The Gore-ing of John Kerry

The Globe, of course, is not alone in these sorts of attacks. Radio host Rush Limbaugh made it clear what he was trying to do when he recently said on his Web site that "Senator John Kerry has a bad case of the Algores." The alleged lie in this case was that Kerry told a group of parents and children who live in a polluted area in Massachusetts that "Until I went to Washington, I had never had asthma in my life," blaming pollution there for the condition. He later clarified that he infrequently uses an inhaler to treat springtime allergies. To most people, it may be obvious that Kerry's clarification simply explained the extent of his asthma. To Limbaugh, the asthma flap deserved the "did he or didn't he inhale?" treatment. "Kerry did what the press calls 'clarified his remarks,'" Limbaugh told his listeners. "That's what the press calls it when a Democrat admits he lied."

Another myth that has made the rounds about Kerry is that, while serving in Vietnam, he filmed himself in an attempt to exploit his military service for future political use. New York Times columnist Bill Keller repeated this lie last August, when he wrote that "with all due respect for [Kerry's Vietnam] exploit, how utterly weird is it that he then took out his handy 8-millimeter camera and re-enacted his heroism on film?" A month later, Keller apologized to his readers, admitting, "The first thing to be said is that the senator's movies are not self-aggrandizing. Kerry is hardly in the film, and never strikes so much as a heroic pose."

Keller's source for this mistake? None other than the "usually dependable Boston Globe," which, as Bob Somerby has pointed out, wrote in a 1996 profile of the senator: "The young man so unconscious of risk in the heat of battle, yet so focused on his future ambitions that he would reenact the moment for film. It is as if he had cast himself in the sequel to the experience of his hero, John F. Kennedy, on the PT-109."

Like much of the media dissembling that circulated about Gore in 2000, such as that he claimed to have discovered the pollution at Love Canal, it is disturbing not only that these myths circulate throughout the press, but, worse yet, that such falsehoods are used to reinforce the existing narrative of the candidate as a politically calculating liar.

These alleged lies touch on another favorite tactic in the Gore/Kerry story line: giving great weight to flimsy personal information. Gore, for instance, was frequently mocked for trying to appear more "authentic" when he began wearing more casual clothes on the stump. Kerry, meanwhile, has already, improbably, taken heat for the cost of his haircuts.

But it's worse than that. A story last June by Michael Crowley in the New Republic, headlined "Can John Kerry Make People Like Him?" was full of enough psychobabble to make the coverage of Gore's personal life seem hard-nosed. Crowley lets his readers know that Kerry "evinces a distinctly self-indulgent streak." The evidence? "Kerry speeds around on a motorcycle and a convertible. Rollerblades and wind surfs, and he plays classical pieces and Broadway show tunes on his guitar." Crowley writes, "[I]f the broad contours of Kerry's biography suggest vanity and opportunism, it's easy to find details that support that impression." Such as? Apparently, "during his famous anti-war testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, Kerry seemed to affect a Kennedy-esque accent," and "early in his career he had surgery on his chin -- a medical procedure, he said: gossip columns called it a cosmetic adjustment." Kerry-led investigations into the fate of POW-MIAs in Vietnam and the BCCI banking scandals were "showy," to Crowley. He then concludes by recounting a brief conversation he observed Kerry having with a black female conductor of a Capitol Building subway car. Some might see this as nothing more than a politician's penchant for being genial, but Crowley felt that Kerry "saw this cultural chasm as an opportunity to practice his charm skills."

To fully enter the woolly world of irrational Kerry rage, though, one has to read Slate blogger Mickey Kaus, who jokes that the Globe's piece on the senator's Jewish grandfather was really a plot hatched by Kerry -- "a convenient bit of de-aloofifying drama" -- and has run a "Kerry Mystery Contest" that asks, "Why is it that so many people, myself included, intensely dislike Sen. John Kerry?" Kaus' own clever reason: "the phony furrowed brow." Every aspiring Beltway smartass surely clucked along in appreciation.

Like all politicians, Kerry engages in his share of contradiction, truth stretching and opportunism. He should be nailed for it. But the creation of Kerry the Phony is a lazy conceit by journalists more interested in taking easy shots than raising real questions. It's much easier to find dark significance in rollerblading, chin surgery and conversations with subway conductors.

And the campaign shows no signs of abating. According to a report in the Capitol Hill newspaper the Hill, the Globe is currently working on a new investigation of the 1980s dating habits of Kerry, who separated from his first wife in 1982 and didn't remarry until 1995. Here's a wild guess: Whatever information the intrepid reporters find, it may very well illustrate some fundamental character flaws in the senator. Quite possibly, it will show that Kerry is "aloof," "self-indulgent," or maybe even a "phony."

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