While it is true that John Kerry doesn't "deserve" our vote, having voted to support the Iraq War and the PATRIOT Act, I do not accept the untenable thesis that keeping Bush in power will better advance our progressive movement by giving us a better enemy to fixate upon than the corporate liberal Kerry.
The history of revolutionary social movements tends not to support the thesis that the more extreme the repression and the worse the leader is the more quickly revolutionary change will follow. On the contrary, revolutionaries usually have their greatest success not in a nation's darkest hour, but when hope springs and optimism is afloat, and expectations are raised.
The Soviet Union after all didn't topple during the brutal reign of Stalin--indeed a fearful conformity was the order of the day. Instead the revolution that toppled communism occurred under the regime of the comparatively benign reformist Gorbachev. I could give countless similar examples.
If John Kerry--the man who became the first successful Senator to renounce PAC money, the man who led Vietnam Veterans Against the War and testified about US brutalities in Indochina, the man who has a near 100 lifetime voting record by the League of Conservation Voters, and the man who consistently scores among the half dozen most liberal senators with a American Conservative Union score of 6 out of 100--is the best choice corporate America can pass on to the Democratic electorate, we are already making progress.
Not since 1960 has the United States elected anyone but a Republican or Southern Democrat, and never in our lifetime has the country chosen a President with as liberal a voting record as John Kerry's record.
Yes America and the Democratic Party both have a long way to go--but consider this:
Of the major candidates--the first to be eliminated were Gephardt (co-author of the Iraq war resolution) and Lieberman (the most hawkish candidate). Over the weekend in Maine and Washington--2nd and 3rd place finishes went not to Generalissimo Clark or the Clintonesque Edwards, but to the Grassroots "peace" candidate Howard Dean and on his left flank -- Dennis Kucinich.
By supporting candidates who are "anti-war" we have already shifted the center of gravity ever so slightly, that John Kerry is now viewed as a moderate, and viewed as the last ditch effort by the Democratic Leadership Council (who would have much preferred Lieberman, Gephardt, Edwards or Clark) to save the party from the grassroots anti-war insurgency that will one day engulf it.
I'm not impressed with Kerry and I may not find it in myself to completely forgive him for voting for the Iraq War--as far as I am concerned the blood of innocents is on his hands--but I do think it is a sign of our strength rather than our weakness, that the best the corporate powers could do to combat us, was back John Kerry.
In politics, victory often looks like defeat and defeat like victory. If Howard Dean's campaign scared Kerry enough so he finally got the spine transplant necessary to stand up to the Republicans we may one day discover that depsite the best efforts of the Democratic Party to mow the grassroots--the year 2004 will mark the year that the grassroots choked the mower. The corporate leadership and the media may have won the battle to appoint a nominee, but slowly we may be winning the war for the soul of the Democartic Party