Kerry's War Story
The campaign of Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry makes for an intriguing case study in cultural electioneering, because despite his manifest lack of talent for the form Kerry did well in one primary after another. Kerry is an old-fashioned senatorial blowhard, with a tendency to "orate." At the start of his initially unpromising campaign, he was quoting Alexis de Tocqueville to guys in bars. Moreover, Kerry was tangled in his own Senate record. He spent his campaign harshly criticizing a series of bills and resolutions -- from NAFTA to the Iraq war to No Child Left Behind -- that he had supported with his votes. Kerry's efforts to explain his past support for legislation he now opposed often left him sounding politically incoherent.
An incoherent blowhard is not an exciting candidate, yet Kerry managed to get a bandwagon going. How? Primary voters repeatedly explained their support for Kerry by saying he was their most "electable" option. It was a curiously detached calculation that was, arguably, a fundamentally cultural decision because it involved a judgment less of the candidate than of the country at large. That unenthusiastic judgment has at least one notable implication: It's in large measure about Kerry being part of the political establishment. Thus, despite all the usual anti-Washington campaign rhetoric, Kerry's persona was deemed "electable" because it was deemed presidential, an entirely "Washington" dimension. Democratic political mythology notwithstanding, the fact that Kerry has long been a significant Washington figure was one of his most saleable aspects.
Kerry did bring important cultural tools to his race, however, including a family that interested people -- his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry actually did interviews -- and most of all an especially powerful autobiography. That story centered on Vietnam, where Kerry served with distinction and was thrice wounded. But the most politically decisive aspect of his Vietnam story is that he had other people telling it. The effect of fellow vet Jim Rassman, who in a series of appearances credited Kerry with saving his life under fire, was incalculable in helping establish a courageous Kerry "character" for voters to perceive.
Kerry is actually a controversial figure among Vietnam veterans, some of whom remain bitter about his 1970s accusations of widespread American war crimes and atrocities. That, however, never became a primary issue. On the contrary, Kerry surrounded himself with a "band of brothers" -- vets who supported his candidacy -- and successfully encouraged the spread of his positive military persona. Indeed, Kerry leveraged that military persona to drag George W. Bush into an early political exchange involving comparative autobiography. Thanks to remarks by Terry McAuliffe, who first drew the public comparison between Kerry's and Bush's records, the details of Bush's Air National Guard service of 30 years ago actually became a news theme, one that forced the White House to release documentation. Because this exchange pitted Kerry against the president, it lent stature to the senator's candidacy.
In short, Kerry appears to have benefited from a culture of political intimacy despite himself. His military record, which would have been of far less value in the 1990s than it was after 9/11, gave him a personal narrative sufficiently powerful to overcome his stylistic and rhetorical weaknesses. (In any event, his later campaign rhetoric was much sharper after he borrowed a more confrontational tone from the faltering Dean campaign and a more empathetic tone from Edwards.) Best of all, Kerry benefited from an increasingly independent party electorate, which paid no attention to mainstream punditry and cast Kerry's persona in a front-runner role.
After the Iowa caucuses, one veteran political reporter evoked the work of Theodore White, whose book-length insider accounts of presidential campaigns throughout the 1960s established an entire genre of "Making of the President" political journalism. "The higher the political office," White believed, "the more important the candidate." That is, people require a sense of character, of who is seeking their vote. Candidacies, such as Howard Dean's, that fail to address that requirement are increasingly likely to fail.
Evoking Theodore White is particularly apt these days. In White's era, voters interested in the backstage campaign story had to wait for accounts by White or one of his many imitators. No longer. White's insider genre is nearly dead, and not by accident. Much of the old political "backstage" has become part of the campaign. We're all insiders now.
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