I took a job with John Kerry. Let’s get that fact out front, in the clear, etc, etc ... I’ll explain why I did it in a bit, but that’s not my main point here. My main point is this: when my wife and I were thinking about reasons why we should uproot our family, move it hundreds of miles, take our son out of school with only two months left in the school year, I thought of one blindingly obvious fact I’d never really noticed before.
We can be proud of the people we support as Democrats. It sounds sort of corny when spoken like that, but follow me below the fold, and you’ll see what I mean. When you put the recent history side by side, the difference between the two parties stands out in such stark contrast, I’m surprised I never noticed it before.
By the nature of the beast, a former two-term President is sort of a special animal. They reached the absolute pinnacle of power, were never told "no" by the voters, and move off into the sunset of enormous prestige and power. Corporate boards, hugely financed foundations, etc, etc ...
But the real rubber meets the road when it comes to people who face that exquisite pain: failure in the national one-on-one battle of a Presidential campaign. That’s when the true mettle of a man (and someday a woman) gets laid bare for all to see. He has to pick himself up, rethink his true priorities, and go out and try to do something about those priorities. And, let’s be blunt: the Democrats are just ... amazing. The Republicans ... not so much.
Let’s look at the ones most active in private life, the last two from each party. For the Democrats, you’ve got the tag team of Vietnam vets Al Gore and John Kerry. For the Republicans, the World War II tandem of George HW Bush and Bob Dole.
George HW Bush ... some high-profile fundraising with Bill Clinton, ok. But really, his life after the Presidency has been a bit short on public spirit and a bit long on influence peddling. Let’s take a quick quote from Wikipedia:
In 1998, Bush made a speech in Tokyo on behalf of Global Crossing, Ltd., a startup telecommunications company. Bush accepted shares of stock in the company in place of his normal $80,000 speaking fee. Global Crossing made a public offering a few months later. SEC records indicate that Bush sold the stock for $4,505,000 in two sales that occurred on November 16, 1999 and March 13, 2000[...]
He has given numerous speeches and participated in business ventures with the Carlyle Group, a private equity fund with close ties to the government of Saudi Arabia ... In January 2006, Bush wrote a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) of the People's Republic of China on behalf of the Carlyle Group. In the letter, Bush urged the Chinese government to approve an impending deal in which the Chinese government would sell 85% share ownership of the troubled Guangdong Development Bank to a consortium led by Citibank. In addition to praising Citibank and the other foreign member of the consortium, the Carlyle Group, Bush also intimated that a successful acquisition would be "beneficial to the comprehensive development of Sino-US relations."
How to use your position to advance the public good, there ...
The other man, Bob Dole, hasn’t quite had the same high-profile luster of business, uh, success, but he’s hardly set the world afire with his crusading spirit ... his own website lists a couple of high-profile charitable gigs with Bill Clinton (is that in the handbook for defeated GOP candidates?), and a bunch of run-of-the-mill political work and law firm stuff. He is now what he was then, a dealmaker and an insider fixer. Nothing outrageous like Bush, but really not a crusader for any causes. I mean It’s great that he’s now been tapped to fix the mess at Walter Reed, but where was he earlier? And the record of Commissions appointed by Bush ... well, let’s just say I’m on a wait-n-see mode there ...
Contrast that with the Democrats.
Al Gore, the victim of possibly the most crushing "defeat" of any Presidential candidate in history, is leading a global effort to get climate change on the front-burner of our political discourse. He’s given thousands of Power Point presentations (really Keynote presentations, but whatever ... ), starred in an Oscar-winning documentary, and built coalitions across business and media to further the cause. He has truly crusaded. He actually makes me personally proud of my vote in 2000.
And John Kerry ... this is where it gets personal, and I should explain why. I took a job heading up John Kerry’s Internet communications. I never expected to; I’m wildly idealistic, and I just didn’t expect an opportunity to present that matched my belief in coalition-building, collaborative media, environmental justice and climate change, and getting us the hell out of Iraq. And, I’ll be honest, I never really knew John Kerry in 2004. I voted for him, I worked for him, I was crushed for him ... but I didn’t really know him, so I never imagined he’d be the one to cause me to uproot my whole family.
I noticed him anew last year, when he first started to push to set a deadline on our troops getting out of Iraq. As the Hotline noted a couple of days ago, he was right then, and the rest of the caucus is on board now. I respected that work, I was glad he was making me proud of my support for him, but I didn’t know one crucial point: he really gets it. He is after systemic change, and, like Al Gore, he sees his position as an opportunity to enrich our country, not himself.
I found all this out talking to people on his team as I investigated what they were building, now what we are building. John Kerry gets the blogosphere and the netroots at a level I never really imagined before. For example, earlier this week, Jonathan Singer at MyDD reported that John Kerry told him that John McCain approached the Kerry folks in 2004 with interest in jumping ship on the GOP to be John Kerry’s running mate. That’s a bombshell, something another politician would probably save for a reward for a prominent journalist, or time it for maximum play in a major publication. But Kerry ... like I said, he gets it, and more than that, he values the blogs and the netroots. So, when a blogger brought up McCain, he gave him the straight scoop ... literally.
Kerry came into politics as an activist, after all, and, even after all these years, that’s where he returns. Like Al Gore returning to his greatest issue after his loss in the Supreme Court, John Kerry returns to his roots, his true passion: activism. He wrote a book about the new forms of environmental activism for global and local environmental issues, hoping to spur more of the same.
And he wants to build a new type of web presence for a figure in his position, open and collaborative. He wants to engage with the netroots (Teresa Heinz Kerry’s a particularly devoted blog reader, I hear) and empower activists. To use an overdone web cliché, he wants to help build Politics 2.0.
He wants to decentralize discourse and activism, build coalitions ... in short, he wants to use the web to contribute to building movements instead of building political careers. He’s doing what other Democrats (don’t forget Jimmy Carter) have done after their Presidential run: get back to the basics of what it means to them to be a public servant, and work for change.
Thinking through that with my wife, my idealism was stirred. I was, truly, inspired to act on my principles as a Democrat.
I signed up the next day.