01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, June 22, 2006

BOSTON

THE "deconstructionist" take on Sen. John Kerry is that he has been a man on the make since at least the summer of 1962, when his connections with the Bouviers (Jackie Kennedy was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy) put him topside on a sloop in Nantucket Sound with President Kennedy. John decided then and there that he would step in Jack's footprints all the way to the White House.

Thus, John followed Jack in becoming a naval officer. He volunteered for Vietnam -- his Mekong River swift boat being his intended "PT-109." He served, collected his medals, and got out of the war zone as quickly as he could to prepare for his first political campaign.

But history had played a trick on him. By the time young Mr. Kerry returned from Vietnam, in 1969, war heroes had become war criminals, and medals won on the battlefield were reviled by a seemingly inexorable cohort of the educated young.

So (according to the cynical view) John went into his anti-war phase, which culminated in his April 22, 1971, appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In an unctuously overdone Kennedy accent, the young Vietnam veteran famously asked the committee how the nation could ask some young man "to be the last man to die for a mistake."

This performance made Mr. Kerry a darling of the Hollywood left. In his early political campaigns, Peter, Paul and Mary were continually showing up to promote his campaign. He entered the U.S. Senate in 1985, having campaigned emphasizing his support for a nuclear-weapons freeze -- a cause that would, had it prevailed, have made the Soviet nuclear advantage in Central Europe permanent.

By and by the combat medals Mr. Kerry had made a great show of throwing over a fence in front of the Capitol in 1971 reappeared in Senator Kerry's office. When he ran for president, in 2004, he would make much more of his short lieutenancy in the Navy than Grant did of his Civil War generalship when he ran for president, in 1868.

For 35 years I have tried to resist the cynical view of Mr. Kerry. I have tended to believe it but have tried to resist it for two reasons. First, many who were young during the Vietnam era were radically inconsistent in their political beliefs. Whatever those beliefs were, I think that we owe each other a moment of forgiveness before death or senility makes it impossible!

Second, the cynical take on one whose public career spans 40 years -- beginning with statements made as a student at Yale -- could be wrong. Wouldn't a perfect consistency more truly impeach a man's character than his being guilty of being part of his times?

Such a benign view of John Kerry's careening flip-flops these 40 years was a lot easier to defend two months ago, before he put a coda on them. First, in April, he did a sort of anniversay lap commemorating his April 22, 1971, Senate testimony with op-ed pieces in The New York Times and The Boston Globe.

These writings ended Senator Kerry's "Reporting for duty" period, of the 2004 presidential campaign, and returned him to his anti-war "last man to die for a mistake" period, of 35 years earlier. Then, on June 13, with President Bush in Baghdad, he addressed a Democratic "TakeBack America" conference with a call to withdraw American forces from Iraq by the end of 2006 -- that would be a little more than 26 weeks from now.

Sen. Hillary Clinton was willing to hear some boos from this crowd by arguing that this would not be in America's best interest. Given that the president was in Iraq as Mr. Kerry spoke, that a democratic Iraqi cabinet had at long last just been formed, that the terrorist al-Zarqawi had finally just been killed, and that most Iraqis expressly believe that a premature departure of British and American forces would be catastrophic, it is impossible not to see this latest Kerry flip-flop as transparently self-serving.

Politically, Republicans deserve to lose the House in 2006. The Senate is another matter, but, in retrospect, the Republican House was better served by the grating but visionary leadership of Newt Gingrich than the greedy bunch who came after. Some reform-minded Republicans welcome the election of a Democratic House in 2006.

Democrats who covet the anti-war vote have a more complicated problem. They must appeal to those, furthest left, who believe that American and ugly American are the same: that America, her culture and influence are the main source of evil in the world.

Next to them are those who so hate George W. Bush, his privileged beginning, his Texas drawl, his "stolen" 2000 election and his war of choice in Iraq that, regardless of the American interest, regardless of the Iraqi interest, they want the United States to fail in Iraq -- just to spite him.

Next to them are Democratic partisans who lust for power, who read the polls and think that promising to end the Iraq war will be a winning cry. To be successful, they will need to keep the far left out of open rebellion, without appearing to; and they will need to give those who merely hate George Bush some red meat, but without giving the impression they want the U.S. to fail.

I do not envy Democrats trying to appeal to America in 2006 on the basis of unappealing and surely passing angers. Nor do I think John Kerry's 2006 flip-flop, which gives the lie to those that came before, can do him any good in 2008.

David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of The Journal's editorial board.