With A Whimper
John Kerry has announced he will not decide whether to run for the Democratic nomination until late spring. Associates say he is stunned over the fallout of his "botched joke", proving exactly how inept a politician he really is.
WASHINGTON — 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.
And so it appears, at least for now, that John Kerry will finally fade back into being an obscure Senator from a deep blue state. The national aspirations fade away with a whimper, "Nobody understands me!". We'll miss him, though. He was so easy to beat on.
By daveinboca, Sunday, 3 December , 2006 @ 12:14 am
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.
By Guy, Sunday, 3 December , 2006 @ 10:16 am
Huh! Dumb as the proverbial box of rocks. However, it’d be so sad to see him not run. Just think. When he runs, it gives all of us more to write about than we can possibly handle.