Case Study: John Kerry

I first chose John Kerry for this analysis while watching coverage of the Democratic National Convention in 2004, where Kerry accepted his party’s nomination to the candidacy for President of the United States.  At the time supporters at the convention generally extolled his attachment both to the Democratic Party and its principal aims. Kerry himself expressed this attachment in his opening remarks that he was “reporting for duty,” echoing the statement that all new recruits in the U.S. Armed Forces must declare when they first appear after having sworn their oath of office.  As the convention progressed, observers and commentators on the ABC network’s coverage remarked that while Kerry’s military service had been magnified in an effort to court the favor of former servicemen who were likely to vote for Republicans on the basis of their “strong defense” rhetoric, little had been made about Kerry’s Senate record.  Voices from the Republican camp further suggested that this record was “the most liberal in the Senate,” and for that reason any attempt to identify Kerry with a devotion to defense matters should ring hollow.  Nevertheless, the first debate between Kerry and incumbent George W. Bush was almost exclusively devoted to foreign and defense policy matters, especially given the ongoing operations by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.  After this first debate, critics then sought to focus not necessarily on Kerry’s putative liberalism, but on what his opponents perceived as inconstancy, and Kerry was ultimately labeled by his opponents as a “flip-flopper,” an allegation most dramatically leveled at the Republican National Convention in the following weeks.

These allegations appear to contradict each other.  On one hand, the claim that Kerry was the “most liberal in the Senate” suggests a consistent ideological signature that favors liberalism, or a preference for equality.  On the other hand, the claim that Kerry was a “flip-flopper” suggests that Kerry’s support was ultimately either incoherent or indecisive.   Either way, both of these claims ultimately demand a closer examination of John Kerry’s Senate record.

Fifteen years ago, examining Kerry or anyone else’s record in the Senate would have been difficult at best.  However, with the advent and the subsequent revision of the search techniques available on the Library of Congress’ Thomas server (thomas.loc.gov), this effort has been made much easier for the interested constituent.  Adhering closely to a design suggested in an earlier article, I chose to examine John Kerry’s Senate record from 1993 to 2004 by measuring the frequency of key ideological indicators (liberty, equality and order) in the text of bills and resolutions that Senator Kerry sponsored from one Congress to the next.  While scores of bills and resolutions appear in any one Congress, I chose to limit the sampling frame to include the first fifty legislative proposals bearing Kerry’s name as a sponsor or co-sponsor in each Congress according to the Thomas server’s search results.  The ideological indicators searched for in each of these bills were drawn from the same table of indicators used to examine other presidential candidates, and Kerry’s sponsorship record for each Congress, from the 103^rd to the 108^th were measured separately.  Again using the same table, these scores were then placed alongside John Kerry’s presidential campaign for comparison.

The results of this exercise are provided below (Click to enlarge) :

John Kerry’s Senate and Presidential Campaign Record (Rhetorical Volume)

 

The figure above depicts the raw frequency of ideological indicators, hereafter called the rhetorical volume, in the text of the first fifty bills returned by a search for those legislative proposals sponsored by John Kerry in the Senate, as well as a measure of the total frequency of the same indicators on the “Issues” pages of Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign web site.  The data here suggest that beginning with the 105^th Congress, the bills Kerry sponsored in the sample tended toward a higher rhetorical volume along the axes of liberty (L), equality (E), and order (O) than either the 103^rd or 104^th Congress.  The 104^th Congress is of particular interest because this is the first Congress in almost half a century that the Democrats did not have control of at least one house.  One may also note that the data indicate a higher rhetorical volume for Kerry’s Presidential campaign than for any of the previous Congressional sessions.  Given the high profile of a Presidential campaign, it is reasonable to expect more statements of a candidate’s principles than during a legislative session, especially when examining the text of individual legislative proposals.

Once one has adjusted for ideological rhetorical volume, however, a much more revealing picture emerges, as it had with Presidential candidates earlier.  See the Figure below.

John Kerry’s Senate and Presidential Campaign Record as % of Total Indicators

 

   
   
In the above figure we find a series of adjustments in the frequencies of indicators on all three of the ideological axes described earlier. This series of shifts in the number of references suggests on the surface that at least for John Kerry’s sponsorship record in the Senate, the allegations of inconsistency may be well-founded.  However, it is worth noting that each major shift in the proportions of ideological indicators for John Kerry’s sponsorship record in the Senate over the last ten years coincides with undeniably major political events in the United States.  In the 104^th Congress, the Democrats became the minority party in both houses for the first time in over a generation, and the new Republican majority, fueled by an urge to restrain government action as well as to limit federal “entitlement” programs, attempted to secure passage of a legislative package called the “Contract With America”.  Kerry, who in the 103^rd Congress had sponsored bills along a moderate egalitarian line, adapted to the new congressional climate, which continued into the 105^th Congress. In the 105^th Congress, Kerry’s sponsorship record shows a slightly higher frequency of conservative indicators than liberal indicators, perhaps in an effort to smooth out relations with the growing Republican majority. 

However, this strategy was ultimately abandoned with the 106^th Congress, marked by the Senate’s dramatic first order of business, namely the impeachment trial of Democratic president Bill Clinton. This coincides directly with a marked increase in the number of bills Kerry sponsored that featured “liberal-sounding” text, and an equally dramatic reduction in the number of bills that featured conservative indicators. This shift is likely a result of responding to the need for party unity among Senate Democrats to come to Clinton’s defense.  For the remainder of the 106^th Congress, Kerry appears to have dropped support for any bills that sounded “too conservative,” as it may betray weakness in the Democratic party, which had largely embraced liberal rhetoric ever since Roosevelt’s transformation of the party under the New Deal (Milkis, Sidney. The President and the Parties, 75). 

The 107^th Congress is particularly noteworthy for Kerry’s sponsorship record for it demonstrates not only a return to the previous strategy of sponsoring bills with a high number of conservative indicators, but a measurable drop in references to liberty, which historically had already been Kerry’s lowest score under this model.  This change, of course, coincides directly with the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.   Here Kerry reacts most strongly to the attacks by sponsoring legislation that generally sought to increase security within the United States, and to respond swftly in the “War on Terrorism.”  Among the bills bearing Kerry’s name as a co-sponsor during this period is the Homeland Security Act and the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act.

Reaction to the Homeland Security Act and the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act among constituents was strong, for they broadened the power of the federal government to monitor civilian activities within the United States. Many organizations, especially civil libertarians and government “watchdog” groups, worried that the new legislation opened the door for a serious threat by government to the fundamental political freedoms enjoyed by American citizens.  This basic libertarian concern was apparently understood by John Kerry as well, for his sponsorship record in the 108^th Congress indicates an increase in the number of libertarian indicators in the bills he sponsored or co-sponsored, among them the S.A.F.E. Act, touted by members of Congress as a revision and restraint of the directives established under the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act. 

What, then, can we conclude about John Kerry?  Was he the Senate’s “most liberal member”?  Or was he a “flip-flopper”?  In four out of the last six Congresses Kerry’s sponsorship record using the LEO model does indicate a generally liberal stance.  However, given that even at the height of the impeachment trial Kerry’s sponsorship record suggests only a moderate liberal and not an ideologue, the first claim seems unlikely.  Even so, only a detailed analysis of the sponsorship records of every Senator from the 103^rd to the 108^th Congress would answer this question definitively. As for the allegations of inconsistency, there is strong evidence to suggest that John Kerry did in fact change his ideological position relative to his Senate activity.  However, given the coincidence of dramatic political events and Kerry’s ideological shifts, one may suspect that he was merely reacting to world events, rather than “flip-flopping” in a cynical move to curry favor with voters.  Indeed, Kerry himself indicated as much in the presidential debates before the 2004 election when he stated more than once that he would react strongly and decisively as president to another terrorist attack on the United States.  In the end, perhaps “reactor” is a far more fitting critique of Senator Kerry than is either of the other two allegations; the ultimate duty for which he reported at the convention was to respond rather than to lead.