Learning to Love John Forbes Kerry

July 14, 2004

Imagine there is only one boy in your entire high school class. He is shorter than you, with weird hair and thick, grimy glasses, but you know you’ll fall for him, regardless. You’ll start to see charm where at first you sensed witlessness. Gradually, his rumpled face becomes cuddly. And those glasses? The better to admire you with.

Now, unlike our sorry schoolboy, John Kerry has height, and more than his share of hauteur, but that doesn’t make him a catch. For those of us who want to see Bush run out of town, Kerry is the frog who will, who must, sooner or later, morph into Prince Charming. We’re stuck with him, so we might as well make the best of it.

But Kerry’s no more like John F. Kennedy than Dan Quayle ever was. And to make matters worse, there were other boys in the class right from the very beginning. Some of them were kind of cute. Howard Dean rolled up those sleeves with red-faced vigor. Got your blood pumping. And Kerry? He was a could-have-been, who kept thinking he still had a future. Embarrassing. All that earnest striving, and still nobody wanted him.

That was then. Now, we’re in a forced marriage with a guy we didn’t much notice in the first few rounds. But the powers-that-be in the Democratic Party didn’t think Dean could play well with others. They feared he’d rip the canvas in his efforts to squeeze a whole herd of reckless new voters into the big white tent.

J. Dayne Lamb is one former Dean supporter who has still not quite recovered from the blow. Like me, she lives on Beacon Hill in Boston, a few short cobblestoned blocks from the mortgaged townhouse owned by the Democratic nominee. That doesn’t make her a fan.

“For Kerry to really win, he’s going to have to speak from some part of his heart that makes us believe him and like him, and I think he’s not likeable, and that’s a huge problem,” Lamb said. “Kerry has been too clever by half all along his political career, and it easily could hurt him badly.”

Many of us in the neighborhood have never much liked Kerry, and are now hard pressed to pretend to see some good in him. For one thing, he’s never around. I’ve seen him only once in the four years I’ve lived here, and that was when I ventured into Savenor’s, the most expensive little grocery store on earth, located on our main street. There he was, the whole length of him, in his dark blue pinstripe suit. And yes, he did look “presidential”—regal even. But so what?

Lamb wasn’t the only Beacon Hiller to cast a primary vote elsewhere. John Sears, a Boston Brahmin and distant relative of Kerry’s (through Kerry’s great grandmother, the blue-blooded Margaret Winthrop) compares the two presidential candidates to Spirit and Opportunity, the rovers crawling around Mars.

“Bush is all spirit and John is all opportunity. He over the years developed—the press calls it aloofness—there was a bad habit of looking over his shoulder to be sure there wasn’t somebody more important coming along,” Sears explained. “John is always tuned to opportunity. There has been the sense at times that he has sculptured his life, perhaps even his chin. It’s not quite the same face.”

What’s there to love? How can we rustle up the genuine support necessary to ensure Kerry a victory? Rallying around the flag may be the choice of right-wingers who would rather not ask the tough questions, but for the rest of us who want the Bushmen out, it’s now our job to rally ’round Kerry.

It’s not so easy to fake enthusiasm for the man, but we have no choice. We must start to find in his pompousness a kind of polish, in his aching desire to be president a symptom of good, healthy, sublimated masculine drive. Never mind that he is a self-serving strategist, whose basic character and convictions are impossible to detect.

We may not care for Bush’s ideology, but at least we know what he wants. Kerry, the eternal calculator, seems inauthentic by comparison.

But that’s just too bad. He’s the bridegroom and we’re the bride, and we’d better smile for the photographs. And so here we are, with our “French looking” frog, waiting for the moment of transformation. But as far as I can tell, he’s still croaking.

Jenny Attiiyeh will cover the Democratic Convention from Boston for Horse Fly.