marciapally.com |
|
|
|
Site updated July 10, 2010 |
|
published Mar. 18, 2004 by the Frankfurter Rundschau
For months, analysts assessing the 2004 US presidential election complained that there were 10 possibilities for the Democratic candidate, too many and too confusing for voters to follow. But in truth, there have always been just two candidates for the next US presidency: Bush and Anybody But Bush. Now with the winter primaries over, it seems the Dems have Somebody But Bush, John Forbes Kerry, who has acquired the mantle and burden of savior to the anti-Bush crowd, perhaps even more in Europe than in the US. Redeem us from the hands of the Bush Beelzebub, and be to us what hath been that other JFK, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Indeed, Kerry himself has modeled his career (and his dating days) after JFK, taking the same job in the Navy as Kennedy had and dating JFK's sister-in-law, Janet Auchincloss.
But John Forbes Kerry is merely a moderate politician who offers some alternatives to the Bush platform. Does that mean he is inadequate to the presidency or inferior to his JFK idol? Neither. Kerry's policies offer what they should: an emphasis different from the incumbent's. And JFK, the glow of nostalgia and PR aside, was also, after all, a politician. If you want Jesus to appear this year, speak to Mel Gibson. The danger of expecting salvation from politicians is that they will fail you, and when one despairs of all the failures, one cannot see the differences among them.
For one things, Kerry's bio is not basic WASP, as is Bush's, but mythic melting pot. His ancestors include John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his mother is a Forbes, a family whose wealth just barely exceeded its hubris. His grandfather, born Fritz Kohn in what is now the Czech Republic, was Jewish, though he and his wife converted to Roman Catholicism and raised their family in the Church. Kerry's own father was a foreign service diplomat during the Cold War, and Kerry attended prestigious private schools in Switzerland and the US, spent summers in the Brahmin enclave of Newport, R.I. and went sailing with JFK I. At Yale, Kerry was involved in the school's Political Union, its soccer team, handgliding, mountaineering, and in the famous elite society called Skull and Bones, to which W Bush also belonged. On graduating in 1966, Kerry joined the Navy, volunteered both for Vietnam and its most dangerous missions. His tour of duty in Vietnam lasted four months instead of the usual year because in that short time, he had earned a Silver and Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts for being thrice injured and saving the lives of men on his boat. He wrote extensive diaries, as though composing his own autobiography would write him into the JFK mold. Much of the diaries are quoted in his new biography, an unabashed campaign book, “Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War” by Douglas Brinkley.
By the time he returned home, Kerry had changed his view of the war, becoming a co-founder of the anti-war Vietnam Veterans of America. He famously testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, calling the government's policy “the height of criminal hypocrisy,” and so catapulted to immediate fame. Yet in a protest march against the war, in which Vietnam vets in anger and disgust threw their medals onto the steps of the Capitol, Kerry threw down medals which other vets had given him yet kept his own, which remain on his office wall.
After his career in protests, Kerry went back into “the system” as a Massachusetts prosecutor, which surprised his some of his anti-authoritarian, antiwar friends. He served as the traditional tough-guy career lawyer, sending a powerful mafia boss to prison, and as baby-boomer sensitive male, creating an innovative rape crisis unit. He became Lieutenant Governor in 1982 and in 1984 took a seat in the US Senate, where he again gained the spotlight investigating the Iran-Contra scandal.
Today, Kerry is the richest member of Congress, worth an estimated $550 million. His first wife, Julia Thorne, was an heiress with a family fortune of $300 million. His second wife, Teresa Heinz, is the widow of the Republican senator John Heinz, heiress to the ketchup fortune, and is worth over $500 million. They own a $4 million mansion in D.C., a $6 million townhouse in Boston, a $6 million summer home in Nantucket, a private jet, a $700,000 powerboat, and a $5 million ski lodge in Idaho, originally a 15th century English barn that the Kerry-Heinzes had dismantled and reassembled, dropping by dropping, in the US. But it's not the upper-crust lineage that shows Kerry to be, after all, a politician. Most American presidents have had more than a bit of money, and some of the richest have been among the most generous — spectacularly, FDR. It's the story about the Vietnam war medals that puts Kerry into perspective.
He can be, as politicians often are, erratic. His record on military intervention shows that he is now critical of the 2003 war in Iraq but voted the year before to authorize it. To peaceniks, Kerry has said that he “will hold Bush accountable” for the Iraq war, and to hawks, he notes that “I have voted for the largest defense budgets in the history of our country.” Though he was in favor of US military intervention in Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti, Panama and Afghanistan, he voted against the first Gulf War in 1991, so, as Howard Dean pointed out, Kerry voted “no in 1991 when there are [Iraqi] troops in Kuwait and oil fields are on fire, and then votes 'yes' [in 2003] and there turns out not to be a threat.” After the speedy US victory in 1991, Kerry reversed his stance to support the war, a shift that was so confusing to staffers that they sent letters to constituents supporting both positions. In March, 2004, when his nomination seemed secure, Kerry backed away from the multi-lateralism and anti-war positions of earlier campaigning, saying “As president I will not wait for a green light from abroad when our safety is at stake.”
Kerry's stance on war-related legislation has also meandered. After the war in Iraq, Kerry voted against Bush's request for $87 billion for military and reconstruction projects there. It was a vote considered irresponsible by those who hold that the US is obligated to rebuild the country whose government and infrastructure it dismantled, regardless of what one thinks of the war itself. Kerry voted for the USA Patriot Act but has since repudiated it, and has also said it was necessary at the time and that he supports it still today, if not John Ashcroft's abuse of it. Kerry sponsored a bill to cut $1.5 billion from the intelligence budget, but after 9/11 he like everyone else wanted to know why US intelligence wasn't better. He said his $1.5 billion cut was meant to shift intelligence to human efforts rather than relying on technology, but he did not explain how the cut would effect that shift.
On other global matters, Kerry has had similar changes of heart. In 2001, Kerry criticized Bush for withdrawing from the Kyoto global warming treaty while in 1997, he voted against it. Kerry has supported global free trade, voted for NAFTA in 1993 and in 1994 to admit China to the WTO. But for much of primary season, he campaigned against “outsourcing” American jobs overseas and for reviewing all trade agreements made to date. By March, secure about the nomination, Kerry once again voiced support for free-trade, attacking those who believe all will be well “if we have more tax cuts for the wealthy or if we cut off trade with the rest of the world.” Recently, Kerry told Jewish leaders who support Israel's construction of a wall between it and the West Bank that the barrier was legitimate self-defense. But in Oct., 2003, he had told Arab-Americans that the wall was “provocative,” “counter productive” and “a barrier to peace.” Kerry clarified that he had opposed the wall when he thought it would penetrate into West Bank villages, though he also clarified that he had not clarified that point earlier.
As with global issues, Kerry doesn't let himself get bogged down in one position in the domestic arena either. He has a strong environmental protection record and a score of 96% from the League of Conservation Voters. He was one of the first to propose an alternative to Bush's energy program that would increase the use of renewable and alternate energy. He opposes oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and co-wrote a bill to raise vehicle fuel-efficiency standards. In 2002, he also drove an SUV. His current platform includes health insurance programs for the uninsured and middle-class families. Yet after the Republican congressional victories in 1994, he criticized the Democrats for their “too liberal” policies, such as universal health care. Kerry opposes the death penalty but in 1994 supported Clinton's crime bill which expanded it. In 1996, he opposed capital punishment even for terrorists, on the grounds that capital punishment would discourage other countries from extraditing suspects to the US. He now supports the death penalty for terrorists on the grounds that since 9/11, countries will not refuse to extradite, though many countries have already refused and, by law, do not extradite to capital punishment countries. Kerry does not support gay marriage (he supports civil unions) but voted against the Defense of Marriage Act which permits states to refuse recognition of gay marriages performed in other states.
The Republican National Committee has emailed reporters an Internet game that highlights these conflicting positions, called “Kerry vs. Kerry.”
In its central points, Kerry's platform today reflects the liberal-Democrat record he has had in his four terms as senator from Massachusetts. He believes in working with other nations to bring the international trade in terrorist weapons under control. He intends to reduce the record-breaking budget deficit by half in five years, in part by eliminating the new Bush tax cuts for those earning over $200,000/year (he supports tax cuts for middle-class families). He supports reproductive choice, proposes a $50 billion grant to the states for job creation, and wants tax credits for America's troubled manufacturing sector and an annual tax credit for college tuition.
Yet Kerry has also held centrist/conservative opinions as. He has suggested that poverty in America stems from the loss of “values” that began in the 1960s. “We have to ask ourselves in 1992 whether this social disintegration is merely a symptom of deteriorating values that has swept all of this country to some degree. We must ask whether it is the result of a massive shift in the psychology of our nation that some argue grew out of the excesses of the 1960s, a shift from self-reliance to indulgence and dependence, from caring the self-indulgence, from public accountability to public abdication and chaos.” Kerry supported Clinton's welfare reform that set lifetime limits on aid and forced millions of the poor, including mothers of small children, into low-paying workfare jobs, though the program failed to provide day care for the children left behind. Kerry has criticized affirmative action programs as “inherently limited and divisive” and as preserving race-thinking and reverse discrimination. Yet when Wesley Clark pointed to this statement, Kerry denied having made it.
Along with conservatives who wish to privatize pension savings, Kerry has declared Social Security unsustainable, though it is currently in the black and requires only modest contributions to keep it there. Paul Krugman of “The New York Times” calls these false alarms about Social Security the scare tactics of financial institutions and others who stand to profit if America's vast pension savings are removed from the governmental program and funneled into the stock market through those financial institutions.
Kerry's voting and policy record may be no more peripatetic than any other in politics over the bumpy last 30 years, and he has acquired the familiar conflicts of interest, as well. As chairman of the Select Senate Committee on POW-MIA affairs, he concluded that no US prisoners of war remained in Vietnam. Yet in 1992, Kerry's objectivity came into question when Hanoi announced it had awarded an exclusive real estate development contract, potentially worth billion of dollars, to Colliers International real estate. Colliers is based in Kerry's home state and its CEO is Kerry's cousin. While serving on the Commerce, Finance, Foreign Relations and Small Business committees, Kerry has raised more money from lobbyists than any other senator over the last 15 years. In this election campaign, the Center for Responsive Politics reports that Kerry has taken $531,251 from the health care industry, which makes him recipient of the fourth largest contribution after Bush, Dean and Joe Lieberman. He is among the 10 top recipients of contributions from the airline and auto industries, with donations of $87,925. The Commerce committee on which Kerry sits also handles transportation.
In defense of Kerry, one might say that the Bush administration has also shifted positions and broken promises. Supporters of Bush must consider that, after banging the drum of national security, he failed to follow his own post-9/11 commission on domestic security measures. After championing his No Child Left Behind education program, he failed to fund it. After announcing a new AIDS program for Africa, he took much of the funds from existing AIDS programs. Then one could look at the big items: the sensational budget deficit, tax cuts that benefit the top 1% of the population while the rest of the nation suffers a “jobless recovery” from recession, the matter of the non-existent WMDs and non-existent Saddam-al-Qaeda cabal, the claim that Iraqi oil sales would pay for its reconstruction, the paucity of security and economic development in Afghanistan, and now in Iraq, and so on. Voters in November will have to decide which imperfect record they prefer, which is always the political question.
[Top]
© marcia pally, new york 2005