Apart from being the most excruciatingly painful public speaker in the last century, John Kerry does absolutely nothing to move the progressive agenda forward. His campaign can be fairly interpreted as a full scale retreat from the ideals espoused in the New Deal and an abject capitulation to the “right-tilting philosophy of the administration.
“And when I’m President, I’ll make sure we have a real coalition, before we set off for war,” blah, blah, blah…Kerry’s blather is almost unbearable; always the haziest platitudes wrapped in patrician pretensions. The phoniness exudes from every word like the warm ooze from an icing tube.
Kerry will offer up John Ashcroft’s name to a rabid crowd of Democrats, but will he take aim at the Patriot Act?
He’ll savage the execution of the war, but will he say we’re getting out?
He’ll rattle on about energy policy, but does he have a plan that doesn’t just pump more money and lives into the oil sector?
Face it, Kerry is listing; taking on water after a lifetime of trying to craft a message according to what people want to hear. He’s 195 lbs. of political helium and not an ounce of sincerity.
He thinks he can win the election by default, by the mere fact that his opponent has led the country into the Sahara without a canteen.
He’s wrong. Bush will devour him in the debates where his equivocating, “half-loaf” Clintonism will be exposed as the sham it is.
Kerry has no vision for the country. His vision is consumed by the one thing that drives him forward; the idea of John Kerry as President.
Now, we can truly see the disaster of the ABB (Anybody But Bush) campaign; a campaign that gained nothing for the left, and produced a “warmongering” candidate who fully intends to continue the bloodletting in Iraq and Afghanistan into perpetuity.
ABB has been the greatest political blunder in the modern era. It ran up the “white flag” before the first shot was fired. If politics is the art of negotiation, then ABB is the political equivalent of voluntary suicide; leaving liberals without a speck of power to advance their issues.
The best thing that could transpire in this election would be for Kerry to lose and for the entire Democratic Leadership Council, that blood-sucking coterie of corporate warriors, bankers and PR types, to be forced to perform ritual seppuku on the White House lawn. Then, perhaps, the onus of being “Republican-lite” would be shed, and the party could evolve along the lines of a broad based labor movement.
What a novel idea; a “two party” system.
Any movement that doesn’t represent a fundamental change in the current political paradigm, that is, a serious reduction in US power and a dramatic shift from the “unipolar” model of world order, will fail to achieve the overriding goals of greater parity among nations, commitment international systems of law and institutions grounded in principles of social justice.
A Kerry Presidency would do nothing to disrupt this basic imbalance of power; an imbalance that has precipitated a global “resource-driven” war and put millions at risk.
MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com
