What is the Kerry Persuasion? For starters, it is not radical. Nothing in Mr. Kerry's record as Senator or as Democratic nominee gives us reason to suspect that as President he would seek dramatically to alter the basic contours of American life. On the economy, that means no HillaryCare, no Smoot-Hawley protectionism, and probably no Kyoto Protocol. On military issues, it's a safe bet Mr. Kerry will do nothing to appear weak on defense, despite a record favoring budget, procurement and weaponry cuts. On the culture, the Senator does swim pretty far to the left. But when partial-birth abortions are already legal, the only thing Mr. Kerry's support for their legality does is preserve the status quo.
Then again, neither is the Kerry Persuasion reformist. Yes, Mr. Kerry is a nominal member of the Democratic Leadership Council and was an early Democratic advocate of a balanced budget. On the other hand, he opposes school choice, he opposes any kind of Social Security reform, he opposes health savings accounts. On free trade, he has moved from support to ambivalence, while choosing a running mate who is emphatically against. On energy, it's back to the 1970s of better gas mileage and subsidies for alternative fuels. On taxes, it's back to the 1990s of Clintonism.
Based on this, we are tempted to say that what the domestic Kerry Persuasion amounts to is the gradual expansion of the welfare state. And there would be some of that over the next four years, especially on health care. But this misses the fact that today's Democratic Party is also fundamentally about the entrenchment of contemporary secular culture. Expanding the welfare state used to be the preferred tool in that cause, but Bill Clinton's Presidency taught that there were other tools, especially the courts. The main thing is to keep the perceived enemies of secular culture--Evangelicals, Creationists, other stock characters of Mencken's Booboisie--out of power. In this age of uncertainty, Mr. Kerry's promise to avoid risk, a politics of inaction, may prove the way to do it.
The same goes in foreign policy, only more so. Let's see: What is it, really, that candidate Kerry says he will do differently than President Bush? Superficially, the promise is a more engaged diplomacy and greater "competence" in the prosecution of our wars. But Mr. Kerry's repeated pledge to fight wars "more effectively" obscures his more central message, which is that he would do anything and everything possible not to fight them at all.
That is the meaning of his recent, revealing reference in the New York Times to terrorism in the context of law-enforcement problems such as prostitution, as well as of his now-famous "global test" remark. The first downgrades the nature of this war, so that it needn't be fought as a war; the second raises the bar for the next one, so that the U.S. ability to use force would be more easily restrained, like Gulliver in Lilliput.
All this is consonant with the basic impulses of the current Democratic Party, impulses Mr. Kerry helped shape in the post-Vietnam era and which have guided him since. Asked by CNN in 1994 under what circumstances he could justify U.S. casualties in the Balkan conflict, he answered: "If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops \[sic\] unilaterally going in with some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no."
What is striking here isn't just the suggestion that to die for the U.N. is ennobling but to die for the U.S. is not. Nor is it that, five years after making this remark, Mr. Kerry supported U.S. military action in Kosovo, which was undertaken outside the U.N. umbrella. What is especially revealing is his view that the U.S. cannot alone "affect the outcome," that whatever the U.S. undertakes single-handedly it is bound to bungle. This, too, feeds his impulse to engage, negotiate, "consult"; to wait upon events and manage them as they arise; to avoid all things risky. It is the politics of inaction again.
We realize that a President does not have a Senator's luxury of prescribing inaction, and that perhaps Mr. Kerry would display a toughness and resolution in the White House not seen since his days as a Swift Boat commander. He certainly has shown mettle and skill in this political season. We are also mindful that the current President, who came to office deriding the idea of nation-building, has gone on to build two of them.
But President Bush's change of heart was the result of September 11, an event that Mr. Kerry says only "accelerated" his own pre-existing convictions. If that's really true, we can only wonder, and dread, just what it will take to make those convictions shake.
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