President Kerry?

Part 2 - Consider the possibilities

by Dan Kennedy

When Al Gore appeared before the media on March 3, he was in a strangely uncomfortable position: on the defensive, having to explain why he'd made fundraising calls from the White House despite a federal law prohibiting the use of government property for such purposes. The vice-president's typically calm, wooden demeanor had abandoned him; he was clearly agitated as he sought to defend his actions.

"My counsel advises me," Gore said, "that there is no controlling legal authority or case that says that there was any violation of law whatsoever in the manner in which I asked people to contribute to our re-election campaign." No controlling legal authority. He mouthed the phrase six more times during his 24-minute news conference. So perfectly did it capture Gore's narrow, legalistic defense that it's already entered the lexicon: search for the phrase on the Web using AltaVista and it pops up 13 times.

There's a perception -- a self-perpetuating one, based entirely on the quantity of media mentions -- that Gore is all but unbeatable, and that only Gephardt has the stature and name recognition to articulate the case against him. That's mighty heady stuff for two candidates who were blown away by Michael Dukakis -- Michael Dukakis -- in 1988. It's also wrong.

Gephardt's stances against NAFTA and the recent tax cut have obvious appeal to organized labor and to progressives concerned about economic inequality. Yet Gephardt is also the ultimate insider, an unappealingly oleaginous pol whose constituency, says CNN political analyst William Schneider, barely extends beyond "the Democratic minority in the House who are unhappy with the White House."

As for Gore, Michael Kinsley's 1988 put-down in the New Republic -- "an old person's idea of a young person" -- still holds, though Gore's not so young anymore. More ominous is the drip-drip-drip of stories about Gore's links to the Clinton fundraising scandals, stories that not only damage his popularity but also make it difficult for him to raise more money. In addition, Gore, unlike Clinton, thrives on being perceived as more-virtuous-than-thou. For that reason, the exposure of Gore's contradictory, hypocritical stands over the years -- on issues ranging from tobacco regulation to music censorship, from abortion rights to the Gulf War -- could cause more problems for him than they would for a candidate who does not profess to operate on such a high moral plane.

"Al Gore ain't Bill Clinton, and we're beginning to see that more and more," says Democratic political consultant Mary Anne Marsh, who's worked on several Kerry campaigns, including last year's.

Certainly you can bet that Gore's opponents will be boning up on conservative journalist Tucker Carlson's devastatingly detailed whack job in the May 19 Weekly Standard, in which he called the vice-president "shiftier and more disingenuous, in fact, than just about anybody currently in national office." Indeed, Carlson's piece is reliably reported to be required reading among Kerry's friends and supporters.

If Kerry does decide to take the plunge, he'll need an enormous amount of luck. In some areas, he can make his own good fortune; in others, he'll have to hope for the best. Here's how, if everything were to break just right, he could move ahead of both Gore and Gephardt to win the nomination.

The audacious gesture

Kerry has one of the best records in Congress on campaign-finance reform. He's refused political-action money for years, and backs a proposal to move to full public funding. Yet he's allowed his contradictory impulses to obscure that strong stand, breaking the voluntary spending cap in last year's Senate race and recently helping to host a $4 million fat-cat fundraiser on Nantucket.

Thanks to his wife's $800 million, Kerry is the richest man in the Senate. He's barred from using more than a tiny fraction that money, though, unless he opts out of the system and refuses federal matching funds, as Ross Perot did in 1992 and Steve Forbes did in 1996. Those are hardly examples Kerry wants to emulate, but he has far more credibility than either of those well-heeled candidates did. If he opened up the family checkbook for, say, the $30 million to $40 million it would take to run a primary campaign, refused private contributions of more than $100, and ran hard on a theme of cleaning up the system once and for all, he could set the moral tone for the entire campaign.

Admittedly, many analysts are skeptical. Washington-based pundit Stuart Rothenberg, for one, thinks opting out could be seen as anti-reform, since Kerry would not have to conform to the current law's strict reporting deadlines. (Of course, Kerry could comply voluntarily.) But Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman thinks Kerry should go for it. "Americans would see it as a sign that he's honest, that he's bought by nobody," Goldman says.

Such a bold gesture would trump anything offered by Minnesota's Paul Wellstone, whose reformist credentials are as good as Kerry's but who presumably couldn't afford a self-financed candidacy. More important, neither Gore ("The bagman for the Clinton re-election campaign," snickers Republican political consultant Charles Manning) nor Gephardt (who, as House minority leader, has hampered reform legislation) wants to touch the issue, beyond mouthing vague platitudes.

Regional appeal

Kerry's first tests would come in the Iowa caucuses and, a week or two later, in the New Hampshire primary. Iowa would be a particularly difficult contest for him. Des Moines Register political editor David Yepsen says a candidate from the East always has a hard time schlepping out to Iowa often enough to make a good showing. But there are tactical opportunities for Kerry in Iowa. First, Gephardt, who's extremely popular there, will probably win, dealing a setback to Gore in the battle of perceptions. Second, Kerry could defeat Wellstone and thus whittle the field of Democrats down to three (or four, if Jesse Jackson runs). That won't be easy, but if Kerry stresses his electability and mainstream views, he can portray a vote for Wellstone as a futile protest. Most folks like their votes to count for something more than that.

New Hampshire, of course, is Kerry's biggest early opportunity -- and, potentially, the end of the road. He has to win, and do it by a substantial enough margin to impress the pundits. But Gore and Gephardt already have a big head start in New Hampshire. Democratic activist Deborah "Arnie" Arnesen says Kerry will have the same problem defining himself in New Hampshire as he did in Massachusetts last year. "I can't really think of any major issue I associate with him except MIAs," she says.

Yet Kerry improved considerably as last year's campaign droned on, and toward the end he developed a compelling set of themes -- education, health care, and the environment -- to counter Weld's mantra of crime, welfare, and taxes. His proximity to New Hampshire makes it easy for him to travel there often and hone his message in front of the people who will decide his fate. About 60 percent of New Hampshire residents are part of the Boston media market, so the increased visibility Kerry gained in last year's campaign will help too.

The Jesse Jackson factor

Just about everyone assumes that Gore will sweep through the South. For one thing, he's from Tennessee. For another, African-Americans make up some 40 to 50 percent of the Democratic electorate in some Southern states, and Gore -- like Clinton -- is comfortable with black culture in ways that a Northerner such as Kerry can never be.

That all changes, though, if Jesse Jackson gets into the contest and takes many of those black votes away from Gore. David Bositis, a senior political analyst with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington-based think tank that studies black issues, believes that's a real possibility. Jackson, who ran for president in 1984 and 1988, has seethed at Clinton's move to the political center, and he might run to push Gore to the left or to throw the nomination to a more liberal candidate.

"I know that Jesse Jackson is very dissatisfied," says Bositis. "If Al Gore couldn't get a significant majority of votes in the South, he'd be in trouble."

That could make the industrial Northeast and Midwest the final battleground. If Gore looks too battered, and Gephardt and Jackson seem too unelectable, moderate and liberal Democrats may well gravitate toward Kerry. Gore will probably win California in any case, the Clinton-Gore Administration having made that state a virtual pork-barrel appendage of the White House. But Kerry yields little to Gore in the way of baby-boomer pop-culture appeal, so it might be close.

n Liberal patriotism. Message has never been Kerry's strong suit, but his record suggests the makings of some coherent, appealing themes. In addition to his tough stand on campaign-finance reform and his work on MIAs, Kerry's most visible accomplishments have been his investigations of the BCCI international-banking scandal and of drug-dealing and corruption among former US allies such as Panama's Manuel Noriega and the Nicaraguan contras.

Kerry's new book on foreign crime and terrorism, The New War: The Web of Crime That Threatens America's Security (Simon & Schuster), is a bit of an eye-glazer, but he does a nice job of drawing parallels between his work prosecuting bad guys in Middlesex County earlier in his career and the infinitely greater dangers now posed by international criminals.

Tying these strands together is his status as a war hero, which gives him a protective coating of unquestioned patriotism and allows him to present himself as a liberal who's more tough-minded than most politicians of his ideological persuasion. It doesn't hurt that he was one of the prime movers of Clinton's first-term crime bill, which combined funding for new cops and harsh measures such as an expanded death penalty (which Kerry personally opposes) with social programs, including the unfairly derided "midnight basketball" provision.

Professional help

Kerry has always surrounded himself with top-notch outside advisers, yet there's something lacking at the core. His political career began with an embarrassing defeat for a seat in Congress, and his Senate campaigns, against unimpressive opponents until last year, have been sloppier than one would have expected.

Obviously, if Kerry is going to run for president, he needs to import first-rate talent, develop a strategy, and stick with it. Claibourne Darden, an Atlanta-based political consultant, believes the reason Clinton survived the Gennifer Flowers and draft-dodging scandals in 1992 was that he was the only candidate who ran "a presidential-caliber campaign."

Ed Jesser, a veteran of several Democratic presidential campaigns, puts it this way: "It's harder and it's longer than any of them can ever imagine. But I don't think that would be news to Kerry."

Part 3 - Fire when ready

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.