Yogi Berra was wrong: Even though it ain't over, it's over. Super Tuesday has met its Democratic Superman. John Kerry now enters Phase III of his four-phase campaign.
Phase I was: "I am just as antiwar as Howard Dean, despite my vote, and I'm just as incensed at Bush's unilateralism. But I'm not a nutty newcomer and I won't self-destruct."
This message, combined with Ted Kennedy's help and the inept anti-Dean military mount chosen by the Clintonites, propelled "the new Kerry" to front-runnership.
Phase II was to beat off the smooth spellbinder from the South who -- had just a few thousand Iowans switched -- would have taken the Big Mo into New Hampshire.
Kerry did it by again absorbing his main opponent's message. John Edwards was gaining populist support by riding the railings against free trade, picking up protectionist votes by spreading fear of wild Indians in global back rooms serving US stockbrokers.
But the Massachusetts senator, a lifelong free trader who had warmly embraced NAFTA, spun on a dime and denounced the "special interests" who were "outsourcing jobs" and "bilking our people." The strategy of the newest new Kerry culminated in Tuesday's coast-to-coast sweep. By stealing the trial lawyer's summation, he clinched the Democratic nomination.
Now come the harder parts. In Phase III -- in the nearly five months from now to his Boston acceptance -- Kerry must reach back and reveal the bedrock "old Kerry," before his tactical pre-emption of Dean's pacifism and Edwards's protectionism.
I remember conversations in Davos over the years with a serious, low-key senator whose thoughtful mien and earnest deliberation belied his down-the-line lefty voting record. I found Kerry to be a nice stiff, not a rigid stiff, who wears and worries well.
In the current phase, with the nomination in his pocket, he can stop emulating Dean's anger and copying Edwards's dual-Americanism. (Where will the Deaniacs and the trial lawyers go -- to Nader? No; they will swallow the old Kerry -- perhaps the real Kerry -- to beat Bush.)
That means he will have to cut the adopted negativist rhetoric of the early phases, like last week's "heartbreaking reminder of the millions of Americans without work" whose "mainstream values are scorned by a White House that puts privilege first."
Such red meat tastes great to the already convinced, but will come across as hot air to independents who decide close general elections -- a group where Kerry is weakest. Their eyeballs also roll heavenward when a politician who voted to welcome China into the WTO waggles a finger at election time to warn the Chinese leaders that "they will feel the full force of our trade laws" if they don't adjust the value of their currency.
Kerry began to back away from the protectionist pitch last week, when editorialists began to hold their noses at echoes of the Smoot-Hawley trade barriers that preceded the Depression. In Toledo, Ohio, after taking the usual pop at strawmen who say "everything will be fine if only we have more tax cuts for the wealthy," Kerry dared to add a shot at Edwards: "or if we cut off trade with the rest of the world."
Some of us hoped that he would get substantive at a nonstump speech at the UCLA Center for International Relations. But it was an unworthy hodgepodge; if Bush had given such a speech, it would have been widely panned as thin, political, gimmicky and naive.
Apparently Kerry's advisers are worried about a too timely capture of Osama bin Laden, thus: "This war isn't just a manhunt." He anticipates criticism for relying too much on the UN: "As president, I will not wait for a green light from abroad when our safety is at stake."
Phase III demands much more serious thinking, enabling voters to compare worldviews and economic plans. That will lay the basis for Phase IV: the September-October debates, and the candidates' reactions to crises and job trends. That will determine if Kerry's ideas are as relevant as those laid out in detail by Bush.
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