Thomas Oliphant, a columnist for the Boston Globe, wrote this excellent article endorsing John Kerry candidacy for the United States Presidency. Oliphant has been covering John Kerry for over 30 years and knows him just about as well as anyone in the business. Here is what he has to say,
"The first two times I dealt with John Kerry, when he had his initial brush with notoriety many years ago, I didn’t know what to make of him. It was actually a little later, after he had screwed up and taken one on the jaw, that I became intrigued by him. He lost his first political fight, and deserved to; but instead of slinking off to a privileged corner of his world, he decided on a slow climb up the public-service ladder. Not for the last time, his grit surprised me...
...In non-Bush America, a far more prevalent symbol of sentiment these days, rather than outright affection for Kerry, is the “Anybody But Bush” pin. Anybody But Bush avoids Kerry. It also contains more than a little bit of disdain and disrespect -- common attitudes in a modern Democratic Party that seems able to take the concept of unity only so far. Democrats (political writers, too) love second-guessing, relentless kibitzing, pseudo-biographical psychobabble. In today’s political culture, progressives tend to be neurotic, conservatives fanatical.
The best cure for this neurosis is not artificially induced adulation but a rational decision to recognize Kerry’s strengths. This is a contemplative, serious person -- well-grounded in progressive principles -- who has the good habit of getting interested in new ideas that survive scrutiny. His work habits reveal an iron butt for grunt work, as well as considerable experience in working across party lines. A non-Bush president will have to repair considerable damage abroad and at home, complex tasks that will resist grand fixes and reward the patience and tough negotiating that are Kerry attributes. But a non-Bush president will also have to think and act big and new, and the work Kerry has already done on a range of issues should inspire confidence.
After Kerry returned for good from Vietnam, he impulsively entered one of the era’s many congressional fights in which pro-war politicians were being challenged...The anti-war candidates had agreed to abide by a vote at a mass gathering of the principal organization in the state, Massachusetts Political Action for Peace (MassPAX). The overwhelming favorite was the Reverend Robert Drinan, then dean of the Boston College Law School. But during the MassPAX meeting at Concord-Carlisle High School, Kerry made a riveting speech -- previewing themes of soldier betrayal and new-recruit determination the nation would hear the following year in Washington -- that won high praise. Kerry still lost, but I kept his phone number and made sure I stayed in touch as he became involved in the fledgling Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
What Kerry did in the spring of 1971 still amazes me. The power and eloquence of his statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gets most of the attention because the film survives, but what amazed me more was the quiet leadership he and a few pals showed in guiding perhaps 2,000 veterans -- many severely wounded, angry, bitter, and passionate -- for a week that stunned the country with its nonviolent effectiveness...
...And, finally, to the present, and his own race. When Kennedy took Kerry around eastern Iowa... the senior senator regularly used a story that captures the best of Kerry’s last two decades. As Kennedy told it, accurately, there was nothing to be gained and much possibly to be lost when Kerry and John McCain set out in the 1980s to bind up the country’s wounds from the Vietnam War. For months on end, there was not a syllable of press coverage as they painstakingly put old prisoner and missing-in-action myths to rest and began assembling the case for establishing relations with Hanoi. Inch by inch, they brought the country along with them. From a master of hard political work like Kennedy, it was deserved praise, and a genuine sign of what Kerry is capable of...
It’s also helpful to know that his comeback was political and personal, but -- quite contrary to the “flip-flop” label the Bush team has sought to stick on him -- it did not involve a single change in his approach to the big questions of our day. Normally, positions on issues don’t work well for me as clues to a presidency, or as stand-alone reasons to be for someone. In Kerry’s case, however, he has made three contributions -- in health care, on energy, and in foreign policy -- to the national discussion over the past year that are vintage Kerry and powerful evidence of how his political mind works. They are not derivative, and, in each instance, the contributions were formulated not by the pollsters or the advisers but by Kerry himself.
On health care, as Kerry grappled with the mess of today’s nonsystem, he made a critical conceptual breakthrough in his analysis of why the great attempt in 1993–94 under Bill and Hillary Clinton flopped. In his mind, and he’s correct, the problem was that universal-coverage schemes tend to focus on the roughly 15 percent of the public that lacks insurance at any given moment, instead of the 85 percent who have what could be charitably called coverage (many of whom despise it almost to apoplexy).
Kerry’s second conceptual contribution was his determination to find and use savings from inside the wasteful status quo to finance health care’s reform and expansion, focusing on the third of all health-care costs that are not clinical. His third was to invest in and use new technology and other qualitative strides in medicine to accumulate still more savings. His fourth was to build toward universality using the existing mix of private and public delivery systems, not to jerry-rig a new one, the best example being his endorsement of tax credits to assist individuals who want to buy into the choice-laden federal employees’ health-insurance plan.
Finally, to deal with viciously escalating insurance costs, Kerry went for the idea of federalizing catastrophic costs, above $50,000 for a condition or illness. After careful vetting (a version of this had been on the table as far back as the Nixon administration; more recently, it has attracted considerable business support), he was able to claim that this would reduce insurance costs an average of $1,000 per beneficiary. This is vintage Kerry: part traditional progressive, part new thinking, and designed politically for swing voters in Congress.
Kerry sought from the beginning to plan big on the energy front, both to find a grand, worthy national effort along the lines of the space program in the 1960s and to serve a larger foreign-policy purpose. A national policy to gradually end the addiction to imports from the Persian Gulf is likely to do far more to “transform the Middle East,” to borrow the silly Bush phraseology, than invading Iraq almost unilaterally with no workable plan for the aftermath. Kerry would back it up with a reactivation of the Middle East peace process, with an activist United States at the center again and allies and moderate Arab states enlisted to provide aid to -- and put pressure on -- the Palestinian Authority. A long period of tacit and not so tacit acquiescence in Ariel Sharon’s postures and actions would cease. Vigorous diplomacy -- in his conviction that it really works, Kerry is very much his foreign-service-officer father’s son -- would define him in large part, not merely in the Middle East but also in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; with trade agreements; the Kyoto Protocol process; and the various nonproliferation regimes. My pal Mark Shields once observed that, more often than not, each president is the stylistic antithesis of his predecessor. Kerry is a worker as well as a thinker.
Kerry has also shrewdly insisted -- from the beginning of his campaign -- on a requirement, as economic policy, that the budget deficit be halved within four years in order to keep the business recovery from hitting a wall of higher interest rates. It is often noted, accurately, that Kerry seeks a return to the basic ideas Bob Rubin followed for Bill Clinton in the ’90s. What the observation misses, however, is the fact that Clinton got all the way through his first campaign in 1992 decrying the economy’s stagnation and advocating stimulus. Kerry, by contrast, has stuck his neck out on fiscal sanity almost from the moment he declared. Kerry is a real Democrat in his commitment to significant new expenditures on priorities like health care, education, energy independence, child care, and additional tax breaks for the middle class and working poor. However, he is also a New Democrat in his belief that the overall context must be anti-deficit for the sake of long-term economic growth.
In his remarkably thorough book on Kerry’s formative youth, Douglas Brinkley tells a story about the two of us in the moments just before Kerry began his statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. We had walked from the Vietnam veterans’ encampment on the National Mall together, taking a detour while he defused a potentially volatile demonstration outside the Supreme Court. When we entered the Dirksen Senate Office Building and raced up the stairs a few minutes before he was due to speak, we were struck by the absence of people in the stairwell and in the long corridor approaching the hearing room. It felt like a Sunday.
But when we reached the door and opened it a crack, Kerry drew back suddenly, stunned at the sight of a completely packed room. I nudged him forward again and attempted to cut the tension by saying, “Go ahead. Be famous. See if I care.”
It never occurred to me or to him where that moment might one day lead. I think it’s important that the presidency looms on his horizon not as a codicil in some trust fund, a virtual entitlement by virtue of lucky birth. Instead, it looms at the end of a long climb up the ladder from assistant county prosecutor.
John Kerry is a good, tough man. He is curious, grounded after a public and personal life that has not always been pleasant, a fan of ideas whose practical side has usually kept him from policy wonkery, a natural progressive with the added fixation on what works that made FDR and JFK so interesting. I know it is chic to be disdainful, but the modern Democratic neurosis gets in the way of a solid case for affection. Without embarrassment, and after a very long journey, I really like this guy. As one of his top campaign officials, himself a convert since the primaries ended, told me recently, this is pure Merle Haggard. It’s not love, but it’s not bad."
