{"id":1854,"date":"2004-03-07T17:29:47","date_gmt":"2004-03-07T22:29:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/07\/1854.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:45:23","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:45:23","slug":"more-on-senator-kerry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/03\/07\/more-on-senator-kerry\/","title":{"rendered":"More on Senator Kerry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well, and Your Humble Blogger has been asked about his lukewarm feeling for John Kerry<\/a>. I haven’t gone into detail, partially because I find it depressing to talk about what I dislike about the man I will vote for in November. I would rather spend time thinking about what I like about him. For the record, though, I have found, in the past, that he tends to make decisions based on politics, rather than principle, which is actually not something that bothers me greatly (as a Madisonian), but then he seems to have bad political instincts, which means that his decision-making is highly suspect.\n

Laura Blumenfeld, in the Washington Post, writes a fascinating article<\/a> which may well make me rethink that criticism. In short, I interpret the article to mean that Sen. Kerry makes decisions while keeping in mind the complexity of the issues. That means that he doesn’t stand on principle, nor does he totally follow political instinct, but tries each time to come to the best decision, based on the facts, in consultation with experts. That’s very difficult to do, and if that’s an accurate description, explains in large measure why he wasn’t a very effective legislator.\n

I was particularly taken with the point that, when diagnosed with prostate cancer, he asked Rudy Giuliani and Bob Dole for advice; that is the sort of collegiality that I like to see between parties. One of the my particular complaints about Our Current President is that he doesn’t seem to seek advice outside his Inner Circle; the secrecy that circle appears to like exacerbates its insularity, and their venal cronyism takes advantage of both. I would not expect a John Kerry administration to suffer from that.\n

So, do I think John Kerry would make a good President? Well, like any candidate, he has strengths and weaknesses, and much depends on whether circumstance plays to one or the other. Judging from Ms. Blumenfeld’s article, however, is seems that John Kerry’s strengths may be just the strengths we need at the moment: a tendency to listen to different voices, an appreciation for complexity, and foreign policy expertise, all together with being generally on the good guys’ side.\n

A side note: Deliberativeness (is that even a word?) is not the sort of thing I look for in a Leader of Men. That is, I expect Leaders to be out in front, and he who hesitates is last. On the other hand, I think the habit of deliberation is a good thing for someone with lots of responsibility, as for instance the leader of the Free World. Deliberativeness isn’t inspiring. It has no Elvis. But the job of President is half Elvis and half administrator, and Elvis was no administrator. It’s possible that John Kerry is the most deliberative man we can imagine becoming President in the near future; one of the problems with Madisonian government is that it does not encourage the long view.\n

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, and Your Humble Blogger has been asked about his lukewarm feeling for John Kerry. I haven\u2019t gone into detail, partially because I find it depressing to talk about what I dislike about the man I will vote for in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1854"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16944,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1854\/revisions\/16944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}