KERRY REX (via Kevin Whited):

Wonder LandPrimary Democrats Find Perfect Vessel In John Kerry. The '60s generation has its candidate. (DANIEL HENNINGER, February 13, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

It doesn't matter that the iconic president bearing Mr. Kerry's initials (as a young man, Mr. Kerry dated Jackie Kennedy's half-sister, Janet Auchincloss) sent the U.S. into Vietnam on a flying carpet of moral certainty. Or that the political commitment to repulse communism in Vietnam, a commitment that troubled Mr. Kerry as he departed in 1968 for heroic service in the war and revulsed him when he left, was set by Lyndon Baines Johnson. Primary Democrats, for reasons that await the tools of psychoanalysis, believe Vietnam was "Nixon's war." After winning Iowa's caucuses, Mr. Kerry volunteered, "I stood up and fought against Richard Nixon's war in Vietnam."

The Republican Nixon's too-ardent anticommunism, they came to believe, was the provenance for Ronald Reagan's wrongful spending on the communist "threat." So it followed that Primary Democrats would then resist Ronald Reagan on Grenada, Nicaragua and installing Pershing missiles in Europe. As senator, Mr. Kerry held hearings into Ollie North and the Iran-Contra connection. In the same Iowa interview just last month, Mr. Kerry described that effort in the words used in the 1980s by all Primary Democrats: "I stood up and fought against Ronald Reagan's illegal war in Central America."

John Kerry was present at the creation of the moral and intellectual voyage of post-1960s Democrats. He helped map its course. [...]

The vote in 2004 is not just a referendum on the two men running for president. It is a keystone election. (Next time, Hillary Clinton, though liberal, will not run the campaign Mr. Kerry will run if nominated.) With American soldiers fighting overseas, this election offers one last vote on whether the forces put in motion around 1968 will also carry America forward into the new century--or stop, to be replaced, finally, by a new vision.

Here's your psychoanalysis: it's guilt. Even Democrats have came to realize that they were disastrously wrong about not just the Vietnam War but, even more importantly, tearing America apart because of it. So, in the primaries, where Mr. Kerry gets to frame himself, he's running as the pro-Vietnam candidate. After all, the images in his campaign ads are of him fighting the war, not protesting it, and he has the great advantage of being largely unknown outside the Beltway and Boston, so this Curtis LeMay persona is saleable.

Unfortunately for him, and his Party, Karl Rove's turn is coming and when folks out in the country find out that the Senator is more Fonda than Rambo those very same feelings of guilt are unlikely to serve him well. If voters were scared off by a Howard Dean who seemed ready to divide the nation, how likely are they to embrace a man who has already done so once before?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 14, 2004 01:31 PM