In an anonymous coffee shop in an anonymous strip mall in Federal Way, Adam Smith, who represents a substantial suburban swath of the south Puget Sound region in the U.S. House of Representatives, is selling me his guy. The congressman's guy happens to be the tall, striking, wealthy, and glamorous John Forbes Kerry, the four-term U.S. senator from Massachusetts and the man many political handicappers believe has the best chance to be the Democratic candidate for the American presidency in 2004.
Smith, the epitome of a centrist New Democrat, likes Kerry's strong backing for weaning the country off its dependence on foreign oil--Kerry is a leading proponent of raising mileage standards for Detroit automakers. Smith likes Kerry's emphasis on balanced budgets and fiscal discipline--soon after joining the Senate in 1985, Kerry cosponsored the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit-reduction act, and he supported the 1993 deficit-busting tax increase that set the stage for the record surpluses of Bill Clinton's second term. Smith likes that Kerry bucked liberal orthodoxy to support Clinton's welfare reform plan. He loves Kerry's staunch and longstanding advocacy of veterans' issues--there are, of course, many military families in Smith's district. He loves that Kerry is a bona fide war hero--Kerry was awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts in Vietnam--who had the guts afterward to step forward and tell those in power that the Vietnam War was an exercise in futility and degradation. And Smith believes that post-9/11 there is a "foreign policy threshold test" for Democratic presidential candidates, one that Kerry, with his extensive experience as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, passes with flying colors.
John Kerry, Smith tells me, is "a leader." He is a man of "courage and vision." He "defies labels." He will go after George W. Bush with "tooth and nail" ferocity.
But for all the positives about Kerry, Smith has to play some defense. There is a rap out there about John Kerry, a miasmic haze of negative perceptions that has hovered over the senator for decades. I have heard it from friends and colleagues, most of them Democrats; I have seen it alluded to in the press; I have discerned it in the long comment threads on political blogs. There is something not quite real about John Kerry, this line of thinking goes. There is something artificial about him, something constructed. He is not like us. John Kerry is too aloof. John Kerry is too cerebral. He is too political, too self-absorbed, too ambitious.
Smith dismisses these criticisms--the charges have been "very, very unfair," he says--and proposes an alternate narrative. Sure, Kerry is ambitious, he says, but "he was willing to risk his life for what he believes in, which is the kind of ambition I want." Sure, Kerry is bright and educated, and doesn't try to hide it; he's "even accusable of using big words," Smith relates in mock horror. Kerry is no fake--he's not trying to pretend he's something he's not. Unlike Al Gore, he doesn't pay "fashion consultants" like Naomi Wolf $15,000 a month to doctor his image. John Kerry, in essence, is "not about bullshitting you." And, Smith adds, John Kerry, more than any other candidate in the race, has what it takes to win.
Smith isn't, or wasn't, the only one who thought so. Many expected Kerry to walk away with the nomination--he was being referred to as "the anointed" a few months back--but Kerry has slipped back into the pack with the other first-tier guys: Gephardt, Lieberman, and now Dean. With all he has going for him, why aren't Democrats rallying around Kerry? Where's the love?
At 8:30 a.m. on a recent Saturday morning, I am in Boston, sitting, along with a nice lady from Newsweek, in the senator's campaign minivan. We have just pulled up outside Kerry's Beacon Hill townhouse, and we are waiting for him to join us for what will be a full day on the campaign trail: first about 45 minutes north to Lowell, where the Massachusetts Democratic Party is holding its annual convention, and then on to New Hampshire. As we wait, Teresa Heinz Kerry, the senator's second wife and the widow of Pennsylvania Republican senator John Heinz--of the ketchup fortune--sticks her head in the window and launches into conversation.
Heinz Kerry is worth north of a half-billion dollars and administers a charitable foundation with $1.6 billion in assets. She has a reputation for openness unusual in a political wife, and has spoken freely in the past about her Botox treatments and the prenup she has with Kerry. In a Washington Post profile last year, she was said to be devoted to the memory of her first husband. She is also devoted to environmental causes, as is Kerry. They met in 1990 at an Earth Day event, began dating two years later, and were married in 1995. She has three grown sons from her first marriage; Kerry has two daughters from a previous marriage. Only recently has she become a Democrat and added her husband's last name to hers.
The previous afternoon I watched as Mrs. Heinz Kerry received an award from the YWCA for her work on women's issues. The luncheon ceremony drew 700 of Boston's hoi polloi, and Kerry's wife was one of about a dozen women being honored. The senator surprised her by showing up to present her award--his aides hid him in the hotel foyer until the appropriate moment. He did not seem aloof there, or cerebral. As he worked his way across the stage to the podium, he leaned down to peck the cheeks of several of the other female honorees. He is an imposing six feet, four inches tall, with a lanky, loose-limbed frame and a shocking mane of silver-white hair that he is said to tame with a metal comb. Mrs. Heinz Kerry seemed suitably touched by her husband's unexpected appearance. He kissed her on the cheek as he handed her the award, and she responded by reaching up and fleetingly touching his face in a gesture that seemed both stagy and intimate.
Sitting in the van outside the townhouse, I get a closer look at Mrs. Heinz Kerry as she leans in a window. She's in her early 60s, but looks at least 15 years younger. She is wearing expensive sunglasses, form-fitting exercise pants, and a stylish red-and-white top. She is very friendly, in a chatty, unselfconscious, aristocratic sort of way. Her English is accented; her father was a Portuguese doctor and she grew up in Mozambique. She does not converse so much as she confides. She is full of anecdotes: so and so said this or that, at such and such seminar or conference. She uses the word "pedagogy" in casual conversation. There has been substantial speculation in the press and political circles that Kerry's wife will be a liability--that she is too opinionated, that her obvious upper-crust sophistication will alienate provincial voters in the heartland. Perhaps. On the other hand, there is an annoyingly simplistic assumption in the political punditocracy that if presidential candidates' wives don't appear blandly deferential and upper-middle-class, then voters won't "relate" to them. This may be true of Republicans, but it is no longer true of most Democrats--or of suburban women unaffiliated with either party. More of them read Glamour than read the New York Times. Then Kerry steps briskly from the house, embraces his wife, jumps into the front seat, and we're off. I catch a last glimpse of Kerry's wife as she turns to begin her morning walk. Kerry has described her as "very earthy, sexy, European," and this strikes me as a fairly defensible assessment.
As we drive, Kerry leans over the back of his seat, and the nice lady from Newsweek and I take turns asking him questions. With one arm draped over the seatback, he clasps his hands together as he talks. They are large hands. The first thing I notice about him, though, is his face. It is really quite a remarkable mug, not handsome in a conventional sense but deeply distinctive and expressive. It is long and Abe Lincoln craggy, anchored by a Jay Leno chin and hangdog eyes set beneath eyebrows permanently cocked at opposing 45-degree angles, giving Kerry a slightly quizzical look. He has a deep voice, with a cultured quality to it. He sounds careful, thought out, judicious. He sounds, in fact, exactly how one expects a U.S. senator to sound. Whether this is how we want our presidents to sound is a worthy question; George W. Bush enjoys broad appeal, perhaps in part because of the fact that he can occasionally sound as illiterate as the next guy.
We talk about the recent Bush tax cut, which Kerry, unsurprisingly, argues is skewed toward the very rich rather than ordinary Americans. He dismisses talk of a serious rift in the Democratic Party between its liberal and centrist wings--though, given the surging rise of left-tilted former Vermont governor Howard Dean in the Democratic race, this is certainly debatable--and assures that he has the credentials to unify the party's disparate elements. And he makes the case for a more accommodating, multilateral foreign policy that "increases American respect and influence in the world."
This leads naturally into the subject of the war in Iraq. Kerry has taken a tremendous pounding for having voted to authorize military action against Iraq, particularly from Dean, a staunch opponent of the war. Dean appeals to liberal voters who might otherwise support Kerry, much to the consternation of the Kerry campaign. And, in large part because only one of them is likely to survive the New Hampshire primary in late January, Dean has singled out Kerry as being particularly disingenuous regarding the war, first voting for it and then harshly criticizing the Bush administration's Iraq policy. Kerry went so far as to call for "regime change" at home in early April, parodying the Bushies' rhetoric about Iraq.
When he explains it, Kerry's position comes across as perfectly coherent and consistent. "I voted to disarm Saddam Hussein," he says. "I voted to give authorization to go to the UN, to build a coalition, to exhaust all the remedies," and only then to go to war if that effort failed. What he wanted, he says, was to "do it smart." Where he departs with the administration, he says, is that they failed to pursue seriously the nonmilitary options, and charged ahead precipitously and without broad support, alienating important international allies in the process. He describes the administration's prewar diplomacy as "uncommitted," and says that his criticisms are centered on the fact that the diplomatic failure to forge a broad and credible military coalition put American troops at greater risk of harm than necessary. "In 18 years on the Foreign Relations Committee I've never seen anything as ineffective as this," he says.
But though this is a reasonable argument, it is also a nuanced one. In the heated atmosphere of a hard-fought presidential campaign nuance tends to lose out to gut-level simplifications--the war was a terrible mistake, or, alternatively, it was a great victory in the war on terror. In our most recent presidential election, Al Gore was all nuance and George Bush was all gut. Whether Kerry has a reasonable position could well turn out to be less important than the fact that nuance, post-2000, is seen as a liability. And, at least as things appear currently, the war and its aftermath--particularly if the failure so far to find any weapons of mass destruction (WMD) holds up--is likely to remain a major issue in the Democratic nominating process. Kerry knows how dangerous the WMD issue is for him, and appears a bit wary when I ask him about it. At first he cautions that such weapons may yet be found. "It's premature to get all agitated about [WMD]," he says. "I'm not one to run around and say there's nothing there." He adds, though, that the Bush administration's credibility is at stake if the weapons don't turn up. "If there aren't any, it raises serious questions about this administration," he says.
Again, this is a plausible position, reasoned and reasonable, the kind of cool talk that is likely to appeal to middle-of-the-road swing voters who worry the Democrats aren't committed enough to protecting American security. It is not the sort of line that is likely to ignite passion in the disaffected liberal Democrats who are likely to vote disproportionately in the primaries. But Kerry is committed to running on a platform of social liberalism and fiscal prudence at home and a muscular multilateralism abroad, all wrapped in a patriotic package lauding the virtues of selfless public service and an engaged citizenry committed to the commonweal--all, dare I say it, very John F. Kennedy-esque. Earlier in his career, Kerry was knocked repeatedly for his sometimes painfully self-conscious attempts to emulate Kennedy. These days, the Kennedy echoes are very much still there, though Kerry has gotten much better at integrating them in a way that doesn't slap you in the face.
Still, Kerry's campaign so far has not performed up to early expectations. Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, a Kerry supporter, tells me he thinks Kerry has been slowed more than is readily apparent by his recent successful surgery for prostate cancer. "It's had a rocky start," he admits of the campaign, though he says Kerry is already picking up steam as he gets back on the road. And then there are all those negative perceptions, which are pervasive enough that George Stephanopoulos asked Kerry at the May 3 South Carolina debate if he was aloof. Kerry brushed off the question with a joke.
In the spring of 1971, a 27-year-old John Kerry exploded onto the national stage. He was, it seemed at first, the right guy at the right time. A recently discharged, much-decorated Navy lieutenant, Kerry was given the opportunity on April 23 of that year to testify to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). He made the most of it. Articulate and telegenic, with good looks, obvious passion, an unimpeachable war record, and a self-conscious invocation of the mythic Kennedy legacy, he was an almost perfect spokesman for the burgeoning antiwar movement.
That testimony was uncompromising. Kerry, dressed in combat fatigues, vividly referenced returning veterans' painful memories of routine cruelties perpetrated against innocents; he called the war "barbaric" and an exercise in "criminal hypocrisy." And yet there was also an idealistic and lyrical quality to his words, which tempered their harshness, an implicit message that while the war may have been a terrible violation of the fundamental values that guided the country, those values themselves remained sound. The lines that are always quoted from the speech are Kerry's two evocative questions: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" The senators treated him deferentially. Claiborne Pell, a Democrat from Rhode Island, expressed hope that Kerry "might one day be a colleague of ours in this body." In one of those life-imitates-made-for-TV-movie moments, Pell was still in office when Kerry was elected to the Senate almost 14 years later.
Unlike so many other radicalized young people at the time who were calling for a full-scale social revolution, Kerry tells me in a subsequent phone conversation that he just wanted the war to end and the troops to be brought home. Not too long afterward, he quietly left VVAW because the group began to "focus on too broad a social agenda." Though Kerry may have been down with John Lennon, whom he would introduce at an antiwar rally in New York that year--a photo of their meeting displayed in his Senate office is one of Kerry's prized possessions--he was down on Hanoi Jane and the more radical elements in the antiwar movement.
Kerry's Senate appearance briefly made him into the political equivalent of a rock star. Within a month Kerry was profiled on 60 Minutes, where Morley Safer said Kerry had "caught the attention of the nation" as "a veteran whose articulate call to reason rather than anarchy seemed to bridge the call between the Abbie Hoffmans of the world and Mr. Agnew's so-called 'Silent Majority.'" In the interview, Kerry comes across as preternaturally poised and self-confident, and his deep ambition is already apparent. At one point, Safer asks him if he wants to be president someday. Kerry looks surprised at the query--he says no--but it does not look like the surprise of someone who has just been asked an absurd question. It looks like the surprise of a boy who has just been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
It was a heady time for the young Kerry--he went on a speaking tour, was featured in national magazines--and it did not come about by accident. Chris Gregory, an antiwar vet who got to know Kerry in 1970, says he didn't particularly like Kerry when they first met but realized that Kerry came at the antiwar effort with "a compelling plan" and an intense fixation on getting the vets' message heard. Gregory, who became friends with Kerry, confides to me a bit later in our conversation, "It's a little eerie how focused and cold-blooded he can be. He's the guy you want when you have a problem."
Kerry's younger brother Cameron, a Boston lawyer, says that Kerry was driven even as a kid: "He was always the team captain, organizing the games, captain of the flag-football team, stuff like that." Kerry is a product of the New England elite, though his parents had more pedigree than money. His father was a career foreign service officer, and Kerry spent his early youth living in Europe. He graduated from an exclusive New Hampshire prep school and attended Yale (class of '66), arriving two years before George W. Bush. As a junior, he was tapped to join Skull and Bones, the secret society for Yale's elite. He also signed up for the Navy and, after graduating, asked to be sent to Vietnam.
In early 1969 he ended up in command of a Swift Boat--think Apocalypse Now--that plied the waters of the Mekong Delta. Del Sandusky, the senior enlisted man on Kerry's boat, says that as a commander Kerry was serious and intense, and was always ready to volunteer for hazardous missions. "He's a hard charger," Sandusky says. "He was the best boat officer we had." Between missions, though, Sandusky remembers Kerry horsing around with the guys, cranking the Doors over the boat's loudspeaker system--again, very Apocalypse Now. I asked Kerry what he thought of the movie. "I thought they were imitating us," he chuckles. Kerry received his Silver Star for chasing after and killing a Vietcong soldier armed with a rocket launcher; he got the Bronze Star for pulling a Special Forces soldier who'd fallen overboard back into the boat while under fire. By 1970, after three injuries, he was back in the U.S.
In 1972, Kerry decided to parlay his celebrity into a political career, running for Congress on an antiwar platform. He beat out the Massachusetts Democratic machine's candidate in the primary, but lost the general election after a bitter campaign. An increasingly paranoid Richard Nixon felt so threatened by Kerry that on election night he stayed up long after his own victory was confirmed to savor Kerry's defeat. The loss, after so much success and national attention, was psychologically devastating. Kerry "went through a tough period after that," his brother relates. "In many ways it was a very personal defeat."
From high in the upper rim of a sports arena in Lowell I am watching John Kerry, standing atop an elevated stage fronted by red, white, and blue bunting and backed by an enormous American flag, as he addresses the more than 2,500 party activists. His long rift with the party hierarchy is a thing of the past; on this day and in this place, John Kerry walks on water. He is a fine speaker, and it is a strong speech, though I have the sense that he could deliver this oration in Dutch and it would not make a whit of difference to this crowd of Kerry partisans.
He starts with a joke, telling the crowd a man in Florida recently asked him what it was like to run for the most powerful office in the country. Punch line: "I don't have any idea--I'm not running for secretary of state of Florida." The crowd hoots with laughter. Kerry attacks the president for his aircraft carrier photo op. He attacks trickle-down economics: "I know a lot of good, hard-working Americans who are tired of getting trickled on." He talks about job losses in the Bush economy: "It is clear the one American who deserves to be laid off is George W. Bush." The crowd begins loudly chanting "Kay-ree." He delivers a good line about the opportunity costs of the Iraq invasion: "My friends, we should not be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them in New York City." He promises that he is "committed to a foreign policy that is strong and right." He closes with a rousing peroration calling for a "new patriotism, a progressive patriotism," and asserting that "the American flag and patriotism belong to no political party and president." As he finishes, a spotlight dances over the crowd in the darkened hall, and a sea of waving Kerry placards rises on the arena floor.
As I watch and listen to this performance, I cannot help but hear the echoes of John F. Kennedy in John F. Kerry. There is the same sort of optimism about America, the same sort of appeal to idealism, the same sort of idea that leadership is in large part about providing a grand vision of the nation's potential. A teenager when Kennedy was elected president, Kerry was clearly caught up in the heady optimism of the time, and his life can be read as a playing out of the Kennedy mantra of duty and sacrifice and service to one's country. The connection is more than an abstract one. He dated Jacqueline Bouvier's sister while at prep school, and met Kennedy at Bouvier's vacation home. He volunteered on Teddy Kennedy's campaign for the Senate in 1962. But Kerry is weary these days of the Kennedy comparison. He objects to my use of the word "hero" when I ask about Kennedy's influence on him, but does admit that Kennedy was an "inspiration" to him and that he was drawn to Kennedy's "idealism, hope, and vision." But historian Douglas Brinkley, who is writing a book about Kerry's Vietnam War-era experiences, says, "This is a guy who was raised on Kennedy-esque vigor. He grew up on that stuff. He believes in it. He came out of it incredibly smart, a bit worldly, a bit glamorous."
Kennedy, of course, was more than just an ordinary politician, more even than an ordinary president. He and his family were, and still are, the center of a whole swirling cauldron of myth, the Camelot mystique, with its potent amalgam of yin-and-yang archetypes of feminine taste and refinement and masculine virility, bound together under a gloss of old-moneyed self-confidence. It does not seem coincidental to me that Kerry's life so closely conforms to this mold: the wealth, the sophistication, the bright and cultured wife, the ostentatious manliness--even at 59, and coming off surgery in February for prostate cancer, Kerry displays, indeed promotes, his devotion to testosterone-laden pursuits. He sometimes flies his own plane between campaign stops, hunts, plays hockey, windsurfs, and likes to tool around on a Harley.
There is, of course, a certain breathtaking grandiosity to this effort, whether conscious or not, to build one's identity in such an overtly mythic political mold, and it is not difficult to see why some cast this as hubris. But all public figures construct themselves as something; it does not take much strain to see politicians, at least those who play on the level of viable presidential aspirations, as walking, talking extended metaphors. Bill Clinton played the average guy jogging to McDonald's, but of course he was never your average guy, not even when he was wolfing down a Quarter Pounder. And I suspect that there is greater grounding in reality for Kerry's attempts at self-fashioning than for, say, George Bush's. Kerry, after all, actually went off to fight, and killed people, and came back a war hero. George Bush, of course, is not a war hero. George Bush isn't even the "rancher" he pretends to be in Crawford, Texas. I doubt very much, for instance, that George has ever roped a steer.
Still, Kerry's early brush with fame, his youthful brashness and self-confidence, his flirtation with the counterculture, his willingness to thumb his nose at the powers that be, and, early on, his too overt aping of Kennedy--for his Senate testimony he deliberately affected a thick Kennedy accent, according to a Joe Klein profile in the New Yorker last year--all cost him dearly. With success coming so fast and with so little apparent effort, almost from the moment he arrived on the national stage he struck many, including influential members of the press and his own party, as arrogant and slick. When I mention to him that it seems much of the negativity about him stems from this period, he readily agrees. "I think you're right about that," he says. Still, he asserts that he has no regrets. "I was a young kid," he says. "I learned from it. And things turned out okay, you know?" But the game isn't over yet for John Kerry; the jury is still out on exactly how well things turned out. As University of Washington political scientist Kevin Price puts it to me, "Al Gore paid a big price for being disliked, and Kerry may have set himself up for something like that."
Certainly, many of the knocks against Kerry no longer hold water. Though he evinces a certain peculiarly Yankee deeds-not-words reserve, on the campaign trail Kerry more often than not comes across in person as effusively friendly. Several times during my stay in Massachusetts I am the beneficiary of the Kerry charm treatment. After a breakfast speech to union members at a Lowell hotel, Kerry walks up to me and slaps me heartily across the back, exclaiming my name with such joy that it seems that for the half-hour since I was last in his immediate presence he has been plunged into the unspeakable torments of hell. Later, at a packed house party in New Hampshire, Kerry is working his way through the crowd and turns to shake the next hand. When he sees who it is, he grins, thumps me lightly on the chest with his fist, and asks if I am having fun. (I am.) As I watch him glad-hand his way through the crowd, I realize that this kind of breezy, manly jocularity is Kerry's natural mode of interacting with other men, whom he often greets with a punch to the shoulder and a bit of jokey familiarity. When he does this, I can almost picture Kerry as a young man in Vietnam horsing around with the guys in the boat.
I've heard he's most relaxed around other veterans, and the several I've spoken with confirm this. Sandusky tells me that the "skipper," as Kerry is still known by his crew, can (and does) curse like, well, a sailor. That close and personal relationship with other veterans has paid dividends for Kerry; in every one of his races since 1984 a loose group of vets who call themselves the Doghunters has hit the campaign trail for him. Vet John Hurley describes them as a "rapid response team" that "protects [Kerry's] flanks" from political attacks from the right.
After his defeat in 1972 Kerry's first stint in the political limelight was over. He went to law school and then worked as a prosecutor in Massachusetts. Kerry is not the sort to give up on his ambitions easily, though. In 1982 he again bucked the state party by running for lieutenant governor. He won. Two years later he ran for the Senate, again beating the party's handpicked guy in the primary. Again, he won. He has compiled a notable record of achievement during his 18 years in Washington. He was instrumental in exposing the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scandal and the illegal activities of Oliver North, and in the mid-'90s took up the politically thankless task of resolving the Vietnam POW/MIA issue. In partnership with former prisoner of war John McCain--the two have become good friends, despite their ideological differences--Kerry was instrumental in putting the festering issue to rest, allowing President Clinton to normalize relations with Vietnam. In 1996 he proved himself both a prodigious fundraiser and tough campaigner when he fended off an intense challenge for his Senate seat from popular Republican governor William Weld. More recently, he has taken a leading role in blocking the Bush administration's plans for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
When I am in Boston, I get the opportunity to witness, however briefly, the power of successfully transforming yourself into a living, breathing political metaphor. On the afternoon of Friday, June 6, I am walking the streets near my hotel when by random circumstance I come across a crowd of several hundred gathered on three sides around the entrance to a downtown building. I ask what the commotion is all about; I am told that Bill Clinton is inside the building. I join the back of the crowd, which is perhaps seven or eight deep. We wait for 10 minutes. Nothing. Fifteen minutes, still nothing. The crowd grumbles. Where the fuck is he? Is this worth it? A handful leave, but far more join.
Then there is a roar from the front, and the crowd presses forward as one. Burly men in dark suits and earpieces hold it back, keeping it from blocking the entrance to the building. The great man has been spotted through the plate glass windows of the lobby of the building, slowly working his way through those lucky or privileged enough to get inside. He comes outside. The crowd roars again, even louder. From the front, a writhing mass of hands reaches out to him, frantically begging for his brief attention. The man behind me is repeatedly yelling "2004" at the top of his lungs. Clinton is visible for perhaps 15 seconds as he works his way down the line toward the limousine waiting at the curb. He has a pig-in-shit grin on his face, which makes the laugh lines around his eyes deepen into furrows. "I told you it was worth waiting," the girl next to me is telling her boyfriend. His expression is sheepish, chastened, as if he feels guilty for having uttered a blasphemy. After the great man passes, one young girl from the front works her way back through the crowd. "I touched him," she shouts as she passes me, apparently to no one in particular. "I touched him."
Watching this scene unfold drives home what this is all about. The stakes may be high and the odds long, but the personal rewards are immense. These are the wages of victory. This potentiality, however remote, is ultimately why guys like John Kerry do what they do; this is what propels them forward through the endless, grinding 16-hour days, the countless demeaning phone calls begging for money. It is for scenes like this, I think, that John Kerry has been preparing for almost his entire life. Kerry is not Bill Clinton, of course--their styles are very different--but Bill Clinton was not Bill Clinton before 1992. Whether John Kerry will get to the rarefied precincts Clinton now inhabits will depend on many impossible-to-predict things. He is both very close to, and very far from, getting there. With Dean surging and Bush being sold as "unbeatable" no matter who wins the Democratic nomination, the odds are against Kerry. But the mythic raw materials are all there. There is only one thing missing, one thing that might finally wipe away all the negative perceptions, though it is the most important thing: the sanctifying glow of victory.
