Oh, No, Say It Ain’t So!
Can it be true? Is it possible that we won’t have John Kerry to kick around any more?
Senator John F. Kerry’s election-eve “botched joke” about the war in Iraq — and the fierce denunciations his comments drew from fellow Democrats — has led him to reevaluate whether to mount a run for the presidency in 2008 and has led him to delay an announcement about his decision, according to Kerry associates.
The Massachusetts Democrat is now leaning toward waiting until late spring before declaring his intentions, even as other candidates jump into the race and begin building organizing and fund-raising teams in early-primary states. Before the joke derailed his comeback, Kerry had signaled that he would decide whether to run by the end of January.
Kerry — who had methodically resurrected his political standing after a tough loss to President Bush in 2004 — was stunned by the swift, angry reaction to his Oct. 30 statement that underachieving students would end up “stuck in Iraq.” Aides and friends say the senator was particularly stung by the fact that so many Democrats had joined Republicans in rebuking him.
The incident laid bare to the senator the lingering skepticism and resentment of him two years after he failed to unseat Bush, according to Kerry advisers who spoke on condition of anonymity.
For so many reasons – because he’s a lousy candidate (partisan), because he’s so outrageously, hilariously off-key (humorous), because he’s an absolutely outstanding whipping post (vindictive) – I can only say, run, John, run!
Hell, I might kick in a hundred bucks to his campaign myself. God knows a campaign without John Kerry is a hell of lot harder to blog about…
Yeah, I’m gonna miss having sKerry to kick around like a flea-bitten mutt.
That Kerry was stung by the reaction of fellow democrats was amazing in light of his reaction to Joe Lieberman’s recent adventure. In fact, I’ll bet Lieberman also would kick in $100 just to have his esteemed colleague to kick around.
Whatever Kerry’s actual odds of winning are, in his mind they are probably inflated by a factor of 10 (so Kerry probably thinks he has a 10% chance of winning). Still, Kerry is remarkably cautious, given his ambition, and is unlikely to give up his Senate seat to go the distance in the Presidential campaign like Edwards did. Look for Kerry to campaign for both until it is clear he has to choose one race or the other, then bow out of the Presidential campaign.
Oh, great, so those of us in MA are going to be stuck with him then?
Let’s hope Gore runs again, he’s another tone deaf candidate with bad instincts and given to flights of inexplicable aggrandizement.
Oh, but then there is pretty boy Edwards – we can kick him around a bit too (I’ll bet he morphs into a Dem version of Dan Quayle).
And not to comment only on the Dems; can we coax Gary Bauer into the race? Is Frist definitely out? He might be able to match Gore’s stiff awkwardness.
I hope Kerry sticks around, as he is a poster-boy for the clueless kind of elitism that so many senior Democrats appear to drift into as a matter of losing their moral compass inside the Beltway.
But Kerry’s crunching defeat in ’04 won’t discourage the likes of him, as he simply has a tone-deaf political ear and an autistic lack of realization that his endless flip-flopping and swerving back and forth and reversing course tells the voter he is a hopeless opportunist, something a lot of people from Massachusetts have known for a long time.
“Crunching defeat?” Nobody knew who the winner was until hours after the last polls closed, and Bush’s margin was the electoral votes from Ohio.
If you want a better example of a crunching defeat, you don’t have to go further in the past than November 7.