Kiss It, Kerry

All right. I’ve just about fucking had it with John Kerry:

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry roamed the stage in Baton Rouge, Louisiana's state capitol, raging about the failures of Washington…

In his attacks upon Washington, Mr. Kerry is adopting a puzzling strategy that could work for a governor but not for someone who is an entrenched member of the Washington elite. In Louisiana, the senator also repeated his disagreeable habit of pandering, telling his red state audience that Massachusetts Democrats should not install a plank endorsing gay marriage in the party's platform because it would be divisive. State Democrats should ignore that advice, and Mr. Kerry would have been wiser to point out that gay marriage has proved to be anything but divisive in Massachusetts.

(Hat tip Avedon, posting at Eschaton.)

One of the things that always struck me about John Kerry was that he is extremely, almost scarily, competitive, which, considering the rough and critically important race he was facing in ’04, I regarded as a good thing. The downside of such a borderline unhealthy competitiveness, however, is a thorough inability to lose gracefully and the tendency to blame. It was suggested to Kerry during the campaign by the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who still enjoys enviable approval ratings to this day, that supporting equal rights for gays—even civil unions—was a bad idea, that it might even cost him the election. To his credit, and much to my (and many others’) pleasant surprise, he rejected the notion, because he knew that equal rights are an integral and uncompromisable part of this country’s foundation.

But in the long view, I think Kerry needs someone to blame, and the seed that Clinton planted, combined with the ridiculous crowing about mandates given the president by the Dominionists, who voted on “moral values,” has grown into something quite ugly within our former candidate, its wretched blooms on display for all his former supporters to gaze upon with horror, each time he lashes out against a community we once admired him for supporting.

Those who suggest his position has not changed are mistaken; it has changed quite significantly. During the campaign, he supported civil unions at minimum and argued it should be left up to each state. Now he turns his back on Massachusetts’ support of gay marriage, ignoring the opportunity to use the success there to foster a greater understanding among those who turn up to hear him speak in other states.

If Kerry needs someone to blame other than himself, he should have taken the money he raised on behalf of the possibility of recounts to meticulously investigate the hundreds of accusations of voter fraud and intimidation associated with the ’04 election, instead of holding onto it with the notion of an ’08 run—a notion, I might add, that becomes ever more a preposterous pipe dream with each utterance about the divisiveness of gay marriage.