Mission: Improbable

John Kerry is pondering a run for president in 2000 -- but why?

by Michael Crowley

American politicians have come to toy so casually with running for president that it's easy to forget how outrageously audacious a notion it is. What kind of man (or woman) deems himself worthy to preside over 270 million people? Who could handle the godlike power to bring nuclear holocaust from a suitcase? If Martians were to land in Roswell -- "Take me to your leader!" -- who would want to be the first to receive them?

Massachusetts senator John Kerry may be such a man. He's a creature of such ambition and sense of destiny that, as the Boston Globe reported, he filmed his own combat heroics during the Vietnam War. Now, Kerry has moved past the point of coy hints and vague musings about his political future to announce explicitly that he's . . . thinking about running.

"All of this needs to come together," Kerry says. "The first thing was just to get past the elections. The second is to reduce my debt to a negligible level [Kerry is still burdened with $900,000 in debt from his last Senate campaign]. Third, I need to talk to some people and ask some questions. Fourth is to internalize and talk to people personally and kind of analyze the information that's crossed the desk."

Kerry says he'll decide by early next year whether to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in the year 2000. But Kerry is already putting the logistics into place. He's been contacting financial and political backers around the country. He's made two trips this fall to the crucial primary state of New Hampshire. And on Monday night, campaign dollars will roll in by the thousands when Kerry supporters pay up to $1000 a head to attend a glitzy fundraiser headlined by comedian Robin Williams and singer James Taylor. Although Kerry may still be undecided, the conventional wisdom (and the gut feeling of some people close to him) is that he is preparing for liftoff.

But why? Kerry would at best be a long shot to win the White House. True, he is a formidable politician -- a decorated Vietnam veteran who publicly turned against the war, an influential senator in his prime after fighting off a nationally watched challenge from Bill Weld in 1996. But Vice President Al Gore has long had dibs on the party's nomination, and he has the power of the Clinton White House behind him. And even if Gore were to become crippled by his connection to the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign's shady fundraising tactics, there are other still-deciding Democratic heavyweights -- including House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, and Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey -- who would have the edge on Kerry should they join the race. (And here's an ominous piece of trivia for Kerry: only two vice presidents in this century have been denied their party's nomination -- John Nance Garner, in 1940, and Alben Barkley, in 1952.)

It has been suggested that there's something in the Massachusetts drinking water that fills our politicians (Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Ted Kennedy, maybe Bill Weld someday) with the hubris to think that America is clamoring for their brave and sage leadership. More plausible is the theory that some people simply want to be president -- they crave to emerge from the teeming billions as the Leader of the Free World -- and that John Kerry is one of them. But running for president is a vastly complicated and ritualistic thing. Few people run once and win. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush all failed on their first try, but those initial runs established them for future wins. Gore, Gephardt, and Bob Kerrey have all run unsuccessfully, raising their profiles and honing their instincts in the process. Surely John Kerry, at the relatively tender age of 54, knows the value of the trial run.

Kerry's supporters, naturally, dismiss the notion of a warm-up. "You only get into a race to win," says one. And the senator has done more than simply drum up some buzz around his name. Kerry has started the serious work of defining his political message, positioning himself as a teller of hard and complex truths in a post-ideological age.

In a primary that will be fought between liberal champions of the old party gospel and centrist Democrats, that places Kerry squarely in the latter camp. The centrists (Gore, Kerry, Bradley, and Kerrey) are backers of free trade, strict welfare reform, and government austerity. The liberals (Gephardt, Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson) seek to push the party's debate leftward on economic equality, government activism, and civil rights. But in this ice age of the left, it's hard to imagine a liberal winning even a Democratic primary. That's a truth underlined by speculation that Gephardt, who is considered Gore's toughest foe, may instead stick around Congress in hopes of becoming House Speaker. Thus, a Kerry game might look like this: (1) position yourself as a centrist; (2) try to outmaneuver Bradley and Kerrey to be the moderate Gore alternative; (3) hope Gore goes down in flames. Should all that work out, Kerry will likely face a far tougher GOP nominee than the geriatric Bob Dole -- most likely the moderate, ultrapopular, legacy-carrying Texas governor George W. Bush.

It's a tall order. First, consider the sheer logistical obstacles. To compete nationally, Kerry would have to vastly expand his political and fundraising network. Still climbing out of debt from his last Senate campaign, he might need to raise as much as another $20 million just to run a competitive primary (Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz, is worth an estimated $760 million, but he has said he doesn't plan on tapping her fortune -- although he doesn't rule it out, either). Never a favorite of local machine Democrats, Kerry can't even count on unified support in his home state. Indeed, Kerry's Senate colleague Ted Kennedy told the Boston Globe last week that he'll have to wait and see who else is running before he backs a candidate. Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank sounded a similar note in an interview with the Phoenix this week.

"I like John and I worked very hard to get him reelected, but the presidency transcends localism," Frank says. "I have no commitment to any of the candidates," he adds, noting that he'll wait to see which candidate he finds most impressive on economic-equality issues.

Kerry may be getting off to a late organizational start, but he has already begun the important work of ideological self-definition. Kerry has sometimes been tricky to label, and watching him explain his philosophy promises to be fascinating. His roots are liberal -- he was a darling of the nuclear-freeze crowd in the 1980s -- and yet in recent years he has developed a true knack for irking his party's liberal orthodoxy. Minority leaders and civil-rights activists flipped, for example, when Kerry delivered a major address in 1992 that criticized affirmative action. Democrats gagged when Kerry said he was "delighted" by a 1994 shakeup of Congress that brought Republicans to power.

But Kerry made his clearest break from the left last spring, with a major policy speech that borrowed both liberal and conservative ideas in decrying the state of the public schools. "We are stuck in ideological cement of our own mixing," Kerry proclaimed, touting "new ideas" and "hard truths that may be unwelcome on both sides of a continuing debate." Kerry's thrust was to call for dramatic changes in the tenure and teacher-certification systems to ensure top-quality teachers in the classrooms. (A sound bite-friendly example: Kerry noted that the brilliant historian Doris Kearns Goodwin would be barred from teaching by most states' certification requirements.) But he also played footsie with some conservative ideas, including school vouchers and charter schools.

The cement cracked, even if it didn't shatter. "I'm not sure what his message is going to be," notes a Democratic operative with presidential-campaign experience. "Has he made a radical break and actually called for vouchers? Is he willing to break from the unions? Is he willing to challenge people?" But it was unusual to hear a leading Democrat offer such strong criticism of the education establishment. And the speech seemed to make a larger declaration that Kerry would be a candidate in search of synergy between left and right. "I certainly don't stand before you to articulate the views of a single political party," Kerry declared.

As Newsweek noted in a recent article dubbing Kerry a member of the "Sanctimonious Middle," his speech recalled the beginnings of Bill Clinton's first White House campaign. In 1991 Clinton delivered three major policy addresses at Georgetown University -- including one that called for strict time limits on welfare benefits -- that distinguished him as a Democrat willing to break with his party's orthodoxy. Though some liberals balked, Clinton's centrism was just the tonic for a party that had come to think it might never reclaim the presidency.

Loud dissidents such as Gephardt remain, but the New Democrats' appeal still seems to be growing. "The electorate continues to be in a period of ideological transformation," wrote Clinton pollster Mark Penn in the fall issue of Blueprint, a Gore-friendly policy journal published by the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Penn says that what he calls the "Active Center" is embracing "the New Democrat philosophy -- an activist but limited government that gives the people the tools to succeed."

Penn says even core Democrats are moving in this direction. "The old platitude that Democrats had to run to the left in the primaries to placate their base is contradicted by the realization that there is a new Democratic Party rank-and-file," Penn writes. He finds that 36 percent of Democratic voters consider themselves moderates, outnumbering the 34 percent who call themselves liberal (18 percent say they're conservative).

These numbers augur well for the kind of platform Kerry is putting together: an emphasis on such universal issues as education and child development, international crime and terrorism, and "transnational" environmental threats like global warming. Delivered with the appropriate new-millennium post-ideological packaging, Kerry's message could sell.

But he might have trouble finding enough space on the shelves of the political supermarket. Gore will reign supreme as long as he keeps scandal at bay. Bob Kerrey will plug his reputation as a hardheaded guru intent on reforming entitlement programs such as Social Security. Bill Bradley, a private citizen since 1996, will glow as the cerebral outsider full of deep, nonpartisan policy thoughts. All three men are deadly dull and a little preachy, although Kerry will be, as one supporter puts it, "the fresh face of the bunch."

For his part, Kerry dismisses talk of political labels and ideology marketing. "I don't believe in formula and I don't believe in packaging," Kerry says. "I believe in being honest, and if you're honest about the right things and you're thoughtful about them, you can build your coalition."

At a time when both liberals and conservatives are on the defensive, that sort of don't-label-me refrain is growing increasingly common. It may, in fact, come to define the 2000 presidential campaign, as both Democrats and Republicans trip over themselves to prove they're not captives of their respective parties. Which calls to mind a line from that 1992 Gen X flick Singles, where a guy hitting on a girl assures her of his sincerity by saying he doesn't have "an act."

"Your act," she replies, "is that you don't have an act."

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.