"W MADE ME DO IT":

What If Kerry Had Voted Against The War? (Charlie Cook, Nov. 11, 2003, National Journal)

When I first heard Monday that Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts had just fired his presidential campaign manager, Jim Jordan, I immediately thought back to a conversation I had a month ago at a reception on Capitol Hill. Several people were discussing the race for the Democratic nomination, and I opined that the Kerry campaign's organizational problems were vastly overblown. In fact, I believed -- and still do --that they were virtually irrelevant to his slippage from the race's front-runner position.

Instead, I suggested that the problem for Kerry, Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina and others in the race was that they were in a race with another candidate -- former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean -- whose campaign was on fire. Dean's candidacy had taken on a life of its own and this, as opposed to any intrinsic weaknesses on the part of his rivals, was what was holding them back. I equated it to a handful of guys in a poker game: Some were accomplished players, but the guy from Vermont sitting across the table from them was drawing the hot cards every hand. I suggested that all the rest of the field could do was to either to drop out of the race or hope that Dean's luck would turn and they would still be alive to capitalize on it.

An older and much wiser journalist, a Washington bureau chief who was covering politics while I was still in Boy Scouts, turned to me and asked, "Where do you think Kerry and Dean would be if Kerry had voted against the war?" Like a thunderbolt from the sky, I instantly knew he
was right. If Kerry had voted against the Iraq war, it is very likely that he would still be the front-runner and Dean would probably be an asterisk rather than the front-runner.

That, in a nutshell, is why governors have so much easier a time running for the presidency than legislators--they don't have voting records on tough issues. Gephardt, Kerry, and Edwards had to insulate themselves against charges of being soft on terror for purposes of the general election--so they voted for war. But that vote kills them in the primary campaign. Guys like Dean and Clark can pontificate on both sides of the issue--as Bill Clinton did in 1991-2--precisely because they were never required to vote up or down on the war.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 11, 2003 12:01 PM