Abstract

HOW KERRY CAN WIN

The article looks at the 2004 United States presidential election between Democratic Senator John Kerry and President George W. Bush. John Kerry can win, given George W. Bush's incompetence, and White House strategists realize that. All the Democrats need to do is to peel away some of the Republican "unbase"--the most wobbly members of the Republican coalition. Deconstructing the Republican coalition is a good long-term bet, and could be done. The result, however, might be to uncage serious progressive reform. Issues such as campaign and election reform, opposition to the religious right, distaste for Washington lobbyists, opposition to upper-bracket tax biases and runaway deficits, criticism of corporations and chief executive officers, are salient today and more compatible with the mainstream moderate reformist Democratic viewpoint than with the lobbyist-driven Bush Administration. It is plausible to think that this will enable Kerry to draw a slightly improved vote among upper-middle-class and even fat-cat Republicans disenchanted with Bush as an incompetent cowboy who has bungled Iraq. In addition to adopting a bolder style, national Democrats also need to grasp former President Bill Clinton's role during the 1990s in aborting some national trends and stirring others that did his party considerable harm. Indeed, Clinton's moral notoriety was central to the rise of Bush at two junctures--Bush's initial election as governor of Texas in 1994, a year dominated by an anti-Clinton backlash, and the presidential race of 2000, in which regional disgust with Clinton was so strong that even Tennessee Southern Baptist Al Gore could not carry Arkansas and Tennessee against the religion-linked Bush campaign for moral restoration.