In John Frankenheimer's original, electrifying 1962 thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, an American soldier is captured by communists during the Korean War, brainwashed and programmed to return to the United States and, years later, to assassinate a presidential candidate. There is compelling evidence now that John Kerry is a kind of Manchurian Candidate of Democratic politics. It seems entirely possible that at some point in his career, he was seized by a youthful Karl Rove, brainwashed and programmed to kill off, at crucial moments in American history, the Democratic partyÂ’s political prospects.
The clues were there all along, if weÂ’d only looked closely enough. His curious combination of self-satisfied superiority and baffled indecisiveness was obviously too contradictory a mental characteristic to be natural. His ponderous oratorical style and studied condescension suggested something artificial had interfered with the firing of the synapses. But the plot worked brilliantly. In 2004, as the partyÂ’s presidential candidate, Mr Kerry contrived to throw away a golden opportunity for a Democratic victory against an increasingly unpopular incumbent fighting an increasingly unpopular war.
