Meet John Kerry. You'd better.
The Democratic presidential nominee, the liberal Boston Brahmin who married our hometown's rich-and-famous widow, Teresa Heinz Kerry, is presumptive no more.
The vast mass of American voters don't have half a clue who Kerry is, what he stands for and why he can be so rich and so eye-crossingly dull. But it's not the fault of the magazine sector.
Magazines are doing their democratic duty to shed light on Kerry's mysterious psyche ( Time ), his enigmatic character ( Newsweek ), his muddied politics ( The Economist ), his chief campaign strategist ( The New Republic ) and his plutocratic bank account ( Weekly Standard ).
Head-doctor-wanna-be Joe Klein psychoanalyzes Kerry in depth in Time's cover story, trying to explain why Kerry can become decisive and act like "a real politician" -- i.e., do the "creative roguery" he needs to win -- only when he is facing the political firing squad.
Klein's piece is interesting, but abjectly friendly. Other Time articles cover Kerry's inner circle of advisers and explain why his aloof ways have not exactly made him a favorite political son for many Massachusetts Dems who don't own $8,600 Italian hand-made mountain bikes.
Speaking of cheap shots about Kerry's wealth, the Weekly Standard engages in lots of them in its otherwise informative detailing of Kerry's vast wealth in "John Kerry Is Different from You and Me."
The piece points out the hilarious irony that should but probably won't stifle some of the Democrat's quadrennial class-warfare rhetoric: Kerry's wife Teresa's assets make him the richest man ever to run for president.
Newsweek's Evan Thomas probes deeply under Kerry's closed hood in his well-written piece, "The Solitary Soldier," seeking to explain the complex, contradictory character traits -- opaqueness, integrity, bravery, caution, idealism, pragmatism -- that leave Kerry a mystery to his few close friends and, it appears, to himself.
The best place to discover what really matters -- how Kerry's political beliefs will affect the rest of us if he becomes president -- are spelled out in the Economist cover story, "Who Is John Kerry?"
The Economist is uncharacteristically understanding of Kerry's congenital liberalism and his plan to expand health care and to reinstate some of President Bush's tax cuts.
But after carefully parsing his flip-floppy voting record, it points out that Kerry is not really that far from Bush's positions on trade, tax policy and even Iraq.
Naderites and libertarians understand this ideological congruency, but it won't please Republican or Democrat troops much to read that "Mr. Kerry is more like the president than he admits."
