Running on cliches

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If you own a computer or listen to talk-radio or read the British or Australian papers, you'll know John Kerry is currently beset by rumors of interns. By the time you read this, it may be that America's genteel broadsheets and network news shows will have overcome their squeamishness and tiptoed gingerly down the path blazed by Drudge and Fleet Street. Or maybe they'll decide to investigate it a bit longer, just to get chapter and verse nailed down, which means you may not get to read about it till, oh, midway through President Kerry's second term.

Now let me say I've no idea whether there's anything to the alleged intern business but ... as Howard Dean says when he wants to air some conspiracy theory about President Bush, it's an "interesting" story.

And, if you think we should have concrete proof before we bring it up, then to paraphrase Wes Clark comment on whether Mr. Bush was a "deserter," I've no proof Mr. Kerry isn't an adulterer.

Nonetheless, while I enjoy "the politics of personal destruction" as much as the next chap, I've no desire to fight the 2004 election on anything as quaintly anachronistic as an intern scandal. That's so last millennium.

On the other hand, so is John Kerry droning on about Vietnam at every campaign stop and traveling the country with his own personal VFW detail. This year more than ever, the lazy platitude is true: "This election is about the future."

Unfortunately, most politicians who say "this election is about the future" haven't given it a moment's thought. Say what you like about us right-wing warmongers, but after September 11 we abandoned our long-cherished theories of Realpolitik -- find your local strongman and shovel millions of dollars at him -- as inadequate, and indeed part of the problem. Sentimental liberal internationalism -- everything has to be done through the United Nations, no matter how stinkingly corrupt and ineffectual it is -- is just as inadequate to the challenges of the age.

Few are so in need of what Sam Goldwyn called "new cliches" as the Democratic Party. That's why it has wound up running on the twin planks of where John Kerry was in the late '60s and where George W Bush wasn't in the early '70s.

In 2002, the Democrats had no ideas and they ran on biography: In Missouri, Jean Carnahan was the brave widow of the late governor; in Georgia, Max Cleland was a Vietnam veteran and triple amputee; in Minnesota, Walter Mondale was the lion of the '84 campaign and a friend of Paul Wellstone. And in all three cases the public shrugged and voted Republican. These are serious times and they demand politicians rise to them.

Yet here we are two years later, and they're running on biography all over again. But this time their chosen biography is Vietnam, and for many Americans, and especially Boomer Democrats, that's far more psychologically complicated.