Theory & Event

For many of us, the entire campaign season was bathed in an aura of knowingness without engagement. We counted on swing state voters to accept Kerry’s words at face value and righteously blamed the Bush campaign for misrepresenting positions that we silently believed Kerry did not really hold. The sad truth is that neither side believed what Kerry said. Even more remarkable is the fact that only 51% of the electorate thought that this was a reason to vote against him. No wonder they thought that the election was about values — not only their own values, but the questionable values of those of us who thought that not believing Kerry’s actual words was a reason to vote for him.

Gay marriage is simply an example of what was wrong with Kerry’s patronizing assumptions about the credulity of the swing voters in Ohio and elsewhere. If Kerry agreed with the Supreme Court’s decision that ‘same-sex sex’ has the same protection as all other sex under the US Constitution, could he really have believed that it is the state constitutions that should be amended to prohibit calling same-sex marriage marriage, rather than something else? If so, why didn’t he endorse the constitutional amendment on the Ohio ballot saying just that? Almost no one who supported Kerry thought that he believed gay marriage was a matter of states’ rights rather than individual rights. Yet we expected Ohio swing voters to take him at his word. Kerry made us feel smarter than they were, but only at the cost of allowing them to feel morally superior to us.

This was not true not only of the “wedge” issues: similar questions arise about Kerry’s positions on the much more important issues of Iraq, terrorism, pre-emptive war, civil liberties, and national security. We kept assuring ourselves that there was a real difference between Kerry and Bush on each of these issues, and that Kerry was just too smart to say so. What he said (mostly) was that the war in Iraq was not a mistake — or would not have been if he had been in charge. Did we think that Kerry really believed this? Or did we, rather, support Kerry because he made us feel smart enough to see through it, while thinking that many Bush supporters, disturbed by recent news, would be dumb enough to vote for Kerry for the reason he gave — that he would have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein more competently than Bush — and thus reject Bush’s counter-claim that Saddam Hussein would still be in power if John Kerry had been President.

As the crucial foreign policy debate in the campaign was reduced to the question of whether Kerry would have had a better plan for regime change in Iraq two years earlier, it is little wonder that swing voters increasingly began to question Kerry’s character. Everyone understands that a politician must compromise some of his positions in order to achieve his goals and set priorities. But when a politician proudly announces each compromise as a new window on who he “really” is, he should not complain when the public sees him as essentially compromised.

This real question of character relates to the spurious issue that, according to many, turned the tide against Kerry — the ad campaign by “The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” The Swift Boat ads were literally false, but their political “truth” has to expose Kerry’s unwillingness to say that the US had disgraced itself in My Lai and Abu Ghraib, and to denounce the illegal detentions in Guantánamo that even the Rehnquist Court could not stomach. This, we thought, is what he really believes. His opponents thought so too, and saw his response to the Swift Boat charges as another failure to be truthful about the real relevance of his Vietnam experience to Iraq.

There are moral values other than truthfulness that might have favored Kerry: equality, respect for human rights, compassion, international responsibility, fulfilling work, and a better quality of life for every member of society, especially the worst...