I actually like John Kerry

I know it's forbidden to say so--it violates the hip left's tenet that one should be cynical at all times and that Democrats are what we hold our nose and vote for if we don't have the guts to vote for a third party. But since he's been nominated, I've been reading up on him to make sure that he doesn't have lurking demons that might derail his Presidency and I've walked away with the impression that Kerry is a man with a great deal of intergrity. Yeah, yeah, yeah--for a politician.

Like lawyers, everyone hates politicians until we need one. Except lately--the raw hatred for politics has managed to eclipse our common sense on both the right and left and there are those on both sides who are grasping desperately for candidates that are somehow not politicians. To settle on someone requires a great deal of self-delusion. On the right, they just accept the bald-faced lie that Bush is Not a Politician by taking evidence that he's just a really bad one and pretending that means somehow that he's not one. On the left, we got snookered by Ralph Nader who is still playing the Not a Politician game, but less of us are buying into it.

I live in Austin, the tail end of the Hill Country, one of the most schizo places in the nation politically. We have both prehensile conservatives lurking around and some of the most thoughtful progressives in the country. Texas put Tom DeLay on the Hill, yes, but we also put Barbara Jordan up there. From this vantage, it's hard to see what all the fuss is about--yeah, politicians give me the willies but if you need to get something done it's best to have them in your corner. And sometimes you can be offensive in your politics and sometimes you are playing defense.

Right now the Republican party is trying to get a stranglehold on power, and it's they look like their model is the way that the Democrats hung onto Texas for so very long, where no amount of corruption was too much if it meant consolidating power. We need to kick Bush out, because a second term of Bush will make the corruption of his first term look like child's play. And we need someone in there who has some experience wrangling with these corrupt Republicans, because any Democratic President can expect the Republicans to move heaven and earth to destroy him.

I don't know if Kerry is going to be able to derail the massive Republican power grab, but I don't think there's anyone who has more experience than him. He's our best bet--if the Democrats can't break them, the Republicans will push the government to a hard right in ways that we have trouble comprehending. I wish that we could give everyone a good shove to the left right now, I really wish we could. But we need to stop the right wing power grab before we can expect anything progressive to get done. And I suspect that Kerry is the sort of man who will commit himself to that long, hard task in ways that Clinton wasn't capable of.