[lbo-talk] Kerry: America First!

[Liza Featherstone]

Of course he is probably lying about being against gay marriage and for
civil unions - which is what he actually said- the likely truth is that he
really doesn't care about the difference, or doesn't want to get creamed by
the right over it. He voted against DOMA, and hardly anyone did that. Even
Paul Wellstone voted for DOMA. Then again, if Kerry was in some weird secret
way opposed to gay marriage and still voted against DOMA because, as he said
at the time, it was ugly hateful politics, that's actually pretty principled
and almost admirable. (Did Ralph Nader at some point say he was against gay
marriage, in the 1996 campaign, or am I scurrilously hallucinating??)

Kerry is a liberal. We'd like to live in a world where someone like him is a
conservative, but we don't. It's our job to make a world like that, and we
haven't succeeded yet. But that goal isn't really advanced by worrying over
the particular flaws of one liberal individual, and how he could be more
liberal -- nothing much is accomplished by individuals anyway. we need to
create the conditions under which someone better could become president, and
since we're currently failing to do that, we are so lucky he isn't a whole
lot worse! Someone like Kerry is as left as we're going to get from the DP
at this point in history, and I frankly am astounded that he is going to get
the DP nomination. 

Liza


> From: "Michael Dawson -PSU" <mdawson at pdx.edu>
> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Thu, 5 Feb 2004 10:40:59 -0800
> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Kerry: America First!
> 
>> Do you have any evidence of
>> Kerry's deep GOPness aside from a feeling?
>> 
>> Doug
> 
> It's mostly a gut reaction, I admit.
> 
> Analytically, I think he's basically Dukakis II, actually: shitty
> policies/staff preferences wrapped in a package tailor-made for the
> Republicans to club down.  On the outside, he's a Mass Lib.  On the inside,
> he's Bill Clinton -- a pathological liar and social climber living out a JFK
> fantasy.
> 
> About the lying part, does anybody really believe he's against gay marriage,
> as he says today?  That's bullshit -- and it's worse if it's true, of
> course.  But his willingness to lie about it rather than make a stand shows
> what he'd do to the masses, in the extremely remote event he wins the White
> House.
> 
> As to hard evidence, the fact that he's not being trashed by the DNC/DLC is
> pretty good.  I believe I also read that, as an undergraduate, he was a
> leader of a Yale movement to _oppose_ draft resistance.  And then there's
> Skull and Bones...
> 
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