[Notice: Starting with today’s Weekly OpEd, all subsequent postings on this site, including all NBNs, will be based upon themes in the Seminar]

 

WSJ columnist Daniel Henninger concludes his first post-election commentary this way: “There is no hope that the Vietnam generation braintrust who just lost this election will ever understand Red [states] America. Until someone in the party recognizes this, the tides of demography will inexorably erode the blue islands that remain on the map.” In sum, this explains the essay’s heading why the “Blue Democrats Lost Red America Back in 1965.”

 

Mr. Henninger builds his theme starting with how the Democrats of the Viet Nam era now running the Party, and having “transformed the world view of the Democrats” before them, effected a cultural change. It included a “greening of America” kind of politics that stressed public emotion and “a culture of non-restraint.” For example, “Whoopie Goldberg’s” exhibitionism on stage that Mr. Kerry called the “heart” of America. The Viet Nam generation also  made “the military…a focus.” The ROTC is still denied a presence at elite universities. The reader waits to see how Kerry fits in, and naturally supposes the candidate must be somehow at the head of all of this. It all sounds about right.

 

But the reader who expects things to flow this way is not current in the Journal’s view of Mr. Kerry or the American electorate. The expectation –that Mr. Henninger is about to underscore his point by a reference to the ex-candidate’s own “greenings” by showing why the Party ran the former leader of the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War for President of the United States in the midst of another war –is misplaced.

 

Instead of reaching the anticipated climax implicit in showing “Red America Back in 1965” Mr. Henninger writes this:

 

“John Kerry tried to use his service biography to erase the Vietnam-era legacy of Democratic opposition to things military. It didn’t work.”

 

This most astonishing sentence prompts two responses, which are trivial because obvious; and a third response which isn’t trivial at all but obvious enough to be the main point about this election.  And yet because the Journal has effectively downplayed or trivialized this obvious point which is the main point, that Mr. Kerry used his Viet Nam biography not to erase the Party’s opposition to things military but to make “opposition to things military” the cornerstone of mainstream politics in America, Mr. Henninger’s version of the election is better understood as the Journal’s version Mr. Kerry’s patriotic attempt to save the Democrats.

 

The first obvious but trivial response to Mr. Henninger’s astonishing sentence is it is impossible to believe that anyone, friend or foe of the Democrat candidate, thinks Kerry used his “service biography” in Viet Nam because he wanted to “erase the Vietnam-era legacy of Democratic opposition to things military.”  Who would not understand immediately what Tom Sowell means by headlining his piece in the Washington Times yesterday–“A Narrow Escape”?

 

We were on the verge of the disaster, long awaited and feared not of an election cycle only. What Dan Henninger and the WSJ say (and suppose first emerged in the 1960s) was about to become the national basis.  What we “escaped” was an installation in the White House of a revolutionary “principle” rooted in “impulses” much closer to our Muslim terrorist enemy’s than any American principle or impulse. 

 

But then the second reason anyone might accept the proposition that Senator Kerry was trying to lead the Democrat Party away from its anti-war viewpoint, actually its core, is the Journal’s own editorial commentary,  as well as its news stories (see IASPS Weekly OpEd of 10. 13. 04). The Journal has taken pains to give the impression that Democrats and their candidate do not represent anything more than a “business as usual”  turn in the electoral cycle. For example, the media’s casting to the winds of all pretence to civilized coverage of events is an excess to be corrected. But perhaps this “non-restraint” was a notching up. Like the nomination of a recklessly ambitious man was a notching up for who could have supposed anyone could prevent public consideration of what Kerry actually did in 1970-1972?

 

Did America have a “narrow escape” or is it wiser to think Kerry's narrow defeat is a breather and no solid "escape" at all?

 

But Dan Henninger (who, struck to the core by 9/11, is one of the best) sees this Elite "11/2/04" assault as leaving everything in place. We're not near any "ground zero" in his eyes or in those of WSJ. In “Review and Outlook” on election day the editors said Mr. Kerry “is not a radical.” He professes nothing more that the Party’s  “persuasion.” He is “remarkably faithful to his party’s core principles and animating impulses.” [stress added] And as the Journal also maintains “America isn’t as deeply split as its elites seem to think…” we can rest assured that the Democrats’ core principles and animating impulses do not threaten more than what we saw under Clinton if a little more to the Left.  

 

And so the third point, the one that is obvious but trivialized by the Journal, now ultimately in the astonishing claim that “John Kerry tried to use his service biography to erase the Vietnam-era legacy of Democratic opposition to things military” is Not that “It didn’t work.”  The campaign, from the point of Gore’s horrifying behavior in Florida right up to this post-election day essay by Mr. Henninger worked. The “anti-War position” is institutionalized, extending all the way to literal treason. A man who has committed treason is electable to the office of President of the United States. The media (we say nothing of the universities, many of the professions and others who comprise the Elites) will support such a candidate, including; well, including anything.

 

Mr. Kerry was able to use his service biography to erase the facts that count with respect to it. Far from this biography being disclosed by the media or by the Republicans, or even by the “bloggers” (who, for all their chatter on the subject of Kerry’s medals or regarding the Swift Boat Veterans efforts to expose him, missed the point at issue), it was this biography that was erased –and is still unknown.

 

The media leader who spoke boldly –a Newsweek executive—of giving Kerry “15” points, in the end 15 points on 48 really “said it all.” That is all but another 15 points. If the Kerry voters had the information on candidate Kerry he would not have received 33% of the vote. He would not have received 18% of it.

 

It’s an interesting subject and problem is it not?

 

by R. J. Loewenberg

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