2008 Woodie Awards
Building upon others’ reflections on TNR in the Foer era, I’m compelled to rethink in that spirit, slightly, that painful subject of why John Kerry lost. Here’s my crack theory. One meme that you saw endlessly repeated during the campaign by the right-wing was that he was a “Massachusetts liberal,” which made him utterly out of touch with the realities in the rest of the country. But shouldn’t the Democratic Party have realized that Kerry would be charged as such beforehand? Part of the Kerry campaign’s strategy was to associate the candidate’s Massachusetts origins with the American Revolution, specifically the patriots at Lexington and Concord. This was an interesting strategy, but it backfired because the Kerry campaign overestimated the endurance of the mythological dimensions of the American Revolution in the modern American psyche. Had the Democratic Party read the historical psychology of the voting public accurately vis-à-vis the impact of a candidate’s geographical origin on his viability (an underlying determining factor in the race), I claim, they wouldn’t have run Kerry at all, or at least not talked up his geographical connection to the Revolution.
Why? Because while the campaign was right to assume that the ‘myth of the Revolution’ is indeed an enduring myth in American cultural psychology, they forgot that the ‘myth of the War of 1812 and its aftermath’ is a much more enduring one even if nobody ever talks about it. A much greater one is the ‘myth of the War of 1812 and its aftermath.’ This is my unlikely theory, so don’t put too much stock in it.
Brief context: at this point in our new nation’s history, Massachusetts was the true Federalist stronghold. At the end of the War of 1812, New England Federalists pow-wowed at Hartford, Connecticut to debate whether to try to separate from the union or make a separate peace with Britain. They didn’t, but the Hartford Federalists were roundly condemned as traitors. Thomas Jefferson was worried that if another war started, the Federalists would seek out foreign support, and Republicans in general ended up invoking the Hartford meeting as symbolic of Federalism’s traitorous nature, linking it to the Federalist campaign against slavery in Missouri. Jefferson in particular stressed that Federalist restrictionists were undermining the union by interfering with Missouri’s sovereignty as a state (that might not make sense, but it did to Jefferson, because he had a different understanding of what the ‘union’ meant that we don’t recognize today. Bear with me).
The conflation of the association between Federalists and the British, Federalists and the dissolution of the union, in the mind of Jeffersonians was exacerbated during the Missouri crisis. Jefferson read both the War of 1812 and the Missouri crisis in a similar fashion: you had the advocates of unrepublican, corrupt principles all located in the same geographical area who, having lost all national support, were trying to exploit sectional grievances to promote disunion, foreign usurpation, and monarchism. In fact, with the crisis around the 1812 war, Jefferson took seriously the idea of starting a war to destroy the New England Federalists, purifying monarchical corruption, and thus securing the union. In Jefferson’s mind, the Federalists, based in Massachusetts, really didn’t belong in America- they were foreigners who lived in a different country who needed to be crushed. He went so far as to suggest in one 1814 letter that “if their administration determines to join the enemy” and “call in the English army, the republicans [would call in] ours.” Massachusetts was a British proxy, controlled by monocrats who called themselves Federalists, but were really no different from Tories. He hated New England, yes, but specifically, this Virginian hated Massachusetts. Americans went to the polls in 1812; the Virginian, Madison, Jefferson’s protégé in a palpable sense, won reelection, defeating New York’s DeWitt Clinton in a close race. You had a southerner winning a narrow reelection over a northerner during a war that was quite divisive.
What I want to suggest is that there may be a historical analogy that can be drawn to the 2004 election. John Kerry was from Massachusetts; in the context of a presidential election occurring in the midst of a ‘hot war’ (though against terrorism, not against the British Empire) and giving rise to some intense xenophobic feelings among Americans (just as occurred in 1812), this was a very big liability- just as being from Massachusetts was politically bad for you in 1812. The charge that Kerry was a “Massachusetts liberal” was really the Right’s attempt to make Kerry into the ‘Other,’ a sell out to foreign influence- is it any coincidence, with this background, that just as Jefferson accused the Massachusetts Federalists of being British, Kerry was relentlessly identified as French? Thus, my unlikely theory of the 2004 election was that Kerry lost because he was from Massachusetts, which the Republicans effectively portrayed as a foreign country with values utterly opposed to those of ‘America,’ just as Jefferson had slightly less than 200 years beforehand. The problem with the reigning interpretation is that it fails to account for the way Kerry was truly made into an ‘Other.’ It was not really a ‘Red State-Blue State’ divide- it was precisely that Kerry was not from a “blue state,” but instead a Frenchman, not an American. Massachusetts, just as it was around 1812-4, was not part of “America,” but instead conflated with Old Europe (read: France).
In politics, theory isn’t much good if you can’t put it into practice. What does my (albeit unlikely) theory of the 2004 election have to teach the Democrats vis-à-vis 2008? Two things: don’t nominate someone from, or associated with, Massachusetts or any other ‘foreign country’ within the United States of America, including New York, which might as well be France; and second, they could complicated the (old and new) Republican strategy by hitting ‘em as directly at home as possible. This isn’t an endorsement of any candidate for public office.
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