I want to make one thing clear: I never thought John Kerry was a bad presidential candidate. I was a very early supporter of his. I never much liked Howard Dean. Now, of course, I would have been a supporter of Dick Gephardt or Dennis Kucinich. But then, I really liked Kerry. I even read his stupid campaign biography! And since then, of course, I’ve done my own research. And by my calculations, Bush had a built-in advantage as big as the one that his father had when he ran against Dukakis in 1988. And it was almost as big as the one Clinton had over Dole in 1996 and Obama had over Romney in 2012. Just the same, there is one way that Kerry was a weak candidate — which I will get to in a moment.

But according to Matt Yglesias, a lot of people remember Kerry as a bad candidate, If Hillary Clinton Is the Next John Kerry, That’s Good News for Democrats. It’s an interesting article, but kind of shallow. All it talks about is how Kerry actually did somewhat better than would be expected given the economic fundamentals. I was expecting some information on demographics. I suspect that just the change in the composition of the American electorate would have changed the election. If John Kerry had received just 120,000 more votes in Ohio, he would have become president. (This has made me start to rethink my position on economic fundamentals, which I plan to write about soon.)

Yglesias thinks that there are three reasons why many people think that Kerry was a bad candidate: (1) he lost; (2) people think Bush should have been easy to beat; and (3) most people didn’t like Kerry that much — they picked him as the “electable” candidate. I don’t think those second two make any sense at all. Back then, Karl Rove had this reputation for being some kind of political magician. People may have thought Bush was an idiot — but it was an idiot savant. We might not have thought he could run a country, but we knew he could campaign. As for the second point, it is almost never the case that partisans are really excited by their candidates. The last time that happened was in 1980 with the Republican Party.

I think people remember Kerry as a poor candidate because he lost. And that’s the only reason. What happens is that all the bad things stick out. There was his style of speech, to start with. Had he been a two term president, that style of speech would be remembered today as the very definition of “presidential.” But he didn’t even win one term, so it is remembered as awkward and pompous. There was the sailboarding. That is a clear sign of virility, but because he lost, now people remember it the way Republicans tried to spin it — as something strange. And there were actual mistakes that would be forgotten had he won. For example, there was the strange decision to not mention George W Bush at the convention. I still don’t know what that was about. On the other side of things, people don’t remember his great performance in the first presidential debate.

But there was a way to win that campaign. (Given what happened in 2008, it is probably best the Democrats did not win.) According to Lynn Vavreck’s book, The Message Matters, the only way for the Democratic Party to have won in 2004 was to change the subject from the economy. (I said this same thing about Romney in 2012.) When the economy is improving, the out-party just can’t make the case that the economy would grow even faster if only we “threw the bum out!” If the Democrats had nominated Dean, he could have made the campaign about the Iraq War. And he could have become president. The problem is that Dean really wasn’t a very good candidate. We needed Kerry — but without his vote for the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq.

Otherwise, Yglesias is right: Kerry was a strong candidate. I will be happy if Clinton is as good.

I don’t much care what Bruce Jenner does or says. But his recent interview does allow me to discuss something that I care about: why people vote the way they do. To many people, the big thing in the interview was that Jenner is a Republican. At The Fix, Hunter Schwarz wrote, Bruce Jenner Is a Republican. Here’s the Reason That Shouldn’t Surprise You. Most of that article has to do with the fact that most athletes are conservative.

There is sample bias in this claim. Schwarz talks about professional athletes and people at Brown University. So we aren’t talking about just any people who are interested in sports, but people who have chosen to take it to a very high level. But okay, I’ll yield the point. I’m sure there is something to athletes being conservative, but not in the way that Schwarz thinks. He wrote, “[A]thletes inhabit a world of meritocracy and hierarchy.” Yeah, but that correlation probably runs the other way. One thing I’ve been harping on a while is the fact that at the highest levels of sports, there is basically no difference between people. My bet is that the kind of people who find working out to be such a fantastic thing are people with higher than average testosterone levels.

But the real reason that we shouldn’t be surprised that Bruce Jenner is a Republican is much simpler: he’s rich. The rich vote Republican, as I discussed almost three years ago, It’s the Poor, Stupid. So there really isn’t much to deconstruct about this. We should applaud him for doing something that is good for the nation generally and the transgender community specifically. But the fact that he is just another rich conservative who says he’s a Republican because, “I believe in the Constitution”? It’s worth a yawn.

What is more interesting is what I wrote about two years ago, Farewell Gay Liberals. I made a more general argument, but said much the same thing back then. Overall, the gay and lesbian community is richer than the nation overall. And gay rights are very quickly going away as an issue. Is there any question about where this leads?

Jenner’s revelation highlights this. There is little doubt that eventually, LGBT rights will not be a political issue at all. The LGBT community has the advantage that its members are born randomly. So its status as a minority group is likely to be very short indeed, whereas the status of African Americans as a minority group will go on and on and on. What we’ll see going forward with regard to the LGBT community is that those in that group will act politically just like the population as a whole. The poor and smart members of the community will be liberal. The rich and dumb members of the community will be conservative. And most will not show up to vote anyway.

Last week, Nicholas Kristof wrote, Beyond Education Wars. His argument: education reform has “peaked,” is “tough,” and will be a “long slog.” Its “low-hanging fruit has already been picked.” And perhaps most of all, “The zillionaires are bruised. The idealists are dispirited.” Now Kristof isn’t suggesting that we give up altogether on education reform, but rather refocus on early childhood education. He also cherry picked some data to make it seem as if education “reform” (as opposed to the real thing) has actually worked. Or at least that it has in principle — like a couple of successful charter schools are prototypes that can be replicated by the engineers.

I’m not against early childhood education. It is indeed an important thing. But to push it as an alternative to reforming our educational system is ridiculous. Regardless, Kristof’s main reason for wanting to switch is political. “Early education is where we have the greatest chance of progress because it’s not politically polarized.” Ah yes, the ultimate apologia for those who do the work of the power elite: let us at least do what “can be done”! And what “can be done” just happens to be those things that don’t upset the power elite — and in many cases are things that help the power elite. Thus we get policies that weaken teachers’ unions but don’t do a thing to equalize education funding.

In addition, Kristof shows an amazingly immature attitude toward the whole process of reform. Check out this jaw dropping explanation of why early education rocks and later education sucks:

Forget the Thomas Friedman “I once met…” nonsense. He’s write that helping teenagers and adults once they’ve slipped out of the education system is hard for the education system to deal with. One might think one of the challenges of education reform would be to deal with such problems earlier. One might also think that the problems of school dropout, teen pregnancy, criminality, and drug use go quite a ways outside what we ought to depend upon the education system for. But I guess that gets into that area where something might be expected by the “zillionires,” so let’s just ignore it and do those things that “can be done.”

But it is the second paragraph that is most telling. He’s betting that the two girls will break the cycle?! And the reason is this one program that seems to be good but which has hardly been proven. It’s charter schools all over again! Back when, it was charter schools that were going to fix all the problems of education. That didn’t work out, so now people like Kristof want to abandon education reform and move onto early childhood education because there’s a cure-all called Educare! It will solve all our education problems! Don’t worry about poverty, racism, and the actual mechanics of teaching! Two years of Educare will solve all our problems!

Peter Greene at Curmudgucation provided a good description of this, Nicholas Kristof’s Tourist Balls. He likened the entire “reform” movement to tourists who come into a town and want to change everything and then leave the place a mess after a short period of time because they find that there are no easy answers. Then they move onto the “next shiny object.” That’s about right.

One thing that comes out in the comments to Greene’s article is that this is also an economic issue. The education “reform” movement has seen that the opportunities to monetize K-12 education are drying up. So now they are looking for ways to do the same with pre-K education. But I don’t doubt that there are a lot of really earnest people in the movement who only want what is best for the kids. And I’m certain that Kristof is one of these earnest people. But they are “useful fools” — people the power elite use to push their interests. And it is their interests that are pushed in all this “reform.” Now we will have our toddlers in corporate provided programs, so they do better in corporate run schools, so there is a large, well educated work force so corporations can have their pick of the best workers at the lowest prices.

Do you remember that time that a classified document was released that caused the United States to lose a battle? Or that time Americans died because of a leak? Or when a hangnail got infected and a government official had to go on antibiotics? The reason you don’t remember any of these things is because they never happened. The government doesn’t get angry about leaks because it harms the country or even the government itself. It gets angry because those leaks usually embarrass government officials. You ought to have wondered about that after the Clinton administration declassified a bunch of documents that the Cheney administration later reclassified.

But more than this, the most important documents are classified not because government officials are afraid that foreign entities will find out about them but rather because they are afraid that Americans will find out about them. It took forty years for information about the Gulf of Tonkin incident to be released. It certainly wasn’t because the Vietnamese couldn’t learn the truth about our error. It was that the American people would not be pleased to know that our big push into the Vietnam War was based upon nonsense — that the justification for the Spanish-American War was better.

As a result, one of the absolute worst legacies of Obama will be his use of the Espionage Act of 1917 and his war on whistleblowers. That really will create a great narrative for the history book. The young and idealistic constitutional law professor comes into office and abandons everything he once claimed to be in favor of. This is why we shouldn’t elect Boy Scouts as presidents. Once the spooks get at them, the naive fall apart. Can’t risk anything going wrong by being liberal about freedom of the press![1] This is why the US press freedom ranking has been dropping.

If you are like me, you got a good laugh out of David Petraeus getting probation for his unconscionable leak of top secret information. We never thought he would get anything more. After all, he is the right kind of leaker: a very powerful older man who used the information to impress and bed an attractive younger writer. Boys will be boy, right?! We can’t hold that against the man!

But it is different when you are someone who is really concerned about wrongdoing by the government. If you leak information about that, then you need to be punished — and severally. That’s why John Kiriakou was given two and a half years when Petraeus was given nothing. One of the big claims for not punishing Petraeus is that none of the names he leaked ever made it out. Well, that was true of Kiriakou too. But again, it doesn’t matter. Kiriakou was the wrong kind of leaker. He wasn’t a high ranking member of the government who was doing it for personal reasons. He was doing it out of a sense of right and wrong. You can’t respect that!

Now Jeffrey Sterling is looking at 19 to 24 years for the information he provided to James Risen for his book, State of War. He didn’t leak any names at all. The government, of course, claims that Sterling caused all kinds of harm to the United States. When does the government claim anything else (except in the case of highly placed leakers just trying to bed a younger woman)? I don’t think Sterling’s leaks hurt the United States at all. Regardless, it will be a major miscarriage of justice if he gets two decades in prison while Petraeus gets none. And Sterling’s lawyers are arguing just that.

Sterling is scheduled for sentencing on 11 May. Expect to see him sentenced to something between 19 and 24 years. The courts can’t make a special exception just for him. After all, he’s the wrong kind of leaker.

[1] I know Obama hasn’t gone after the press directly. The systemic attacks on leakers is a constitutional loophole. Without leakers, the press will be allowed to write anything it wants based upon government press conferences. And at that point, you might as well have a government controlled press.