Centering Kerry
Peter Hart is an analyst for the media watch group
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and the author of The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly (Seven Stories Press, 2003).
The campaign season has arrived, and prominent TV and print pundits are peddling the same advice you hear every four years: The Democratic presidential candidate should abandon progressive stances and occupy the political center. With John Kerry having emerged as the presumptive nominee, the pundits are once again sounding the call: Move to the right.
Time magazine's Joe Klein wrote that Kerry needs to be bold: "The ideal step would be to make [Republican Senator] John McCain his choice for vice president and announce a government of national reconciliation composed of moderate Democrats and Republicans." Klein recommended making a "radical move to the middle, a campaign that looks and sounds different from the usual partisan claptrap."
Over at Newsweek, political reporter Howard Fineman had the same advice. In a column based on what anonymous "wise guys" were saying, Fineman says Kerry needs to craft "a coherent, centrist vision." As Fineman puts it, "There's room in the middle, wise guys insist." To Fineman and his unnamed experts, "Kerry can't occupy the center if he's defined as a mere liberal. He has the most liberal voting record in the Senate. What to do?" Fineman has the cure: Kerry should "run ads in battleground states reminding voters that he was a prosecutor and that he voted for welfare reform in 1996, a brave (for Massachusetts) stand that drew picketers to his home." Whatever the wisdom of that advice, it's partly based on an inaccurate rendition of Kerry's political record"he does not in fact have the Senate's "most liberal voting record." It'd be nice for Newsweek's political reporter to point that out as deceptive campaign season spin, instead of treating it as fact.
But some pundits keep dreaming: The New York Times foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman wrote on March 27 about the good news he's waiting for: "I want to wake up and read that John Kerry just asked John McCain to be his vice president." Friedman explained that's the only way to tackle the country's problems, "with a bipartisan spirit and bipartisan team." The notion that the Democrats' problem is that they are too far left has long been conventional wisdom for the media"but what do voters think? Many elections are won by the party most able to energize its base, which is why the Republicans have several times won the presidency with candidates who quite consciously moved away from the center, toward their party's ideological pole. Candidates who alienate their base"for example, a Democrat who picked an anti-abortion running mate, or ran by touting support for limits on welfare"are not guaranteed to pick up enough support from the center to make up for diminished support from their own side.
Pundits like to point to the supposed electoral benefits of Clinton-style "triangulation" as evidence that moving to the right helps win elections for the Democrats. But on closer examination, that argument falls apart; the Democratic Party actually lost congressional seats and governorships during the Clinton years, as the Democratic faithful were unimpressed by the party's drift to the right. Both Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988 took the pundits' move-to-the-right advice"with little notable success. The selection of conservative Sen. Lloyd Bentsen as Dukakis' running mate, wrote Washington Post scribe David Broder at the time, "Sent an unmistakable message to the activist constituencies of the Democratic Party that the days of litmus-test liberalism are over." Of course, after both Mondale and Dukakis were defeated in landslides, the conventional wisdom was that they hadn't moved to the right far enough.
The script might be the same this year. The New York Times devoted a whole story to the notion that appearing with Sen. Ted Kennedy was a liability for Kerry. Even some Democrats were worried, according to the Times. But there was just one problem"the Times found no Democrats actually saying this. But to many in the media world, "liberal" is still a dirty word, and the center is the place for the Democratic Party. Recent headlines suggest that the advice isn't ignored: as The New York Times put it, "Kerry, Acknowledging Vulnerability, Says He Plans Effort to Show He Is a Centrist." Big-time pundits couldn't be more thrilled.
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Published: May 06 2004
