John Kerry on 2020, Trump and why we need to ask ourselves"what did you do?" - a podcast by POLITICO

Isaac's last episode: The former secretary of state has led a Forrest
Gump-like life, from his high-school days playing hockey with Bob
Mueller to introducing John Lennon at a Vietnam protest to running for
president and almost winning. Some people think he should run again in
2020.

He probably isn’t, but 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 said in our interview. 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, 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 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.” 

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