Ever since he rose to the top of the pile of Democratic contenders for his party's presidential nomination, John Kerry has sought to "introduce" himself to the American electorate - to flesh out his political profile, to present as a dedicated, balanced, evenhanded centrist floating along in the political mainstream.

Evidently it didn't work.

A Page One July 14 Washington Post story carried the headline: "Re-introducing the Candidate: Convention's Goal is to Ensure Voters Know Kerry." Paragraph two of the ensuing story noted that the convention's theme phrase (stronger at home, respected in the world) "is designed to underscore the centrist and forward-looking image Kerry wants to present to voters."

If the introduction had succeeded, there of course would have been no need for a re-introduction. Central to the re-introduction was Kerry's ballyhooed mandate to speakers that they cool the Bush-bashing and accentuate the positive about Kerry - to be, in that marvelously meaningless word, proactive about the man.

That evidently didn't work either - much. Just about every speaker got in his (or her) digs at President Bush, direct or implied: Teddy Kennedy, Howard ("Primal Scream") Dean, fuddy-duddy Jimmy Carter, alpha Al Gore. Oddly short on Kerry positives was his mouthy wife Teresa, most recently famous for instructing a newspaperman to "shove it": At the convention she expatiated hardly at all about her husband's centrist virtues but digressed at length about her causes of the hour.

The failure to recast Kerry as a moderate goes to the difficulty of the task.

Few call themselves "liberals" anymore; still fewer want the label. The obfuscatory term of choice is "moderate." It all testifies to the overwhelming success of conservatism in the past 40 years. In the electorate generally, twice the percentage term themselves "conservative" as "liberal." So statistically, "liberal" is not a term boding much electoral success. For liberals seeking such success along with ideological preservation, the smoothie fall-back adjective is "moderate" - so inoffensively reasonable and seductive.

Even Teddy Kennedy, Mr. Chutzpah Liberal himself, knows the liberal label doesn't sell well beyond the confines of Massachusetts and a few other like-minded precincts. So he has been surrogating for Kerry on the campaign trail by insisting labels don't mean much anymore; if you must use them, he urges, please employ "liberal" as a synonym for faith and family values. That's faith and family values.

The instruction is to remain ideologically pure; deviate only linguistically. Exploit the language. Re-define - re-introduce? - in warm-and-fuzzy words and phrases: centrist, moderate, mainstream, middle-of-the-road; sensitive, caring, compassionate, proactive; fiscally conservative, socially responsible. Do whatever it takes to win, even if it means revising the rhetoric and rewriting the dictionary. The heralded keynote speaker Barack Obama dutifully intoned, for instance, that we are not liberal Americans or conservative Americans but United States of Americans all.

Yet liberalism is alive and well in some of the nation's most important opinion-making realms: Hollywood (exemplified most recently by Michael Moore's anti-Bush flick), establishment churches (the effort to mainline the deviant), the academy (the radicalization of the professoriat), and the press (perhaps more pro-Kerry now than it was pro-McGovern in 1972). Newsweek's Evan Thomas testifies that this year pro-Democratic press "bias" could "be worth maybe 15 points."

Most important: However one may describe John Kerry, liberalism prospers in him, too - in the company he keeps, the positions he takes, the votes he casts. Continued...