Election Dysfunction IV: Early Failures Forge Limp Future
by Noel Sheppard | View comments |
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Since he stepped onto the political stage, John Kerry has opportunistically reengineered his political image to fit with the times.
Any psychiatrist worth his or her salt would attest to the concept that human behavior is patterned quite early in our lives. As a result, we have a tendency to not only repeat actions that generate a positive outcome, but also alter those that don’t.
With the Presidential campaign now in its final hours, it might be interesting to take a look back at the early days in John Kerry’s career to assess how much of his current behavior was a result of his first forays into the political landscape. Luckily, the nice folks at the Boston Globe published a truly fabulous chronicle of Senator Kerry’s life in a weeklong series last year that affords us a fascinating picture of a once neophyte candidate’s early campaign activities.
After three years of basking in the anti-war limelight, Mr. Kerry decided that it was time to make his first run for political office. With his eyes set on becoming a Congressman, he began scouring districts for such an opportunity. As Brian Mooney puts it, “His ambition tempered only by political naiveté, Kerry tried on congressional districts like suits off the rack. In less than two months in early 1972, the antiwar leader called three different districts in Massachusetts home.”
What follows is almost Clintonesque. His rather wealthy first wife, Julia, had bought a house in Worcester in a district that Kerry felt was ripe for the taking. However, they never actually moved in. A Republican representative in the Fifth District had been named undersecretary general of the United Nations, and, as a result, was going to be vacating his seat. Ever the opportunist, Kerry decided to rent a home in Lowell, thereby placing him well within district borders. Unfortunately, this tact was not lost on the local electorate or the conservative newspaper there, the Lowell Sun, who pilloried him as a carpetbagger.
Potentially most foretelling about the candidate’s future proclivity to do anything that it takes to win was the fact that Mr. Kerry’s brother Cameron was actually arrested for trying to cut into the phone lines of Kerry’s primary opponent. To this day, the Brothers Kerry deny any wrongdoing, whilst affirming that it was all a set-up by one of their political foes. I guess this was a precursor to the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. To be sure, Kerry’s antagonist, the Lowell Sun, had a lot of chuckles about this as these news clippings from the period demonstrate.
Although Kerry did win the Democratic primary, he ended up losing the election to Republican candidate, Paul Cronin. However, as a result of the Sun’s relentless lambasting of Kerry over his anti-war and Leftist leanings, it appears that Kerry learned an important lesson from this experience — the power of the press. As Kerry himself stated in letters to his top contributors, “For two solid weeks, they called me un-American, New Left antiwar agitator, unpatriotic, and labeled me every other `un-' and `anti-' that they could find. It's hard to believe that one newspaper could be so powerful, but they were." How much might this experience have foreshadowed Kerry’s constant attacks on George W. Bush to the media in the current campaign?
After his defeat, Kerry decided to go to law school, and shocked most of his friends by actually becoming a prosecutor, where he was quickly promoted to First Assistant District Attorney. In this role, Kerry became more adept at the fine art of distorting facts for political gain. This talent quite came in handy when he greatly inflated the reduction in the case backlog in his district under his watch to help reelect his boss.
During this campaign in 1978, Mr. Kerry became significantly more adroit at using the media to his advantage. In one instance, he was almost sanctioned by a Superior Court Judge for violating a gag order concerning a case that was being tried. Apparently, Kerry had designed a full-page ad about his boss that included information that was specifically covered by this order. The DA’s main challenger accused him and Kerry of “staged media events” to win the election:
One of the cases that exploded into the news in the weeks before the primary was a scandal involving the sale of county jobs. A gusher of news leaks suggested a wider conspiracy of government higher-ups and organized crime involvement. A defense lawyer for one of two suspects charged with selling low-level jobs accused Kerry directly of violating grand jury secrecy by leaking stories to the press.
After the election was over, it turned out that much of the leaked information was totally false. Sound a bit like Kerry’s incessant claims that the President bungled in getting bin Laden at Tora Bora, or the missing munitions from Al Qaqaa last week? Think the DA’s victory in this election helped solidify this misinformation practice in Kerry’s campaign arsenal?
By 1982, Kerry’s sights for public office rose again, and he was looking to become the Lieutenant Governor. In a stunning example of his lack of loyalty and flip-flopping tendencies, Kerry did a marvelous job of straddling the fence between which Democratic candidate for governor he was going to hitch his wagon to. In fact, during the primaries, Kerry had two sets of buttons made — “King/Kerry” and “Dukakis/Kerry.”
Of course, Dukakis would eventually win, as would Kerry. However, regardless of the promises that Kerry made to his constituents that he wasn’t going to use this as a launching pad for his next political endeavor, he just couldn’t resist the opportunity that was made available when Senator Paul Tsongas had to vacate his position in 1984 for health reasons. As a result of this good fortuity, in this campaign, Kerry was taught a lesson that would continue to come in handy throughout his political career — the art of changing your position on key issues in order to win financial backers, important endorsements, and votes.
In the primary, Kerry was paired against another very liberal Democrat, James Shannon. They were both vying for a key endorsement from a large nuclear disarmament group called “Freeze Voter ‘84.” In order to win their support, both candidates were asked to take a questionnaire concerning their positions on key issues surrounding then President Reagan’s military buildup. It turns out that Shannon scored a little better than Kerry. However, Kerry had an in. One of the members of the executive committee of this group tipped off Kerry’s campaign manager of the “mistakes” that Kerry made on the questionnaire, and advised him of the appropriate responses. Here is a letter from this individual to Kerry’s manager. These changes in his positions ended up being vital to Kerry eventually defeating Shannon. Sound familiar?
However, Kerry’s Vietnam experience didn’t hurt, either. During the debates, Shannon suggested that Kerry had changed his position on Vietnam after coming back, and asserted that if Kerry was so against the war, he never should have gone in the first place. To counter this, Kerry enlisted the help of many of his Vietnam veteran friends who began shadowing Shannon wherever he went. In the end, they helped put Kerry over the top to victory. From this campaign, Kerry learned how his Vietnam experience along with his veteran companions could be quite a political advantage. How important a lesson was this given the nature of our current race for president?
With the primary won, Kerry set his sights on his Republican opponent in the general election. To appeal to a broader base of Massachusettsans, Kerry exaggerated his work with the JFK campaign by creating a flyer wherein he stated, "Ever since I worked as a young volunteer in John Kennedy's presidential campaign, I have been deeply committed to participation in politics and political issues . . . Back then, I joined the struggle for voting rights in the South."
In reality, Kerry’s entire experience with the Kennedy campaign amounted to him stuffing some envelopes for one letter drop when he was at boarding school. Furthermore, Kerry’s help with voting rights in the South occurred on the Yale campus. He never actually visited the area until several years later.
As one can plainly see, these early campaign experiences appear to have quite forged a pattern in Mr. Kerry of political opportunism to achieve a final goal. From moving into the right district at the right time, to changing political views, all the way to distorting factual information that is part of the public record, it quite seems that candidate Kerry has been reengineering an image that he perceives will be a successful one since he first stepped onto the political ponderosa.
We can only hope that this is another manufacturing job lost under President Bush’s watch.
slep@danvillebc.com
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