Dear Mr. Kerry,

You’re not my first choice. But then again, I don’t have much of one. As you are the Democratic presidential candidate, and the only viable alternative to Bush, I’m supposed to rally around you.

I know how important it is that Democrats appear seamless in their support for you.

But I had a difficult time celebrating every time you won a primary. You don’t represent me. Who am I? I am a young voter, like the millions of young voters across the country who have been revved up by someone other than you. We’ve been aching for a candidate we can really get behind. We found it in Kucinich. We found it in Dean. We found it in Sharpton. We haven’t found it in you.

You may think this doesn’t matter. After all, we’ve vowed to vote for “Anyone but Bush,” making your job rather easy. You can throw a few things our way—an MTV interview and a youth link on your website—and then stretch out your arms and vacation in Idaho. The consensus is we’d vote for Mickey Mouse if he was running against Bush (and some of us will, writing him onto the ballot just to say we did).

But there’s a danger in the fact that we’re still having Meetups about defeating Bush in 2004, not electing you. And while young people are mobilizing to vote as quickly as Republicans signed on to endorse Patriot Act, there’s a catch to our enthusiasm: we’re flippant, unpredictable. We lose interest easily. We don’t vote for just anybody. If you don’t start picking up where Dean and Kucinich and Sharpton left off, we either won’t vote, or we won’t vote for you. We still have Nader/LaDuke bumper stickers on our Hondas, if only because we couldn’t get them off. Still, it’s a reminder of all the things we want in a candidate, but don’t have.

Mr. Kerry, you are at a great risk of losing thousands of voters to disillusionment and disappointment. This is not meant as a threat, but as a reality. If young voters aren’t impressed by you, they will not vote. This could cost you the election. We need you to start being our candidate, too. And that means more than telling us to “Choose or Lose.”

With all due respect, here are a few things you can do to ensure we turn out for you on Election Day:

First, we need some real answers about your plans for Iraq. You’ve suggested that you will step up the war on terrorism, increasing the size of our Armed Forces in your first 100 days as president and calling for 40,000 more troops in Iraq. This doesn’t sound like a plan for peace. It sounds like a plan for extended invasion and occupation.

We don’t want to hear “shadowed by terrorism” rhetoric. We’ve been pounded with this enough. We’re tired of secrets, of being misled. We need you to level with us. Mr. Kerry, we’re fighting a war that we didn’t want, that we still don’t want, yet you’re talking about stepping up the fight, about “winning peace,” as if peace is attainable by conquest. You’ve posed the question to Bush, and now we put it on you: Where will you take us in the war against Iraq? Because we don’t want to “stay the course.”

Second, we need some real answers about your plans for the Patriot Act. You’ve said you will replace the Patriot Act with “a new law that protects our people and our liberties at the same time.” But we need you to do better than that. This is one of the most frightening pieces of legislation to be passed in our lifetime. We have been fighting it every step of the way. Yet you dismiss our efforts, and the gravity of such a law, by suggesting a replacement. No more dancing around this issue. What can we expect from your new law? Because we never wanted the first one.

Third, we need some real answers about your plans for NAFTA. You don’t support NAFTA “as it is today,” yet you voted for it in the Senate. We want fair trade policies, not free trade policies, but we haven’t heard you utter the “F” word, even while you’re riding on the shoulders of the working class as a hero. Don’t yank us around. What is the future of NAFTA? Because we don’t like it as it is today, or tomorrow, or the next day.

Finally, we need some real answers about healthcare. Your plan doesn’t cover all of us. It only covers “nearly all children and most adults.” Who gets left out? If Dennis can offer single-payer health care, so can you. You’ve vowed to “fight for the day when affordable health care is a right,” for every American. How long do we have to wait? Because we’re running out of time.

Mr. Kerry, it’s not too late for you to become something more than our “anyone but” candidate. We’re ready to elect a president we can be proud of. It could be you. But as it stands now, you may be better than Bush, but that’s not good enough for me.

Sincerely,

Megan Tady

Megan Tady (megtady@yahoo.com) is a freelance journalist in Western Massachusetts. Her last article, "Youth Have Swung it Before," was included in the book Storming the Polls: How to Vote Your Views and Change the Rules published by WireTap.

###