Opinion: If it weren't for the small matter of the war for civilisation, I'd find it hard to resist a John Kerry presidency.
Groucho Marx once observed that an audience will laugh at an actress playing an old lady pretending to fall downstairs, but, for a professional comic to laugh, it has to be a real old lady. That's how I feel about the Kerry campaign.
For the professional political analyst, watching Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis or Howard Dean stuck in the part of the guy who falls downstairs is never very satisfying: they're average, unexceptional fellows whom circumstances have conspired to transform into walking disasters. But Senator Kerry was made for the role, a vain, thin-skinned, droning blueblood with an indestructible sense of his own status but none at all of his own ridiculousness. If Bush svengali Karl Rove had laboured for a decade to produce a walking parody of the contemporary Democratic Party's remoteness, condescension, sense of entitlement, public evasiveness and tortured relationship with military matters, he couldn't have improved on John F. Kerry.
Primary season gives the party's electorate a chance to rattle the leading candidate and make him a better campaigner.
This time round the leading candidates - Howard Dean, Wesley Clark - rattled the electorate and in their stampede to the fire exits they wound up sweeping the quintessential "None of the Above" man to victory. They made a very basic miscalculation: Howard Dean was a dull centrist governor pretending to be nuts, John Kerry is a nut passing himself off as a dull centrist.
Granted that many folks mistake self-importance for gravitas, it's surprising the devious minds of the Democratic establishment, so fearful of Dean, failed to see the problems with Kerry. A serious party would have seen the war on terror as a major foreign policy challenge they needed to address credibly. But instead the Democrats looked on it in a shrivelled, partisan Carvillesque way as a Bush wedge issue they needed to neutralize. And so they bought into Kerry's self-created myth of his four months in the Mekong as the most epic chapter in the history of the republic, and promptly mired the party in a Vietnam quagmire that feels like it's been going on longer than the real one. Furious at having his self-inflating war fantasies exposed in August, Kerry's now wasted most of September trying to nail Bush on aspects of his National Guard service 30 years ago. Nobody cares what Bush was doing in 1972, but Kerry's such a petty, ill-disciplined candidate he refuses to let it go, no matter how low his numbers go.
If there's one lesson to be drawn from the 2002 elections it's that biography is insufficient: the war-wounded Max Cleland in Georgia, the governor's widow Jean Carnahan in Missouri, the old lion Walter Mondale in Minnesota all went down, because come election day losing three limbs or your husband or 49 states is not in itself a qualification for office, not in serious times. Two years ago, voters were very clear-sighted, and they rejected the TV-movie-of-the-week narratives, however appealing, in the absence of evidence that the candidates were credible on the issue that mattered.
But in the senator's case the party was so gripped by their cynically contracted Mekong syndrome they overlooked how unappealing 99 per cent of the Kerry biography was. The Senatitis - all the I-voted-for-it-before-I-voted-against-it stuff - is an inevitable consequence of spending more than half a term in the world's most ponderous, self-regarding legislative body. But, even by Senate standards, this one's a dud. Senator Kennedy, by comparison, has a formidable list of legislative accomplishments. Disastrous accomplishments, but you can at least see the guy's been doing something. Kerry, by contrast, has nothing to show for his 20 years in Washington other than a lot of votes against things - mainly against (if you're looking for a theme) the projection of US power in America's interest. The sour oppositionism isn't grounded in any strategic clarity so much as his inability to get past Vietnam. His famous 1986 Senate speech, with its now discredited Christmas-in-Cambodia fantasy, is typical: he was supposed to be addressing US Latin American policy but the only part of his speech in which he sounds engaged is yet another self-aggrandising stroll down the Ho Chi Minh Memory Trail.
In 1980, launching his own campaign for the White House, Ted Kennedy ran into trouble because he couldn't give an answer to why he wanted to be president. Kerry's problem starts long before that: after 20 years, there seems to be no obvious answer as to why he wanted to be a senator.
There's something to be said for the cynically conservative attitude that a legislator who doesn't produce any legislation is the least worst kind. But when a senator makes the focus of his legislative inertia America's national security, the Cold War and missile defence, I'm not sure that theory isn't being stretched beyond its natural limits. When Kerry talks, as he often does, about his "30 years in public service", it's hard to see what service the public's got out of it.
In 1960, accepting the nomination in another perilous time, JFK, the one warming up the initials for the present colossus, never felt the need to mention his wartime heroism in PT-109, never mind base his entire candidacy on it, or reunite his crew to serve as a warm-up act. But 44 years on, Dems loved condescending to Kerry's "band of brothers" at that Boston convention: never in the field of human conflict was so much made of so few by so many.
I've heard big-time Democrats say that "of course" they support our troops even though they oppose the war. I've never quite understood what that meant. But I think that's what most Dems saw in Kerry: they supported a soldier who opposed a war because he was the embodiment of their straddle. Alas, if you detach the heroism of a war from the morality of it what's left but braggadocio? There were only ever two likely outcomes this November: Kerry will lose narrowly, and we'll be in for another four years of whining about how the world's biggest moron managed to steal a second election; or he'll lose decisively. The second option's the one to bet on.