Why John Kerry Cannot Make Up His Mind
By Byron Matthews

When he defended his vote against funding the ongoing war in Iraq by pointing out that "I voted for it, before I voted against it," John Kerry did more than supply the epitaph for his 2004 campaign. He also gave rise to a journalistic cottage industry devoted to exploring the depths of John Kerry’s mind to discover just why he has so much trouble making it up. As the results of these investigations begin to be reported (e.g., Philip Gourevitch’s recent New Yorker profile of Kerry), we now see that the mind of John Kerry is actually a treasure trove of impressive mental proficiencies and capacities, including a rare subtlety of thought, an ability to perceive every shade of gray, logic trees grown thick with branches, a recognition of the world’s conditional and subjunctive nature, and so on and so forth.

Even at the risk of appearing ungenerous, it is hard not to suspect that if George Bush were as agonized and erratic as Kerry in formulating and stating his positions, the preferred explanations might involve more speculation about possible information processing deficits, a disappearingly narrow attention span, a mollusk-like absence of curiosity about the world, and above all the simple baffled bewilderment of a man who is in way over his head. In any case, explanations like those have not been allowed to go to waste, being commonly invoked to suggest that in Bush’s case, decisiveness may be a sign of cognitive limitation.

John Kerry’s supporters like to portray their candidate as an authentic intellectual, an attribution that suggests a generic defense for his difficulties with taking a position and sticking to it. Simply stated, intellectuals by their nature are prone to serial infatuation with ideas and, being more attuned than the rest of us to the latest currents of thought, intellectuals should be expected to more often change their positions on all kinds of things, sometimes dramatically. At best a valuable and adaptive flexibility, at worst an endearing foible, this intellectual nimbleness is something that comes with the rarefied territory, a necessary part of the package that delivers the superior leadership an intellectual can provide in the longer run.

Unfortunately for that line of argument, the essential defining characteristic of intellectuals is that they are captivated by ideas as ideas, but there is scant indication that John Kerry is an intellectual in that sense. Kerry’s commitment to an idea seems always proportional to the political opportunity that attaches to the idea, not to the quality of the idea itself. For him, the attractiveness of an idea is a matter of its usefulness, and its usefulness is a matter of its political appeal. Unlike an authentic intellectual, Kerry is captivated by an idea only as long as it continues to captivate others.

This helps account for Kerry's difficulty in sticking to a position, and for his frequent
inability to formulate any clear position at all. Kerry’s problem is that today’s most useful position may not remain so tomorrow, especially for a different audience. Settling on a stable overall position, precisely what’s required in a national campaign, thus becomes a perplexing and perilous task. When voting both For and Against turned out to be a seriously inadequate approach to the problem, Kerry apparently decided to retreat from the Senate chamber altogether for the duration of the campaign.

In fact, we may see here one key to understanding Kerry's lackluster record in the Senate, where he has rarely sponsored important national legislation. The problem is that Kerry’s opportunistic approach to issues makes sustained leadership on any controversial legislative goal extremely difficult. It is true that Kerry has maintained a consistent position on certain issues, such as his steadfast opposition to new weapons systems throughout the 1990s. But examples like that merely reflect his solidly reliable left-liberal constituent base, and they show Kerry acting as a follower, not as a leader.

Most important, we can now begin to account for Kerry’s puzzling inability to provide analytically based policy proposals, proposals derived from the application of general principles to a specific problem. For example, it might seem inexplicable that Kerry, at this late date, remains somehow unable to describe and defend any long-term strategy for dealing with the root causes of terrorism. But Kerry does not choose among ideas by analyzing issues; instead, he selects his ideas by analyzing sentiments. So far, Kerry apparently sees no net gain in committing to a strategic vision for the long-term future of the Islamic world, so he does not offer one. This is likely to remain the case as long as tropes like "rebuilding alliances" and "not going it alone" continue to elicit sufficient approval from his audiences.

The behavior that Kerry's supporters are eager to credit as reflecting an intellectual’s appreciation of nuance and complexity is really nothing more than temporizing through purposeful ambiguity and tactical equivocation. Kerry’s instinct is never to take a position until it seems clear where the maximum political payoff lies, meanwhile enveloping his followers in a platitudinous fog, as in his Boston acceptance speech. But in a national political campaign Kerry eventually will have to commit to clear overall positions on key issues. He will also be required to argue for analytically based proposals for dealing with particular problems, and to maintain some commitment to the underlying analyses. These are daunting tasks for Kerry because they require him to set aside his long-standing and by now reflexive tendency toward continuous political re-calculation. John Kerry will prove to be a poor national candidate for reasons inherent in the way he evaluates issues and formulates his responses to them. He would be an unsuccessful President for the same reasons.

Byron Matthews, a sociologist retired from the University of Maryland Baltimore County and a partner in an educational software company, lives near Santa Fe, NM.