Under Kerry's Tent: He's the (Any) One

Weekend Edition
July 31 / August 1, 2004

Under Kerry's Tent

He's the (Any) One

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Can someone win the presidency entirely on the basis of a negative asset? I 
wouldn't have thought so, but here's John Kerry, just about 90 days shy of 
election day, promoting himself as a man of presidential caliber entirely on 
the basis that he's the Anyone in "Anyone But Bush". Aside from the flag 
wagging , that's what it comes down to, unless you take the probably realistic 
view that when it comes to war-fighting in the service of Empire he's far more 
bloodthirsty. Come next January the Anyone behind the desk in the Oval Office 
may be a bit taller. There'll be medals on the book shelf showing he killed 
Vietnamese in the service of his country. Most everything else will stay the 
same. Kerry's been pretty clear about that, letting his core constituencies 
know that as President Anyone he's not going to cut them any favors.

The nation's hungry, its underemployed, its jobless? In April Kerry announced 
that his economic strategy will be to wage war on the deficit, which means 
he'll do nothing to alleviate problem number one in American today, which is 
the lack of jobs and the rotten pay for those lucky enough to have some form 
of work.

Women? Kerry, the man who voted for Bill Clinton's savage assault labeled 
"welfare reform", on poor women, said he might well appoint anti-abortion 
judges, adding magnanimously that he wouldn't want such appointments to lead 
to the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Kerry vows to put more cops on the streets and there'll be no intermission in 
the war on drugs which has played a large part in producing the memorable 
statistic issued by the Justice Department last week, to the effect that the 
number of people caught in the toils of the criminal justice system grew by 
130,700 last year. The grand total is now nearly 6.9 million, either in jail 
in prison, on probation and on parole, amounting to 3.2 percent of the adult 
population in the United States. In many cities in the US a young black man 
faces a far better chance of getting locked up than of getting a job, since 
the lock-up is the definitive bipartisan response of both Democrats and 
Republicans to the theories of John Maynard Keynes. Blacks have got less than 
nothing from Kerry, aside from his wife's declaration that she too is an 
African American, yet the Congressionlal Black caucus cheers the man who voted 
for welfare reform and devotes its time to flaying Ralph Nader

The "Anyone But" strategy favored by most pwogs has meant that Kerry has never 
had his feet held to the fire by any faction of the Democratic Party. This has 
been the year of surrendering quietly.

War in Iraq? A majority of the country wants out, certainly most Democrats. 
Kerry wants in, even more than Bush. When the DNC told Kucinich to stuff his 
peace plank, Kucinich tugged his forelock and told his followers to shuffle 
back in under the Big Tent and help elect a man who pledges to fight the war 
in Iraq better and longer than Bush. Feminist leaders kept their mouths shut 
when Kerry flew his kite about nominating anti-choice judges. Gay leaders 
didn't open their lips to utter so much as a squeak when Kerry declared his 
opposition to same-sex marriages and to civil unions. Did we hear from Norman 
Lear and People for the American Way as Kerry, the man who voted for the 
Patriot Act, revived his Tipper Gore-ish posturing about the evils of popular 
culture? Of course we didn't, even though Kerry voted for the unconstitutional 
Communications Decency, a piece of legislation that even the prudish Joe 
Lieberman couldn't stomach.

Kerry told James Hoffa of the Teamsters this spring that he wouldn't touch the 
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge but would "drill everywhere else like never 
before". There wasn't a bleat from the big environmental groups. He pledged 
the same policy again to the American Gas Association a couple of months 
later, throwing in the prospect of a new trans-Alaska-Canada pipeline for 
natural gas from the Arctic. Once again the big environmental groups held 
their tongues.

True, Andy Stern, head of the Service Employees Union threw a gobbet of red 
meat onto the Convention floor by confiding to the Washington Post's David 
Broder that another four years of Bush might be less damaging than the 
stifling of needed reform within the party and the labor movement that would 
occur if Kerry becomes president. After a couple hours of being forced to 
stand on a milk crate with a copy of the party platform over his head and 
electrodes attached to his penis Stern recanted and said he was "a hundred per 
cent " for Kerry. Thus ended labor's great revolt against a candidate who's 
cast his share of votes in US Congress to ensure job flight from America and 
whose commitment to the living standards of working people is aptly resumed in 
his pledge to raise the minimum wage to $7 an hour by 2007, which is still 
far, far below that the minimum wage was worth in purchasing power when it 
peaked in the late 1960s.

Contrast the lib-pwog refusal to raise any sort of trouble with the robust 
comment of the conservative organizer Paul Weyrich who recently remarked, "For 
all of their brilliance, [Ken] and Mehlman and Karl Rove made a very serious 
mistake with this [Republican]Convention's line-up. It is one that the rank 
and file should not tolerate. If the president is embarrassed to be seen with 
conservatives at the convention, maybe conservatives will be embarrassed to be 
seen with the President on Election Day."

For all the interminable thundering about the evils of George Bush, the man 
has done a very respectable job of sabotaging the American Empire, which is 
probably why so many liberals hate him. They think he's a national 
embarrassment, hurling Imperial America over his handlebars, landing on its 
ass amid world derision. But as Gabriel Kolko remarks in his contribution to 
Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils, the new book on 
the election edited by Jeffrey St Clair and myself: "the United States will be 
more prudent, and the world will be far safer, only if it is constrained by a 
lack of allies and isolated. And that is happening.Inadvertently, the Bush 
Administration has begun to destroy an alliance system that for the world's 
peace should have been abolished long ago. The Democrats are far less likely 
to continue that process. As dangerous as he is, Bush's reelection is much 
more likely to produce the continued destruction of the alliance system that 
is so crucial to American power in the long run."

A print version of this column appeared in The Nation, in the edition that 
went to press the day before Kerry gave what is in my memory, stretching back 
to 1972, the worst acceptance speech at a Democratic convention, with the 
possible exception of Mondale's in 1984.

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