A Pilgrim’s Digression

Return of Kerry

According to this article, Kerry may well run again in 2008. In proposing a possible re-run, Kerry remarked that Ronald Reagan ran twice, in 1976 and in 1980, before winning the Presidency. Only problem with that analogy is that Reagan did not make it out of the primaries in ‘76. Nixon is the last President to have lost a bid for the Presidency before winning it some eight years later. Nixon may in fact be the only President to have achieved that.

Still, I admire Kerry’s drive.

“Sometimes God tests you,” Kerry told the crowd at H20, a restaurant on the Potomac waterfront, according to an aide. “I’m a fighter, and I’ve come back before.”

To me, it makes some sense to run Kerry again, if only because he will be able to correct the mistakes he made in 2004.

Will the party allow him to run again, though? I think it depends on the course he charts in the next four years. If he can prove himself to be a leader of the party and not someone who will now retire from public life and disappear from the stage, I think he has a shot. I happen to think it is merely wishful thinking on the part of the Republicans that Hillary will win the nomination for President in 2008. But if she does decide to run for the nomination, that will present one heckuva obstacle to Kerry running again.

I like James Carville’s suggestion about the future of the Democrat party. He made the following remarks at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, at which the future of the party was discussed.

“I’m not in denial. Reality hit me,” Carville said. “Let’s take the greatest morality story of all—we’re born again,” he added, in a play on words connoting both his view that the party needs a fundamental change, as well as the importance of evangelical Christians to Bush.

“We have to treat the disease, not the symptom,” Carville said. “The purpose of a political party is to win elections, and we’re not doing that.”

Carville said that the party’s concern about interest groups had resulted in “litanies, not a narrative.”

“The party needs a narrative,” he said. adding later that one possibility would to become “an aggressively reform, anti-Washington, anti-business-as-usual party.”

That is a party I could get behind, depending on what “reform” comes to mean.