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Kerry followed through in smaller ways too, giving speech after speech about the laughable mohair subsidies that created virtually no jobs and cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year. Hollings, who endorsed Kerry before the primary in his home state of South Carolina, admits that conservatives in his state are mystified that he's backing Kerry over a fellow Southerner like John Edwards, "They say, 'Wait a minute, Fritz. You're for that Massachusetts liberal?' I say that liberal-conservative stuff is just the Republican spin. Bill Clinton was a liberal, and he put our budget back in the black. The people in South Carolina are no different from the people in the North. They're interested in their country and in jobs."
Kerry can point to all sorts of positions that don't fall neatly in either side's ideological bucket; nor do they all seem screened for political advantage. Voters most concerned about lost manufacturing jobs won't like Kerry's support for the North American Free Trade Agreement. The teachers' unions weren't thrilled with his sympathetic discussions of school vouchers or his speech in 1998 in which he called for an "end to teacher tenure as we know it." Seniors may be surprised that in 1997 he proposed that rich people pay higher Medicare premiums. Iowa's farmers were reminded in the days before the caucuses that he had once proposed abolishing the Department of Agriculture. Civil libertarians were spooked by his support for roving wiretaps even before 9/11. African Americans were troubled by his assertion in 1992 that it was time to move past affirmative action: "We cannot hope to make further racial progress when whites believe that it is they and not blacks that suffer most from racial discrimination."
However much these positions may hurt Kerry's standing with traditional Democratic constituencies, they may broaden his appeal among independents and make it harder for Republicans to stick him in a little cubby labeled DUKAKIS REDUX. He co-sponsored a "two strikes, you're out" bill in 1996 that would have led to life imprisonment for sexual predators. He has worked with Senate majority leader Bill Frist to increase global AIDS funding and with Republican Kit Bond to bolster day care--including funding religious groups. Indeed, Kerry talks up faith-based charities with the zeal of a convert. "No one can tell me these programs don't work," he says.
That's why Republicans who have watched Kerry up close warn that Bush shouldn't consider him a liberal lightweight who can be boxed up and buried. "That's a prescription for disaster in November," says Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel. "He is a seasoned, smart, tough, articulate campaigner who has a pretty strong record to offer the American people. And that's the way [Republicans] better take him on."
But Bush might find subtler ways to use Kerry's words and record against him. When Americans try to gauge whether a politician is liberal or conservative, they look at more than his resume or transcript. "The liberal moniker is as much a cultural label as it is about a voting record," observes Democratic political consultant Anita Dunn. So which Kerry will the country come to see--the one in duck boots, shaped by a Swiss boarding school and Yale secret society? Or the one in sweats and khaki, baptized in the Mekong Delta?