Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  Politics is tough, and I’m okay with tough politics. But the gun issue was just the beginning, a mere preview of the political weapon the Republicans would create on the issue of gay marriage. The contrast between what I was seeing and hearing from people as I campaigned and the debate the Republicans were trying to ignite was stunning.

  The Republicans were up-front about their reasoning. Someone told me a long time ago that a gaffe is a moment when a politician tells the truth. The Senate Republican conference chairman, Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania, committed one of those gaffes. He explained to the press why they suddenly planned to schedule so many Senate votes on social issues like guns and gay rights. He said that my campaign “loved to talk about education and health care.” Implicit in his statement was the fact that his political party wanted to create an entirely different, parallel conversation.

  I didn’t need a pollster to tell me Santorum’s political gambit was far removed from the issues most Americans worried about. I had the best focus group in America, free of charge, at least three times daily: the people, most of whom had never stepped foot in Washington, D.C., along the rope lines at rallies.

  If you’ve ever let C-SPAN take you behind the scenes of a campaign rally, you know that today a rope line is a place where a candidate is greeted by a phalanx of smartphones, people reaching out to snap a selfie or record a frantic three-second video.

  The 2004 campaign was the last presidential campaign of a more personal era. Back then, you could still have a conversation with someone in the rope line, even amid the sea of arms reaching out for an autograph.

  The Secret Service erected heavy-duty iron Jersey barriers for protection. They warned me of the many possible scenarios where what appeared to be innocent might not be so harmless. The baseball someone was handing you with a pen for an autograph could be an improvised explosive device that would leave you without hands. The cell phone someone was trying to pass you to say hi to their elderly mother? That too could be a bomb, they warned.

  But I felt the input from talking to people was important. In many ways it was my only real daily contact with the folks who would be making the decision on Election Day. Nothing in the faces I saw up close along those rope lines indicated anything but warmth. Sometimes I would spot the flicker in someone’s eye, or the creases in a worried forehead, indicating they had something to get off their chest.

  When they shared their stories, the common theme was almost always struggle. Someone at home was sick, and insurance wasn’t keeping up with the medical bills. A mother would lift her young son with Down syndrome and tell me that special education wasn’t getting the money needed for the attention her son deserved. A father worried about his son headed off to Iraq after a tour of duty in Afghanistan. “My boy, this is my boy,” he’d say, passing me a dog-eared snapshot. I would flash back to that moment thirty-six years before when I bid farewell to my father at the service station as I headed off to war. I won’t ever forget that look in his eyes, and now that very same look was on the face of someone else’s father.

  Many stories were about jobs. It wasn’t just that over a million jobs had disappeared under President Bush, or that we’d lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. What I heard was more basic. A man a few years younger than I, but weathered by a lifetime of working outside, or a burly fellow with a walrus mustache and two noticeable hearing aids, the aftereffects of decades manning a loud machine in a factory. They would lean across the barricade and put their face close to my ear to make sure I could hear what they were saying: they were working harder, working two jobs, or out of work entirely, or their pensions had disappeared, or their kids were moving away because the jobs didn’t exist anymore at home. They were unburdening themselves. These were proud people who had always counted on the dignity that came with working hard, raising their kids and knowing that one day they’d retire with their grandkids nearby to enjoy the reward of a hard-earned pension and Social Security. It wasn’t too much to ask after years of backbreaking work, but that way of life was disappearing.

  The people I met stuck with me: the faces, the intensity, the emotion. Not once did anyone come up to me and say, “Please, John, whatever you do, stop gay people from getting married in Massachusetts,” although that was exactly what the Republican Party seemed determined to talk about. Rick Santorum, a true believer when it came to this issue, was probably the most honest about his views. With Rick, it wasn’t an act. He had granted an interview with the Associated Press and let loose with his worries, speculating that if gay marriage could stand anywhere in America, you’d wind up with men marrying children and even dogs. He meant every word.

  One day on the campaign in Milwaukee, when the staff was so bold as to let me have some fun and break the monotony of three rallies a day, I went for a motorcycle ride with a group of firefighters and cops. Most of them were active in their local union. Afterward, we sat down for a beer. They were candid about the race.

  “Open the mail from the Republicans, pick up the phone at night, and it’s another robocall. It’s all we hear about. If it’s not guns, it’s gays,” they said.

  The resident wiseass in the group fired off a quick one-liner. “I’ve been married for thirty-five years. If these gays want to be miserable too, who am I to stop them?”

  I smiled. “Guys, do you know anyone who actually is worried their marriage is going to fall apart because two men or two women somewhere want to spend their lives together?”

  In my mind, that was the craziest part of the GOP hysteria, the insinuation that suddenly our heterosexual marriages would be undermined if a state chose to allow civil unions or gay marriage. It was all built on the premise that being gay was a choice, with more than a hint that it was contagious.

  I’d heard it all before and not just from Republicans. Back in the early 1990s, I’d testified in front of Strom Thurmond’s Armed Services Committee in favor of letting gay people serve openly in the U.S. military. West Point had an honor code that forbade lying, but if patriotic gay Americans were willing to lay down their lives for our country, they had to break that oath every day. Who were we kidding? Did anyone really believe that of the 416,800 Americans killed in World War II, none of them was gay? Did none of the 59,000 names on the Vietnam Wall belong to a gay American?

  One night soon after I’d come to the Senate, I went for a long walk near the congressional cemetery. Lo and behold, I came across a tombstone with a surprisingly defiant inscription: “A Gay Veteran: They gave me a medal for killing a man and a dishonorable discharge for loving one.”

  All of this was a big fight in the Senate as the Armed Services Committee deliberated. I still remember a history lesson from Senator Byrd about how the Roman Empire perished when homosexuality could flourish and a strange, meandering line of questioning before the Senate Armed Services Committee from Senator Thurmond about sodomy.

  People had every right to believe what they wanted to believe. I’d been raised to believe marriage was a sacrament, the union of a man and a woman, but not everyone had to believe that. No government was ordering my church to perform a gay marriage. What on earth was the problem with trying to lower the temperature and find a legal way to protect gay people so that partners could pass on property or custody of children, or make health care decisions for each other? It felt like a parallel universe when Santorum and the Right declared a culture war.

  The big question was how far the Bush-Cheney campaign was willing to go to put the issue front and center in the 2004 campaign. Would they leave it to the Christian Coalition and Jerry Falwell, or would they weaponize it themselves?

  The president and First Lady had gay friends. There were senior people in their White House and in their campaign who were gay, including the vice president’s daughter. I don’t believe that either President Bush or Laura Bush has a bigoted bone in their body. They regretted that the first President Bush’s renominating convention in Houston in 1992
wasn’t a Texas homecoming but a parade of Pat Buchanan clones playing social issues like a poorly tuned fiddle. At that ugly convention, RNC chairman Richard Bond declared, “We are America, they are not America.”

  We’d occasionally hear from one of my gay campaign staffers that a Republican counterpart on the Bush campaign—living in the closet—was fighting to keep that issue on the backburner. President Bush was a competitive person, but he was uncomfortable with social issues defining his campaign. Left to his own devices, he would’ve been very happy to be reelected on the strength of wartime incumbency and post-9/11 unity. But there weren’t enough votes there. I had made the race tight. With the math turning against them, Karl Rove successfully sold the campaign on a path of division.

  Rove knew the power of social wedge issues. Thirty-eight states had already enacted some measure to define marriage as being between a man and a woman. It ginned up Republican turnout and galvanized the kind of conservative evangelical voters who had lagged in turnout in Bush’s down-to-the-wire battle with Al Gore.

  The Bush campaign doubled down on elevating gay marriage in the campaign, siding with Karl Rove over their own campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, who had not yet publicly announced that he was gay.

  President Bush dedicated an entire presidential radio address to the case for amending the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage. I remember listening to Bush’s words that Sunday morning. Bush sounded like he was reading a hostage statement prepared by his captors, the words foreign sounding, but each calculated to give the social conservatives just what they needed to motivate their voters and drive a wedge between us and them.

  The radio address was transparently political. Even if you believed gay marriage was a federal issue, it would require sixty-seven votes in the Senate and two-thirds of the House to amend the Constitution. Nowhere near those majorities existed. Congress had no vote scheduled. The president of the United States was using a radio address to the country to focus on this single issue in the middle of two wars, with no congressional action scheduled and its hypothetical outcome a foregone conclusion. We’d come a long way from Franklin Roosevelt using the radio address to tell us “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

  The line I still remember from the president’s message was a soft nod to civility, while he pried the lid off Pandora’s box. “We should also conduct this difficult debate in a manner worthy of our country, without bitterness or anger.”

  Give me a break, I thought. Civility was never going to be the hallmark of an issue fueled by division.

  In 2004, eleven states had already put banning gay marriage on the ballot for November, driven by the conservative movement. Among the measures was so-called Issue 1 in Ohio, also known as Amendment 1, which stipulated that the only marriage that would be valid and recognized in the state was one between a man and a woman. This was the lone ballot initiative that the Buckeye State’s voters were asked to weigh in on in the state that could determine which party controlled the presidency. Ohio’s Republican governor, Bob Taft, didn’t want it on the ballot. He feared it would drive businesses from investing in his state. Neither did his Republican attorney general. They missed the memo that its entire purpose was to spark conservative turnout and cost Democrats votes.

  Issue 1 had the Bush campaign’s fingerprints all over it. Ohio’s secretary of state, Ken Blackwell, responsible for ballot initiatives from certifying signatures to rubber-stamping language, was cochair of the Bush campaign and a hard right, social issues zealot.

  Blackwell traveled the state campaigning for Issue 1 in crude, unmistakably anti-gay language. He obviously missed the president’s words about conducting the debate with civility. He said gay relationships “even defy barnyard logic . . . the barnyard knows better.” It was a not-so-subtle way of describing some of his fellow Americans as less than human, less even than animals.

  The irony wasn’t lost on me that for all the Republican attacks on me as a flip-flopper, or the way they sneered at the word “nuance,” Bush’s use of the gay marriage issue was a master class in having it every which way. He had run in 2000 as a compassionate conservative, but his Ohio chairman was belittling Americans because of who God made them. In 2000, Bush had said he supported civil unions, but his campaign supported this ballot initiative, which would make it illegal for Ohio even to recognize civil unions. Until Bush jumped on the federal constitutional amendment bandwagon, we had the same position: we believed marriage was between a man and a woman but supported civil unions. Now his campaign said we were on opposite sides of a gulf they wanted to widen. So much for President Bush’s promises in 2000 to be “a uniter, not a divider.” That’s what bothered me the most. Presidential campaigns are tinderboxes, and social issues are rarely thoughtfully discussed in an environment where hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on ads and interest groups are constantly trying to turn even small differences into big ones.

  I had no qualms opposing amending the Constitution of the United States over this issue. I don’t believe in playing around with the Constitution except when it’s the only means to right wrongs or protect freedoms. That’s what I’d call being an actual conservative.

  Affirming the humanity and citizenship of freed slaves was a reason to amend the Constitution. Giving women the right to vote was a reason to amend the Constitution. In the Senate, I regularly opposed efforts to change the Constitution to do something we didn’t have to do or that Congress could do on its own. I used to go down to the floor of the Senate and speak out against the predictable effort every Congress made to pass a constitutional amendment banning flag burning. I’d remind my colleagues that the countries that had banned flag burning included Nazi Germany and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I had no qualms reminding anyone that while I detested the act of anyone burning an American flag, I’d fought in a war for freedom, and that included someone else’s right to be stupid or even unpatriotic.

  Here we were, though, debating another trumped-up constitutional amendment, another politically rigged fight, but this time the disagreement and disputes were unleashing ugliness, vulgarity, viciousness and vitriol in America that politics and our country’s leaders should seek to avoid at all costs.

  The people whom Ken Blackwell was trivializing were all someone’s sons and daughters. I’ve never forgotten meeting Matthew Shepard’s mother in 1999 on the steps of the Senate when she came to lobby for a national hate crimes law. Her son was beaten, tortured and left to die on a barbed wire fence in Wyoming the year before for the “crime” of being gay. Her eyes were hollowed out, deep circles underneath them. I couldn’t begin to imagine the sadness, the horror, of wondering what was going through her son’s mind as he hung there dying. Where did hate come from that could allow such a thing to happen?

  In the immediate heat of the campaign, we had to guard against the issue’s political potency. Social issues were working against us in some places where the Bush campaign was banging that drum the loudest. Arkansas and Kentucky, which had been long shots all along, pulled out of reach. A flyer appeared all over West Virginia showing two men holding hands and promising that if John Edwards and I were elected, men would be free to marry each other. Our poll numbers were dropping in the Midwest, in areas where voters were socially conservative and in counties where the biggest job losses of the Bush presidency—the issue we wanted to debate—had occurred.

  What could we do? It came down to two choices. We could dial up our appeals on economic issues, or we could try to blunt the appeal of the Bush-Cheney social issues agenda. I wanted to drag the race back to economic issues. But there were places in American politics that I just wasn’t comfortable going. When you’re in political trouble, it’s not a bad idea to check out old playbooks from the past. You can usually find some wisdom. President Clinton was the first Democrat reelected since President Roosevelt. I respected his political skill, and to this day I think many of his critics conveniently forget just how hard it was for a Democrat to win in 1
992 and 1996. But when some veterans of those campaigns began to push me to take the gay rights issue “off the table” by appearing at an event in favor of Ohio’s Issue 1, or by voting for the constitutional amendment, I recoiled.

  I understood their point. Clinton in 1996 had signed the so-called Defense of Marriage Act into federal law, guarding against gay marriage, and ran radio ads in rural America celebrating it. It denied Bob Dole a wedge issue.

  The bill became law—but without my vote. In fact, I’d been the only senator running for reelection to vote against it. I could not now in good conscience endorse a ballot initiative in Ohio that would make it impossible for Ohio to ever have civil unions. That was just plain wrong.

  We were going to have to win this race the harder way—by redefining the race around the real issues.

  The collision of faith and politics in the presidential campaign was a bolt from the blue, but certainly not from the heavens. It was a sad reminder that the modern, bare-knuckle political season doesn’t shed light on life’s most personal, difficult and thorny issues, it only distorts them. Back when I was fighting my way to the nomination, winning primaries and consolidating support, the archbishop of St. Louis, Raymond Leo Burke (who would years later be demoted and benched by Pope Francis), inserted his personal politics into the campaign by unilaterally announcing that because I supported a woman’s right to choose, I would not receive Communion in his archdiocese. A couple of other conservative bishops would go on to join him. Burke had been a controversial figure in the Church for a long time, issuing similar edicts when he was ministering to the faithful in Wisconsin.