Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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Rep. Dennis Kucinich endorses Kerry in Detroit, July 22, 2004.

The next move for Kerry's campaign is clear. With his southern running mate secured and left wing of the Democratic party satisfied by Michael Moore movies and comparisons of Jeb Bush to Osama bin Laden, it's time to tack to the center and show how "moderate" he is.

Several columnists and bloggers have signed on for this mission. The problem is that Kerry doesn't have the record of a centrist.

Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly dismisses the Senate rankings, suggesting that "a longer look shows that Kerry is liberal, but hardly a Paul Wellstone liberal, and Edwards is smack in the middle of the Democratic pack."

Nonsense, points out blogger and law professor Stephen Bainbridge. He pulls the Americans for Democratic Action's ratings, and finds Kerry has a lifetime rating of 92; Wellstone has a 99. Edwards has an 81. From 1990 to 2000, neither Kerry nor Wellstone had a rating lower than 90.

Back on June 25, the New York Times contended, "Kerry's Campaign Theme Is Leaning Toward Center":

Like any nominee moving toward a general election, Mr. Kerry is increasingly reaching out to voters in the middle. He also increasingly talks about values. Attacking Mr. Bush's budget, Mr. Kerry said last week: "Scripture tells you where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Let me tell you where my heart is. My heart is with the working families, who built this country."

But even as he moves his appeal to the center...

Wait, that's "reaching to voters in the middle"? Only at the New York Times could a Democrat accuse a Republican of abandoning working families, a charge that voters have heard every election since FDR, and have the move described as "moving his appeal to the center."

Peter Canellos of the Boston Globe scraped the bottom of the evidence barrel last week to make the case that Kerry isn't a down-the-line liberal. The usually smart Canellos (who edited some of my articles in the Boston Globe earlier in my career) suggested Kerry would have chosen the conservative path on the votes that he missed and cited facial expressions as evidence of Kerry's centrism.

He said Kerry's most-liberal-record-in-the-Senate National Journal rating has been misconstrued, because the magazine "rates senators in three major areas — economic policy, foreign policy, and social policy — but only if they voted on more than half the issues. Kerry spent most of 2003 on the campaign trail and amassed only enough votes to be assessed on economics. He wasn't even rated on foreign or social issues."

Yeah, but the bills that Kerry did return to the Senate to vote for obviously were high priorities or symbolically important to him, because he concluded they justified interrupting his campaign.

Fourteen of the 15 votes on social issues involved abortion or Bush's judges. There's no way John Kerry would have voted conservative on these bills, despite what he says today about believing life begins at conception.

Of the foreign-policy votes, Kerry missed two votes on a requirement that portions of aid to other nations for HIV/AIDS prevention be used for abstinence programs; three votes on nuclear bunker-buster weapons; a proposal to bar the enforcement of the ban on U.S. citizens traveling to Cuba, and a proposal to reduce reconstruction aid to Iraq by $5 billion. Does anyone imagine John Kerry would vote for the conservative position on any of these?

Canellos points to John Kerry's speech criticizing affirmative action in 1992. He notes, "after days of rebukes up in Boston, Kerry didn't back down, but applied so many layers of conciliatory clothing to his remarks that any sharp edges got covered." Actually, it's hard for him to back down when he never stood up that much to begin with. Kerry never introduced any legislation to change affirmative action, and by 2003 he had creatively reinterpreted his speech to be a "standing up for affirmative action." He has always voted to preserve quotas.

Then Canellos adds, "Whether joining with Republicans to promote a budget-cutting plan or staring with incredulousness at a roomful of Boston reporters who questioned why he believed openly gay soldiers would harm the morale of the military, Kerry never seemed so happy as when challenging his hometown ideology."

"Budget cutting"? Is this referring to Kerry's early support of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget-balancing law? Come on, if that one vote makes you a moderate, then Edward Kennedy is a moderate, too. Besides, in 1986, Kerry told about a dozen Massachusetts mayors "he voted for the Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction bill to force the Reagan administration to cut defense spending."

And it's interesting that the strongest evidence of Kerry's defiance of his party's orthodoxy on gays in the military is his incredulous stare (Canellos tries it) that won't show up on transcripts. (There's a slogan: "John Kerry: Liberal Votes, but Conservative Facial Expressions") Today the candidate's website says, "John Kerry opposed the Clinton Administration's 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell Policy.' He was one of a few senators to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee and call on the President to rescind the ban on gay and lesbian service members."

Canellos continues, "Likewise, his efforts to expose the Reagan administration's "secret wars" in Central America — portrayed by Republicans as softness on Communism — were more an expression of his prosecutor's zeal to uncover lies and inconsistencies."

Oh, come on. Almost all of Kerry's investigations targeted a Republican administration with a sympathetic media at his back. He investigated LBJ's Defense secretary Clark Clifford for a while, but then backed down"pulling his punches and allowing the elderly statesman to claim a loss of memory", according to the Globe. Exactly how many "lies and inconsistencies" did Kerry target during the Clinton era? Take any topic. The decision to not send armor to Somalia. The messy-war-from-high-altitude strategy in Kosovo. The bombing of the Sudanese aspirin factory.

Canellos comes to a less-than-complimentary conclusion about the Democratic candidate: "Kerry is neither a liberal dragon nor a liberal angel. He's no liberal at all. His dry husk of an agenda is all process and few goals."

Perhaps Kerry is far from the idealistic crusader that true-blue liberals would prefer. But that doesn't mean he's got a record that classifies him as a moderate.