John Kerry's Desperate Hours: The one-time Democratic front-runner is fighting
for his survival
By Will Dana
On a Friday in November, at the end of a tough week, John Kerry projects an aura
of friendly confidence that suggests he is either out of touch with reality or
has the serenity of a Zen master. In the last five days, Kerry has fired his
campaign manager and then seen two staffers walk out the door. He has decided to
opt out of the public financing for his campaign -- ostensibly to keep up with
his chief rival, blunt, plain-spoken former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who
made a similar decision earlier in the week, but also, as Time will report a few
days later, because his campaign is having trouble persuading anyone to write a
check.
Until pretty much the moment he started running in earnest earlier this year,
Kerry's campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination had about it
an aura of inevitability. Most watchers attributed the four-term Massachusetts
senator's overconfidence to a hubris born of his patrician roots. The shorthand
became: Because this guy went to a fancy prep school and then was tapped to join
Skull and Bones at Yale, he just naturally assumes the nomination is his. But in
person, Kerry projects something different: He doesn't seem elitist or aloof.
Just the opposite, in fact. He is eager to connect, intense and hopped-up,
pulling near-strangers in tight for old-friends-style handshakes, throwing
around a lot of "man" and "dude." In these moments, the detail about Kerry that
seems most important is not his elitist roots but the fact that he's a sixty-year-old
guy who likes to snowboard.
Kerry brings to the race a dramatic life story and a resume so perfectly
burnished that he seems almost a fictional creation. Born into an old-line
family of Boston Brahmins, he was educated at Swiss boarding schools before
attending St. Paul's and then Yale. As a teenager, he sailed off Newport, Rhode
Island, with President John F. Kennedy. A few years later, as a young naval
officer, he became a bona fide war hero in Vietnam, then returned home in 1969
and emerged as a prominent anti-war activist. He co-founded Vietnam Veterans
Against the War, testified in Congress, headlined a peace rally with John Lennon
and became a target of the Nixon White House ("Destroy the young demagogue
before he becomes another Ralph Nader," wrote Nixon aide Charles Colson in a
memo to the president).
Kerry was elected to the Senate in 1984 after working as a prosecutor and
serving as lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. In the Senate, he became known
for his high-profile investigations: He was one of the first members of Congress
to probe the Iran-Contra scandal; in 1988, he helped uncover the massive BCCI
banking scandal. In the Nineties, he joined Arizona senator John McCain to
investigate -- and put to rest -- claims that American POWs were still being
held in Vietnam. More recently, he led the fight to protect the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling.
But it's another recent vote that most seems to have gotten Kerry into trouble
with Democratic voters -- his decision to back the president's resolution to go
to war in Iraq. Kerry offers a logical and well-reasoned rationale for favoring
the war. But the stump is probably not the best place for nuance, and so Kerry's
on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand stance has come off as overly calculated when
contrasted with Dean's sledgehammer anti-war bluster.
With less than two months to go until he faces voters in Iowa and then New
Hampshire, Kerry is refashioning himself as a bare-knuckled longshot -- the
insider as outsider. Neither a bleeding heart, an insurgent, a new face nor a
technocrat, Kerry is selling himself to voters as the guy who knows how the game
is played in Washington. His challenge will be to show them that's not all he
knows.
It seems that the fact that you voted in support of the president's war
resolution has caused you a lot of trouble in your campaign. Do you regret
supporting the president?
What I regret most of all is the way the administration dealt with it -- the
extraordinary failure of the administration to keep its promises, to be mature
and thoughtful about how you take a nation to war. They misled us; they
presented false intelligence to us. The president made a series of promises to
us -- number one, that he was gonna make every effort possible to build a
legitimate coalition. He did not -- he built a fraudulent coalition. Second, he
was gonna exhaust the remedies of the United Nations and the inspection process.
He did not. And third, that he would go to war as a last resort. He did not.
I voted to protect the security of our country, based on the notion that the
only way to get inspectors back in was to have a legitimate threat of force and
the potential of using it. They took that legitimacy and bastardized it. If I
were president, we would not be in Iraq today -- we would not be at war. This
president abused the process.
Had you thought of Bush as someone whose word you could trust at that point?
It seems to me that we had a right to expect the president of the United States
to live up to his word. It was disgraceful, one of the most egregious,
fundamentally flawed moments of foreign policy that I can think of in my
lifetime.
You were highly critical of the way they conducted the Afghanistan war, as well.
But that was a question of strategy, not whether we should be there or not. They
had Osama bin Laden and a thousand Al Qaeda fighters cornered in the Tora Bora
mountains and allowed them to escape.
Why do you think that was? Were they afraid of losing troops?
I think, at that point in time, yes. They ran a risk-averse operation. They
didn't move any of our available legitimate forces into the area. Instead, they
sent Afghans -- who, a week earlier, were fighting on the other side -- up into
the mountains and said, "Hey, you go get the number-one criminal in the world."
It sounds pretty stupid to me, frankly.
Are you saying that Bush's conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- not to
mention the way he has pissed off our allies -- has been incompetent?
Oh, absolutely. Worse than incompetent. Clouded by ideological excess, a
misinterpretation of history, a willful denial of facts.
Is Iraq turning into another Vietnam?
Not yet, but it's on its way, absent major changes in the way they're doing
business.
The economy is clearly going to be the number-one issue in this election -- it
always is. Bush has certainly looked vulnerable on this front. But in the past
few weeks, it looks like we've started to see some positive economic news. Does
this take a big issue away from the Democrats?
Whether the economy is good or bad, it doesn't change the fundamentals of my
campaign for the presidency. Because I believe this administration is so badly
out of touch with the needs of the American people, I think it is so much in the
pocket of powerful special interests, I think it is so much working against the
interests of average Americans -- that having a stronger economy, in their
equation, is not gonna change life for a lot of Americans.
When the other Democratic candidates talk about Bush, they pretty much just bash
his policies. You not only do that, but you also question his basic fitness to
serve -- you just said he was incompetent. My question is: When Republicans ran
against Clinton, they made a huge issue out of Clinton's character. Why isn't
the character issue being taken to George Bush?
If you're running for the presidency, there are other things you have to focus
on. I want to paint an optimistic, hopeful vision for the country and open
people's eyes to the things that we could be doing with respect to, say, energy
independence. In the 1930s, we thought it was critical to get electricity out
into rural America, right? I think it's critical to get clean energy out to
every part of America. Let's help create the framework to do it.
Did you feel you were blindsided by Dean's success?
Well, not blindsided. I mean, when I voted for the war, I voted for what I
thought was best for the country. Did I expect Howard Dean to go off to the left
and say, "I'm against everything"? Sure. Did I expect George Bush to "explicative
deleted" it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did.
Do you see Dean as the next George McGovern? It's being said that the
Republicans are foaming at the mouth to go against Dean.
Republicans have been contributing to Dean's campaign on the Internet. Look,
Bush stood up in the White House Rose Garden a week ago and said, "I'm gonna run
for re-election on the basis of my pre-emption doctrine and our ability to make
the world safer." He has declared his strategy. And unless we have a nominee who
can go right at him on that strategy, we're gonna be in trouble.
What do you think of Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor of California?
Well, first of all, Arnold's a friend of mine. I've known him for a long time,
and he's a capable guy. I mean, he's smart and capable. I would have preferred
that there had been no recall. I went out and campaigned against it. But I
understand the anger that existed out there.
Do you think that same anger is propelling Dean's candidacy?
Other people have to determine that. I'm not an analyst. I'm running for
president based on my vision for the country, and I think I have a longer,
stronger, deeper record of fighting against those interests, and representing
that anger, than Howard Dean.
You have talked in the past of smoking pot when you returned from Vietnam. What
do you think of the way the pot laws are prosecuted today?
We have never had a legitimate War on Drugs in the United States, ever, and we
won't until we have treatment on demand for addiction and until you have full
drug education in our schools. The mandatory-minimum-sentencing structure of our
country is funneling people into jail who have no business being there.
And every year, the number of people arrested for marijuana offenses goes up.
I've met plenty of people in my lifetime who've used marijuana and who I would
not qualify as serious addicts -- who use about the same amount as some people
drink beer or wine or have a cocktail. I don't get too excited by any of that.
Would you favor decriminalization?
No, not quite. What we did in the prosecutor's office was have a sort of
unspoken approach to marijuana that was almost effectively decriminalization. We
just didn't bother with small-time use. It doesn't rise to the level of nuisance,
even. And what we were after was people dealing with heroin and destroying lives,
and people who were killing people. That's where you need to focus.
What's most important to you in this campaign?
This is a critical time for the country. The stakes are just enormous. We need a
president, frankly, who has the kind of experience that I've had: of being in a
war, understanding its downsides but understanding the nature of the threats in
the world. Understanding that you couldn't leave Saddam Hussein to his own
devices, but you needed to do this in a very responsible, thoughtful way.
Does this change the way we relate to the world?
I'm gonna lift this country up to a greater engagement in the world. I mean,
think of what we could do to reach out and begin to present a different face of
our country. Think of what we could do to advance the interests of the
developing world, so people would see the United States as not just this
aggressive, arrogant force that only thinks of itself and doesn't really have a
greater sense of humanity and concern. We're just not embracing any of that
stuff today, and it drives me crazy.
