Why my acquaintance John Kerry can lose

W. Scott Thompson, Gianyar, Bali

He's smart and good-looking. He's both a patrician, Jewish, and Irish, oxymoronic in American establishment circles. He's rich, my he is rich! -- if you include his wife's billion, they would be by ten times the richest presidential couple in American history.

He hasn't enunciated any particularly novel proposals in foreign policy -- certainly none affecting us in Asia -- but if only because he would sweep the White House clean of its scalawags, he would stop the rot. He may claim to have only trivial differences with Bush on Iraq; but everyone knows he is a multilateralist and would never have gone almost alone into the present war, as the neoconservatives surrounding Bush demanded. Economic policy would go back to fundamentals, and at the least, huge handouts to the rich would end.

Yet even with the polls showing a tight race, most pros, including those around Kerry, seem still to believe that Bush will win. There are at least four basic reasons among those commonly given, the last two having directly to do with Kerry himself.

The first is that Americans rally to a war president, and for better or worse we are at war. Sensible people believe that Osama bin Laden, no fool, on the sound Leninist precept "the worse the better", must surely prefer Bush and could hand him a second term with a large attack in October. Anyway, if Osama doesn't, the more paranoid are confident, Vice President Dick Cheney will arrange it for him.

The second argument is that Bush, with his pick-up truck and folksy tone, is more keyed to middle America, where the votes are. In the end, when people go into the counting house, as opposed to speaking to the pollsters, they vote their comfort level. Bush policies have deeply divided the country's elites, but the "great unwashed" in pivotal states no doubt in their hearts feel more at home with him.

The third factor is the sense of unease with Kerry himself. There are several dimensions to this. I have to confess that for a decade I knew him and his first wife fairly well, living in the same suburb of Boston, taking our children to the same schools.

Although no doubt I too shall vote for him, it will be with misgivings. Politicians are opportunistic by trade, but Kerry is that by temperament. Our Irish maids wouldn't work when he came to the house, for they felt he had pandered excessively to the black voters, who in their view had destroyed their communities. Admiral Zumwalt, then the chief of the American navy, while our guest refused even to shake hands with Kerry, later explaining that Kerry's behavior in Vietnam -- where Zumwalt at that time had been commander -- was so execrable. Everyone seems to have a complaint about Kerry's excess of opportunism.

There is the corollary issue of whether his wife is an asset or a debit to the campaign. At a Washington dinner party, a prominent Kerry supporter and friend commented that "that is the question that always arises in a couple where one is strong...and one is weak." Everyone at the table knew who the "weak" one was. Opportunistic...and weak. It doesn't play.

Finally, there remains the shadow of an "October surprise." Obviously the first republican salvo struck Kerry at his supposed strongest -- his fighting record. Whence the thinly veiled group formed to attack Kerry's Vietnam record ("Swift boat Veterans for truth") , which at the very least has prevented the Kerry campaign from surfing on his "take-charge" image -- and getting a free ride on his battle decorations. And I suspect that a second salvo is being thrust down into the guns.

In the 1980s, Julia, the first Mrs. Kerry, sent as a birthday present a stack of memo pads with my name and address. But in the background was musical notation. And in thoughtful recognition of my operatic interests, she had sent pads that had the splendid and amusing aria from Don Giovanni where the valet Leporello lists the don's conquests: 1003 in Spain, for example. A rather unsubtle message. In these days, there may be more tolerance for such behavior. But not in the Bible Belt. Brace yourself for innuendo backed with testimonials that John Kerry has been worse than just a bad boy while serving in high places. How Karl Rove and other Bush advisers plan to bring this off this remains to be seen. But no one in Washington will be surprised.

So John Kerry is riding as high as he is more out of disquiet with Bush than from any enthusiasm for him personally, or for his policies (or lack thereof). I recall running into Lt. Gov. Kerry in Washington, in the 1980s, when I was serving in a sub-cabinet position in the Reagan administration. We shook hands and then he said, warmly, "let's have lunch," gripping my shoulder, and while raking the room over my other shoulder for anyone more important. He had not looked me in the eye. If he becomes president, whom will he be looking over people's shoulders to find? That is the quandary most people find themselves in as they contemplate making him the most powerful man in the world.

Dr. W. Scott Thompson, D. Phil. is Adjunct Professor of International Politics, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, Medford, MA. The views expressed are personal.