Can John Kerry end the curse of the Massachusetts liberal? Our Harvard columnist thinks he can
David Y. Lee for Newsweek
Beccah Golubock Watson thinks the 'liberal label' won't stick to John Kerry
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Beccah Golubock Watson
Newsweek
Feb. 21 - Most liberal Harvard undergrads are too young to remember the "Dukakis Debacle," in which George H.W. Bush and the Republican imperial guard hung paroled rapist Willie Horton around Michael Dukakis's neck. To us, Massachusetts’ lone support for South Dakota native George McGovern’s 1972 presidential bid is only a line in the history textbooks: "Massachusetts: one. America: zero."
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But we are familiar with another old Massachusetts story, the "Curse of the Bambino," born when the Red Sox made the devastating choice to sell Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920. Prior to the infamous trade, the Sox were baseball's golden team—winning more World Series than any other ball club. But after the "Bambino" left, Red Sox luck ran out—for good. In the four World Series they have appeared in since 1918, the Sox have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by losing in Game Seven every time. Ruth, who never won a championship before the sell, went on to a legendary career in New York while Sox fans are left with a history of losing, passed on from generation to generation.
This election year, the question that dogs left-leaning Harvard students is this: Does the Curse of the Bambino extend to politics? Even though we didn’t witness Dukakis’ dimwittedness and McGovern’s washout, we still shiver when we hear the phrase "Massachusetts liberal" thrown at John Kerry, the latest Massachusetts pol to make a play for the White House. The label brings to mind images of inarticulate hippies, hearts on their anti-war T-shirt sleeves, throwing pragmatism to the wind—images, in other words, we would like to forget. If John Kerry is the latest Boston Birkenstocker, as the advisers who put Bush in a flight suit might like us to believe, will he join Dukakis and McGovern in a Massachusetts-based defeat?
Not necessarily. The Bushies could have a harder time making Kerry over as a latter day Dukakis than they think. Sure, Kerry may have dovish roots and the heart of a Sox fan. But good luck dressing him up in psychedelic makeover beads. Nick Smyth, president of Harvard of Students for Kerry, bristles at the “Massachusetts liberal” label. "You can't pigeon-hole Kerry like that,” Smyth says. “He's an independent-minded, progressive and a very thoughtful leader." Pointing to the senator’s penchant for hunting and his career as Middlesex County District Attorney "putting criminals in jail for life,” Smyth says Kerry can almost look conservative at times.
In fact, Kerry's stances run across the ideological mill, a fact that his Republican opponents will no doubt try to exploit. But the senator's ideological complexity could have more to do with New England tradition than it does with political waffling. Harvard students who have visited Walden Pond, or walked past the site of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s old house in Harvard Square (now a branch of Tower Records), recognize that Massachusetts is where common sense and progressive ideas, the bedrock of American liberalism, all began. John F. Kennedy, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Elliot Richardson—all sons of this commonwealth and this college—were public servants who stood for human dignity and equality above partisan politics. In this election, of course, those men would probably be derided as hapless patricians who couldn’t hold their beer. Still, they would no doubt find some nobility in Kerry's refusal to be pinned down.
Of course, John Kerry, does look like a radical leftist when compared to President George W. Bush. From the ballooning $500 billion budget deficit (which doesn’t include, of course, ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan) to hints that he’ll support a constitutional ban on gay marriage, this president has proven he has little interest in moderation of any kind. Truly dangerous is Bush’s fixation with eliminating the estate tax and his proposed adventures to Mars. Where is the radicalism really coming from, the junior senator from Massachusetts, or the White House?
It’s true that some parts of Kerry's history are radical. A 1970 interview with the Harvard Crimson reveals a Vietnam-embattled Kerry who wanted to virtually "eliminate CIA activity," and favored less U.S. unilateralism: "I’d like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations," he said at the time. Harvard Democrats who read the recent press on the 1970 Kerry interview were a little bit squeamish. Here were the makings of a "Massachusetts liberal" smear campaign, produced by our own campus newspaper no less.
But at least Kerry, the decorated veteran, was thinking about international relations back then. The president certainly didn't have such noble causes on his mind Two years after Kerry’s Crimson interview, the President was kicking up his playboy heels down in Alabama, possibly shirking National Guard duty and flirting with the "Blount Belles," women who worked with Bush on Wynton Blount’s segregationist Senate campaign. U.S. interaction with the international community was clearly the last thing on Bush’s mind. Kerry has since become more moderate on foreign policy issues, but Bush still doesn’t seem to know what "international community" means.
So while the Curse of the Bambino lives on in Massachusetts, the curse of Massachusetts liberalism may be coming to an end. Kerry can weather the smear campaigns that have sunk other Bay State pols because, for better or worse, he’s too straight and narrow to be made over as a poster child of the radical Left. Take it from someone who knows plenty of real Massachusetts liberals: Kerry’s centrism is as solid as Plymouth Rock.
Watson is a senior at Harvard College. She is one of five college journalists writing periodically about Campaign 2004 for NEWSWEEK and NEWSWEEK.COM
