A kinder, gentler election would be a first

Is John Kerry, the senator from Massachusetts who wants to oust President Bush from the White House, a liberal? And if so, what does that mean?

With the recent primary wins Kerry has racked up, the glee in the Bush campaign headquarters in Northern Virginia is so visible NASA probably thinks there's a new aurora borealis in the sky.

In 1988 former President George H.W. Bush, father of the current president, had no trouble trouncing the last "Massachusetts liberal" who wanted the nation's top job. Michael Dukakis, governor of the Bay State, was sliced, diced and pulverized by the Bush machine as a "card-carrying member" of the American Civil Liberties Union, as the weak-on-crime politician who pardoned convicted murderer Willie Horton, as a detractor of the Pledge of Allegiance.

To listen to Dukakis, Bush was a conservative Neanderthal in thrall to the rich whose pledge of a "kinder, gentler" nation was a mockery. To listen to Bush, Dukakis was a scary creature from another planet where values were a dirty word. Both were outlandishly wrong but the Dukakis campaign was so bad and the credit card economy so ascendant that victory was in the stars for Bush.

Will 2004 be a repeat of 1988 if Kerry gets the Democratic nomination?

No. If we are to see a Bush-Kerry match-up, it will be a close race, possibly nearly as tight as it was in 2000, although nobody wants an outcome like that again. One thing different is that 9/11 shook the nation to its core, and the fallout is still uncertain. But some of the same issues and tactics are certain to emerge. Class warfare, values (the pledge, abortion, gay marriage, the right of half-naked women to be seen on prime-time TV, the teaching of sexual abstinence in schools), the loss of jobs, the use of U.S. military power abroad, the state of America's education system and 44 million people without health insurance will be central to the debate. And the tactics will be that anything goes.

Just as Dukakis was not as liberal as he was portrayed, Kerry's extensive record shows that he is liberal but not as liberal as Republicans, who like making liberal a dirty word, will make him seem to be. That's why Howard Dean infuriated the Kerry camp by calling him a virtual Republican.

Kerry voted with the president to create the Department of Homeland Security, to authorize the use of force in Iraq, to give Bush trade promotion authority, to bar cooperation with the International Court. He is not as liberal as his Democratic colleague from Massachusetts, Sen. Ted Kennedy.