Yes, John Kerry is your soul mate.
One night in 2000, Sen. John Kerry invited 15 Massachusetts technology entrepreneurs over for dinner. Arriving late, Paul Egerman, a veteran of tech start-ups, wasn't able to find a parking space and pulled into a dubious spot in front of his host's Beacon Hill mansion. The senator greeted him at the door with a parking pass, then asked for a favor in return. "He gave me a piece of bond paper with just his name and asked me to give him an autograph," Egerman recalls. "I felt stupid." But he signed -- and then took a second to process what he'd just learned: John Kerry collects entrepreneurs' autographs.
Those who assume that a liberal senator from Massachusetts would rather collect the autographs of tax collectors might be even more surprised. Like most Democratic senators, Kerry routinely receives poor ratings from the tax-cut-obsessed National Federation of Independent Business. The group, which represents 600,000 small-business owners, wars regularly with congressional Democrats over the minimum wage, the estate tax, and almost everything else. Tapping a trial lawyer as his running mate did nothing to boost Kerry's image at NFIB.
And yet, in two decades in the Senate, Kerry has put together a distinct agenda with respect to entrepreneurship, one informed by his own experiences as a business owner and his roots in one of the nation's most innovative, growth-oriented state economies. "A lot of political folk, especially Democrats, didn't used to get the private sector," says John Moriarty, a former lobbyist and longtime Kerry ally. "But he understands the value of it, of rewarding results based on merit." Still, Kerry has work to do. An informal survey of Inc. 500 CEOs, for example, shows Kerry winning the support of only 16% to Bush's 57%. They may recall that in 2000, Al Gore, despite a long history as an enthusiast of technological innovation, came to be perceived as an opponent of business altogther once he pledged to defend "the people versus the powerful."
The Kerry camp would argue that their man has some of the best Main Street business credentials since Truman. In 1976, Kerry and his friend K. Dun Gifford opened a cookie business in Boston under their mothers' maiden names, Kilvert & Forbes. It was intended to sound, Gifford says, like "a pretty snooty upscale company."
Though Kerry also had a law practice at the time, Gifford says his partner proved to be a hands-on operator, reviewing sales data daily. They started with two types of cookies based on family recipes, selling for $1.25 each because of costly ingredients. Kerry insisted on the Lindt chocolate he remembered from his Swiss boarding-school days and the same butter used in traditional croissants.
Political ambitions cut short Kerry's cookie-mogul dreams; when he ran for office in 1982, he bought out Gifford, then sold the business. "I could've been Mrs. Fields," he joked with reporters in May, but "I thought it was smarter to earn $23,000 as lieutenant governor."
In the Senate, Kerry volunteered to serve on the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, even though it is widely seen as a backwater. At first, many thought it an effort to move out of the considerable shadow of his state's senior senator, Edward Kennedy. Both Democrats and Republicans have since credited Kerry with helping to expand the committee's range as its ranking Democrat and, for two years, its chairman. He has not spent as much time as Republicans lamenting the burden of taxes and environmental and labor regulations, but he has proposed tax-simplification and regulatory-assistance programs designed to make it easier for small businesses to comply.
Although pro-business activism does not always square with fealty to Democratic interest groups, Kerry has at times managed to balance the two, sponsoring legislation to encourage individual investment: tax breaks on long-term gains from small-business stock, and an expanded capital-gains exclusion for small-cap companies. He has also pushed programs designed to benefit businesses in disadvantaged urban and rural areas, subtly challenging the logic of affirmative action by prioritizing place rather than race.
Kerry has used his Beacon Hill dinners to keep in touch with local health care, software, and venture-capital communities. "He's a man of Massachusetts," says Moriarty. "The tech industry has been economically important for most of his adult life. Enabling everyday high-tech start-ups is small business." These days, the state's economy is defined more by the tech-heavy Route 128 corridor than by Cape Cod docks or Boston banks; growth has come in the form of small companies, frequently founded out of universities and research labs. "He gets that it's an incubator economy," Moriarty says.
As a presidential candidate, Kerry has proposed the types of initiatives that would likely play well at those entrepreneurial dinners, even if they don't excite the NFIB. The centerpiece is a national "small-business opportunity fund," with a focus on loans to micro-enterprises and a promise to increase federal venture capital investments. He now suggests scrapping capital-gains taxes on new long-term investment in small businesses and speeding up depreciation schedules for high-tech equipment and software.
In sum, Kerry's platform emphasizes access-to-capital issues over payroll concerns like taxes and health care costs (although Kerry has proposals dealing with those subjects, too). "There's a clear policy distinction between looking at small business as a large mess of small interests and looking at a segment of fast-growing gazelles, the real engine of the U.S economy," says the Democratic Leadership Council's Rob Atkinson, who has advised Kerry. "That is what Kerry has done differently from the more traditional Democratic approach and actually from the Republican approach."
