John Kerry: Post-LBJ Democratic Party Incarnate

"This election offers one last vote on whether the forces put in motion around 1968 will also carry America forward into the new century — or stop, to be replaced, finally, by a new vision."

An insightful analysis from Daniel Henninger at OpinionJournal today:

.... John Kerry was present at the creation of the moral and intellectual voyage of post-1960s Democrats. He helped map its course. He testified in 1971 against the Vietnam War as a young veteran before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He appeared as an antiwar spokesman on "60 Minutes" and "The Dick Cavett Show." John Kerry was a celebrity among Primary Democrats as Bill Clinton never was during this important period. As a Southern governor, Mr. Clinton learned about the inevitable left-right compromises of public policy in ways that rarely tainted the austere ideological experience of Mr. Kerry in the liberal northeast and Washington. (This may well disadvantage Mr. Kerry in the election.)

We have in George Bush a president for whom the formative event of his political life is not Vietnam and the years after but September 11, a catastrophic attack on American soil by an organized global enemy. With his doctrine of pre-emption for threats to U.S. security, his destruction of the Taliban and overthrow of the Hussein regime in Iraq, Mr. Bush has largely broken free of the political period that shaped John Kerry's career. Mr. Bush argues that he is dealing with a world and enemy that has not previously existed. But with Iraq, 30 years of Primary Democratic belief instinctively reappears as resistance, led again by John Kerry. If George Bush's sense of right purpose flows directly from September 11, 2001, so too does many Democrats' from what John Kerry was doing and thinking in 1968 in the Mekong Delta.

Mr. Bush would do well, if he has not already, to revisit the histories of this period. Through the years that John Kerry was personally helping form — and represent — the cognitive gestalt of modern Democratic voters, Mr. Bush was in business. But the Democrats who came to maturity around 1968 spent those years deepening their beliefs and baptizing younger adherents, who filled the streets of San Francisco and elsewhere to oppose "George Bush's illegal war in Iraq."

In this campaign, John Kerry will surely seek to revive all the post-'60s idealism, rhetoric and moralistic energy embedded inside the primary voters now mustering up around his candidacy. He may sound earnest mouthing his way through the nomination odyssey but believe me, he will be articulate and forceful in the fall. Then he will be speaking with belief and on subjects he knows well.

The vote in 2004 is not just a referendum on the two men running for president. It is a keystone election. (Next time, Hillary Clinton, though liberal, will not run the campaign Mr. Kerry will run if nominated.) With American soldiers fighting overseas, this election offers one last vote on whether the forces put in motion around 1968 will also carry America forward into the new century — or stop, to be replaced, finally, by a new vision.

If Kerry gets the nomination — intern scandal or no, Clintonian machinations or no — Henninger has put his finger on the why of it.

(Thanks, Big Trunk.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 02/13/04 05:35:04 PM
Categorized as George W. Bush & John Kerry & Political.