Brooding Broder, Posturing Post

David Broder almost had an interesting column in the Washington Post today. In Broder’s view, the “Democrats’ Shaky Convergence” (his title) isn’t really a convergence at all because the “heart” of the party is at war with its “head.”

The Democratic “heart,” its activist base, is pretty radical, certainly far to the left of its candidates and the American public at large. When a cross-section of the delegates were asked in a Boston Globe poll what they believe, Broder reports,

80 percent of them say they opposed the decision to start the war in Iraq and 95 percent oppose it now. Unlike Kerry, 62 percent support gay and lesbian marriage. Almost nine out of 10 describe themselves as supporters of gun control.

By contrast,

The head — the platform and the policy ideas embraced by John Kerry and John Edwards — belongs to the New Democrats, the group that 20 years ago founded the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which became the political base for Bill Clinton.

The trouble with this picture is that the “head” shot is too fuzzy. Broder actually appears to believe that Kerry believes the last things he’s said, that he’s a “conservative” or at least not a “liberal,” that his 19 year Senate career is not a good indication of what his positions are, etc.

An editorial in today’s WaPo, “Mr. Kerry’s Task,” makes a similar point and stumbles over the same large obstacle. Kerry’s “first objective,” the edit maintains,

will be to convince voters that he is a credible potential commander in chief. He has the experience and knowledge of the world to do so; his problem is that his words may be undermined by the gap between his posture and the views of most of those who will nominate him. Mr. Kerry has portrayed himself as a leader who would be more competent and cooperative, but no less resolute, than Mr. Bush in the war on terrorism. But as the convention has made clear, many of his backers are far more dubious of Mr. Bush’s assertion that a war is taking place at all, and they flatly oppose his strategy of preemption. Where Mr. Kerry criticizes Mr. Bush’s prosecution of the Iraq war, most of his party seems to have no doubt that it was a disastrous blunder in the first place — skating over the fact that their nominee voted to give the president the power to wage it.

I think this editorial misses the larger gap between Kerry’s current words and his past words, and votes. That is, like Broder over on the OpEd page, it assumes that what the edit gingerly described as Kerry’s current “posture” is something more than poll-induced posturing.

Actual voters may be more skeptical.

UPDATE [30 July 8:45AM]

Kerry’s speech last night did strike me as one of his best, although skeptics will say that that’s not saying much. He pledged to tell the truth to the American people but has not said, at least recently, whether he believes we were wrong to go to war in Iraq. His statement that he would not “mislead us into war” implies as much, but such important matters should not be left to implication and inuendo.

Everyone said his task at the convention was to introduce himself to the American people. In that regard, and with particular attention to the biographical film and performance last night, I was struck by a comparison to Richard Nixon. Nixon presented a tape with an 18 and a half minute gap; Kerry presented a biography with a 19 and a half year gap, his Senate career.

UPDATE II [30 July 12:15PM]

For once the Washington Post agrees. Saying “Mr. Kerry missed an opportunity for straight talk” and calling his acceptance speech “in many respects a disappointment,” a WaPo editorial this morning notes that “Mr. Kerry last night elided the charged question of whether, as president, he would have gone to war in Iraq.”

Say What? (2)

  1. Dean Esmay July 30, 2004 at 8:35 am | | Reply

    It is easy to exaggerate this disconnect though. Recall if you will all the talk about how much more to the right most Republicans were in 2000 than Bush. Which, of course, is true; Bush on policy alone was barely a hair to the right of Clinton, while most at the convention were quite firmly to his right. They nominated him because they liked him and they thought he could win.

    Kerry the Dems don’t even like, they just think he can win.

    Then the question will become: if he does, how will he govern? While I have said publicly that I will swallow glass before I vote for him, let me point out that his record as Senator is not necessarily definitive. He is a Senator, which is a job filled with compromises, and furthermore, he is from a very left of center state that rewards politician who vote that way. Once he is President, there is much reason to believe he will be much more centrist than his voting record, especially because he will have the entire Congress to wrangle with, and will be less inclined to pick fights than he is to want to actually get things done.

    I doubt he’ll be a disaster as President. My refusal to vote for him has more to do with the behavior of his party over the last year. And the horrible hypocricy of attacking Bush for “misleading” us into war. What a despicable lie on Kerry’s part.

  2. Claire July 30, 2004 at 1:41 pm | | Reply

    Kerry is not the head of his party. He is a chosen front-man, who is the mechanism by which those in power will be able to recapture their party’s control of the country, they hope.

    It’s like a beauty contest. The ‘judges’ are the ones who control things, and the ‘contestants’ like Kerry all have to figure out what the ‘judges’ want and give it to them in order to ‘win’. Then, he has to follow the directions of those who ‘crowned’ him or have the ‘crown’ withdrawn.

    Although it’s roughly the same for both parties, the Democrats either don’t bother or don’t care to try to hide it much any more.

    I’ve got this great idea for a movie. See, there’s this presidential candidate who suddenly starts flip-flopping on the issues. When our intrepid star and his beautiful sidekick finally learn the truth, they discover that the ‘candidate’ is a robot, and a group of moderates within their party has managed to take control of his programming, causing him to constantly give out new and conflicting messages…. Think it’ll sell?

Say What?