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Despite the chatter, John Kerry probably isn’t running for president again—though he says he wants to be part of the future of the Democratic Party, and the country, no matter what.


He’s sticking to his insistence that any White House talk distracts from 2018. But there’s clearly still an ember of desire to run again. “I’ve only done it once, unlike a lot of people who’ve been out there, and came pretty close,” he told me in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. It was a conversation he ended with a standard-politician four-point list of priorities, some 40 minutes after delivering a standard-politician evasive answer about a 2020 candidacy: “I haven’t eliminated anything in my life, period, anything—except perhaps running a sub-four [minute] mile.”

But that is not the point for Kerry, whose public life stretches across modern political history, from the day in 1971 when, as a young Vietnam veteran, he testified before the Senate in opposition to the Vietnam War, to walking out of the State Department for the last time in 2017. He’s already done fundraising for and endorsed several Democratic candidates in 2018—including a few of his former State Department aides running for House seats. He says he’ll be out campaigning for the midterms. And he says he’ll keep proselytizing in speeches on college campuses from the example of his own life, about how politically activated young people have always been the ones to change the course of political history.

“I’m engaged, man, I’ve done this my whole life. I’m not going to suddenly stop and say I’m not going to be involved in these choices, you know,” Kerry said. “You know that old question that sometimes was asked [after] World War II or Korea: ‘Daddy, what did you do in the war?’ Well, people are going to ask, ‘Daddy, Mommy, kid, what did you do in this moment in our history, where our democracy is threatened, where the challenges are as great as they’ve ever been, and where the world is not coordinating very effectively?’ That’s a big challenge.”

Click here for the full podcast to hear Kerry talk about his conversations with foreign leaders about what is happening in American politics and his sense of what the country needs to prioritize going forward.

Kerry comes with a little advice for the people who are looking to lead his party forward, as a person who says he never goes to bed still thinking about the what-ifs of being president, but whose take on the questions about voting machine irregularities in Ohio—which, theoretically, was enough to swing the state and the 2004 election to President George W. Bush—is a suspicion that is “not lingering, it’s real.”

In the 2004 primaries, Kerry beat back Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a liberal outsider-insurgent, on an argument of electability and experience in Washington. And ahead of 2020, he sees those qualities as again being political assets.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a year for total newness, because people want the trains to run on time, people want to re-establish something, and I think there may be a premium for some relevant form of experience,” Kerry said, though adding that such experience “doesn’t have to be [in] politics.”

In 2004, Kerry was worried about restoring national unity—it was, he said, one of the principal reasons he considered selecting Sen. John McCain as his running mate in that year’s election. Kerry said that bridging America’s divisions is an even bigger concern ahead of 2020, but he’s not sure he’d counsel the Democratic nominee to think about a Republican running mate. The fissures defining American life right now, Kerry suggested, are more complicated than a simple Democratic-Republican divide.

In his new book, "Every Day Is Extra," and in our interview, he is still clearly upset about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against him in 2004—in which fellow Vietnam veterans accused Kerry of lying about his experiences in the war—and remains frustrated by everyone from Bush on down who was involved in that campaign. Don’t make the mistake that, in retrospect, he says he and his campaign made in not responding forcefully to spurious attacks: “You’ve got to take it on.”

“I’m convinced that there’s a lot of fakery going on right now, in terms of what’s being done versus what is said to be done” by the Trump administration, Kerry said. And to Democrats who complain that they don’t want to do interviews to simply shoot down untrue accusations by President Donald Trump or others, Kerry can relate. But ultimately, “that’s not the way to do it,” he said. “You can answer where you have to answer, but you’ve got to be expressing a point of view about where the country needs to go.”

Kerry says he understands many of the factors that led to Trump’s win, from voters’ sense of being left behind after the economy cratered in 2008, to the lack of voter turnout in 2016.

But he thinks those are obstacles that Democrats can overcome if they remain vigilant about holding Trump accountable.

“Back with Richard Nixon, you know, he won 49 states in 1972,” Kerry said. “A year and a half later, he was gone. That’s because people kept hammering and stayed focused on the truth.”