Martin Peretz is an ass :grr:
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041122&s=peretz112204I've known John Kerry for 34 years. We met in the peace movement, and I was present in 1970 when a huge convention of peaceniks rejected him as their candidate in a primary race against Philip Philbin, a Democratic hack and hawk who, through seniority, was then second in command of the House Armed Services Committee. The caucus instead nominated Father Robert Drinan, dean of Boston College Law School, who won the seat and held it for five terms, until Pope John Paul II made him resign.
Even then, no one seemed to like Kerry. (The only person I've known who really does is David Thorne, the brother of his first wife and his classmate at Yale.) Kerry's initial defeats (he also lost a race for Massachusetts' fifth congressional district in 1972) did not deflect him from his ambitions, but he deferred them to attend BC Law School and then work as a prosecutor. He got back into politics in 1982, with his election as Michael Dukakis's lieutenant governor, where
his own unpleasantness was somewhat shielded by that of his boss. He was first elected to the Senate in 1984, the same year as Al Gore. Something demonic in Kerry persuaded him to belittle Gore whenever we met. As their first term started, Kerry boasted to me that he had beaten out Gore for a coveted seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, while Gore had to content himself with Armed Services. But it was the latter committee that went on to do much of the heavy lifting of the next two decades, while J. William Fulbright's old Foreign Relations Committee went into a steep decline. Kerry also became a member of the Intelligence Committee, whose public meetings he attended sparingly and--if one judges from his book The New War--from which he learned little about the terrorist threat that he described so murkily in the last campaign. By contrast, Gore created a real record for himself: on the environment; the Internet; arms control; and nuclear strategy, where he introduced the revolutionary idea of the single-warhead missile.
Today, Democrats are overcome with despair. And I do not doubt that Bush's second term will have its abuses and its nastiness. But they should not delude themselves:
John Kerry would not have been a good president; he might even have been a dangerously bad one. Next time, Democrats need to nominate not merely a candidate who they imagine can win but a candidate who deserves to.
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