Why John Kerry Lost the Election

The power is currently out in this part of Charlottetown, a fitting end to a day of entirely terrible weather. So I'm going to put this newly-unwrapped laptop battery to use and actually write about something since I'm not going to fall asleep any time soon.

I happily haven't watched any television, or read any news website all day today. Only because someone told me did I know that John Kerry had given up so easily, despite a quarter of a million uncounted votes. After watching the film Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry I truly gained a great deal of admiration for John Kerry the man, mostly due to his anti-war activism after his Vietnam service that the movie details.

Now, unfortunately, the right-wing in the United States still views war protestors as treasonous, for a number of increasingly scary reasons which are fleshed out in Dave Neiwert's Fascism article I added to my del.icio.us links just today. This gave a scare to the power brokers in the top rung of the Democratic Party. "There's no way we can attract moderate Republicans with a Vietnam war protestor" they said. Not thinking that the party of Jimmy Carter had no hope of attracting any voters whatsoever who still harboured ill feelings about those who avoided the draft like Clinton or protested the war like Kerry. So instead they tried to get Kerry to be something that never fit who he was as a man, the proud war hero.

As intentionally ignorant as so many Americans seem to be, one thing they can seem to spot fairly easily is an intellectually-inclined person acting like a tough guy. Intelligent people know that real toughness is in the quiet disposition of someone who knows to stay out of the spotlight and quietly work away, or to fight hard for one's true beliefs without worrying about consequences. These people, paradoxically, would actually have detested Kerry less were he to come clean about his real historical role in Vietnam-era America. All they can do to that would have been to disagree. But when Kerry tried to pretend that part wasn't as important as the fact that he simply served in the armed forces for a while left him open to be ridiculed.

Clinton was unabashed about being against the war, and being unwilling to give up a Rhodes Scholarship to go get shot for a war he felt was wrong. Kerry did happen to go, because he wanted to really see what was going on there, it would seem, and having seen the senselessness of it all, he came back and tried to end the war as quickly as possible by organizing veterans against the war.

This action was as noble and right and upstanding as one could ask of a man. And there would have been no effective response on the part of the right wing to denigrate him for his role in history. The man who struck fear in the mind of Richard Nixon when he was only 27 can be disagreed with, but he can't be disrespected, just as people who were against the war, as much as they may have disliked Nixon, did have a grudging respect for his cunning and ruthlessness. But a man who, having played as large a role in history as Kerry did to then turn around and try and take credit for his act of service as simple heroism, when such a stance is directly contradicted by his own, more noble, words of three decades ago, creates a hollow man who in many ways has compromised the integrity of the man he once was.

Perhaps this is why the filmmaker didn't do an interview with Kerry for the movie. I don't want to guess why Mr. Kerry might think it right to speak in terms of fighting a better war rather than ending another unjust war. But again, one gets the sense that he is compromising the core experiences that shape who he is in order to become acceptable to a media which demands no substantive opposition to the idea of the moral rightness of war. To do so, they say, is to betray the soldiers. Yet the soldiers are the very ones who come to truly comprehend how senseless certain wars are.

If John Kerry had run proudly as an anti-war candidate, and articulated that not only was the Bush administration incompetent in pursuing war in the way that they did, but that the very idea of invading a sovereign nation unilaterally and unprovoked is nothing more than a crime against humanity.

For him to have said "yes, Mr. President, it was the wrong war, at the wrong place at the wrong time, and don't suggest that my saying this betrays the troops until you show the decency to actually listen to the troops and acknowledge their deaths by attending perhaps a single funeral will you have any authority to moralize on the rightness of your war" he would have landed the proverbial knockout punch that, if he really is still the man he once was, he was surely dying inside to throw.