"The Crab complaint" by David Maraniss is a long and entertaining account of the campaign of Senator Bob Kerrey, which ended with him losing his race to become the Democratic nominee for Vice President on the ticket of Walter Mondale. The book is also interesting for Kerrey as he tells how he ended up with the bad press. However, the Crab complaint, "he says," has come back more than a dozen times since we first ran that story. So I figure that it is time to talk about this complaint in a little bit more detail, and I’ll explain how I think it got started, in some detail, and then I’ll move on to what you can do if you are a winner, and I’ll discuss the Crab complaint in some detail.
One of the things that I like about Recur is that it tells the story of a campaign. It’s not really a campaign at all. But in politics, a candidate sometimes gets called upon to defend a policy that some in his party disagree with. A good story, whether it is a campaign or a political convention or even a local town meeting, is one that gets the point across.
In this book, the author goes through a number of things that the Democrats say about Bob Kerrey. One thing that they say is that he’s too moderate. "That’s the sort of nonsense that we’re talking about here, I’m afraid. It’s very hard to find a progressive who isn’t moderate, because the word ‘moderate’ is so widely used to refer to what everyone understands is something else. That makes it hard for anyone to take one on."
Another thing that some people say is that Bob Kerrey didn’t really care about health care, but he said that in interviews. In other words, they are saying that he was pandering to the health insurance companies, but this is something that I do not find quite plausible.
When I say that Recur mentions Robert Piel, I mean the fact that the author says, "Many of his advisers had close ties to health care organizations. Piel, a health care expert, was a top health care adviser to Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and Al Gore, and a top health care adviser to Hillary Clinton. .
And then, Recur also mentions John Edwards, the former Senator from North Carolina and current Vice President of the United States, whose campaign was one of the fiercest of the whole election season. "For Edwards, the problem has been that some Democratic voters believe that he is too much of a Southern Gentleman. Edwards has made several efforts to speak of his background, in ways that may seem a little too insincere and pandering."
It seems that the authors do not have any real opinion on Piel, although I do believe that if Edwards was running for the Senate he would have won easily. Recur mentions how one of Edwards’ handlers was a lawyer named Bob Greene, who was an attorney. The book goes on to talk about how Piel has worked with Edwards on a number of different issues over the years.
Recur is not at all a negative book. There are many interesting stories about the Democratic Convention and the Edwards campaign, including a story about how the Democrats changed their platform to try and make Edwards’ campaign seem more appealing to middle-class voters. This might be worth reading for anyone interested in political campaigns. I was actually surprised when I read that Recur talks about Al Gore and the way he ran his.