Happy Birthday, Mr. Candidate

Why is Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry afraid of being called a liberal?

He is one, of course. His consistently wise, left-leaning senatorial record over the last 17 years leaves little room for doubt about that—unless you consider pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-environment, anti-death penalty legislators to be conservatives.

And yet the overriding impression one gets of Kerry from reading the press he has received since announcing his formation of an exploratory committee to consider a run for president is exactly that: Massachusetts’ junior senator is extremely antsy about accurate descriptions of his place on the political spectrum. And so, with Kerry’s 59th birthday last Wednesday, this seems as good a time as any to reflect on the words he uses to describe himself.

When asked about being a liberal, Kerry told the New York Times in an interview published on Dec. 9 that “labels are silly in modern American politics.” Perhaps he is right about that; certainly it’s hard to take the traditional labels seriously when the Democrats’ best attempt to win this year’s elections was to pretend they were all staunch Bush Republicans and hope no one would notice.

But that doesn’t mean they should be silly. Just because poll-enslaved, cowardly centrists have spent the last decade blurring the line between left and right doesn’t obviate the fact that those political and moral philosophies—those silly labels—have very real meanings that don’t deserve to be hidden in a corner by complacent vote-jockeys.

It’s important to have politicians with liberal views and records, like Kerry, but it’s in some ways even more important that those politicians self-identify as liberals—otherwise there can never be any organized opposition to the party that so readily calls itself conservative. A posse of freelance, unidentified left-wingers can’t stand up to the incumbents unless they band together using their own clumsy, imprecise political labels to distinguish themselves. If liberals are going to use a label, why not use the clear, time-honored one that is still totally fitting for this sadly dwindling group?

Shying from the liberal nametag is not much of a strategically sound move either. “This is not a debate about left and right,” Kerry said in the Times’ interview. But rest assured, if Kerry makes it past the primary, Bush’s party will turn it into one. The Republicans will attempt to use the tactics of the 1988 election in 2004, attacking the distinguished senator and patriotically anti-war veteran on practically the only grounds they can—his status as a Massachusetts liberal. This is a label Kerry can hardly hope to shake off—it is, after all, wholly accurate. If he tries to sidestep, he will neither satisfy scornful conservatives of his centrism nor convince the shrinking liberal voting base that he’s anything more than another Al Gore or Sen. Joe Lieberman—a quasi-left-winger, a moderate Republican in threadbare Democrat’s clothing.

It is truly unfortunate that Sen. Kerry seems to have decided that such a makeshift disguise and dodgy evasion is the only way to defeat the conservatives he rightly despises. “You’ve got to fight back” against attacks on your political affiliation, he told the Times. But since when did fighting back mean copping out?

—SIMON W. VOZICK-LEVINSON