There is cruel irony in the notion that Kerrey’s decade here at The New School will hurt him in Nebraska. The irony is that, well, most people here didn’t like him very much. Indeed, the last time he stood for election was not 1994; it was a no-confidence vote brought by the faculty of the New School.
The overall vote was reportedly 271 to 3 against Kerrey, with the vote among tenured faculty 74-2 against, and Kerrey announced his resignation soon thereafter. (I was not on faculty then.)
This occurred after Kerrey went through five provosts in seven years before naming himself provost in addition to president, which helped trigger student occupations of the administration building (back before the word “occupy” was capitalized).
Admittedly, The New School is a politically charged environment and certainly not an easy place to govern. And a decade is a long time to run anything, let alone a university with a long and vibrant tradition of dissent. But to say that his New School tenure was rocky is like saying that Nixon had a bumpy presidency.
So in my view, he ought to try to make lemons from lemonade: find some footage of himself clashing with unkempt student protesters (he called police during the occupation and students were forcibly removed) and have someone put it up on YouTube. Say that he got pushed out because people rejected his “common-sense Midwestern approach.”
Kerrey was famously undisciplined during his 1992 presidential campaign. And having campaigned with him during the Bill Bradley campaign in Iowa circa-1999, I can attest to his quirky charm. During a break between campaign events in small-town western Iowa, I asked if he wanted to go to a law office to make some calls, or have a private lunch. He preferred we go bowling and eat hot dogs. Will Nebraskans these days find his idiosyncrasies to be endearing signs of rugged Midwestern independence, or just odd? And can he discipline himself to stay on message for six months? Those are the key questions.
Nebraska has reddened quite a bit since his last race there in 1994. Back then, they had a Democratic governor and two Democratic U.S. senators; now, Nelson is the last elected Democratic statewide officeholder – and he likely couldn’t have been re-elected this year. But if anyone can pull this off, it would be a highly decorated veteran who has surprised observers at most every turn of his long and winding political career.
(Cross-posted, with permission of the author, from Politico’s Arena)
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