In late November, George W. Bush went on the political offensive over the state of the war in Iraq. Determined to get his groove back after weeks of being pummeled by revitalized Democrats, Bush delivered a major speech outlining his "plan for victory." Democrats, smelling blood, carefully plotted their response. The party's Senate leadership decided that Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island would deliver their rebuttal. As a former member of the Eighty-second Airborne who had opposed the war from the start, Reed had the perfect credentials to remind Americans about Bush's mismanagement of the war and of the grim realities the president had refused to acknowledge in his speech. All things considered, it looked like a banner opportunity to inflict more damage on the reeling president.
There was just one problem John Kerry.
Without checking with his party's leaders, Kerry scheduled his own response to Bush, which was to take place at 11 A.M., precisely the time that Reed was scheduled to respond. In Senate strategy meetings, mild panic ensued. "It was 'Oh shit, we can't have two competing press conferences at the same time,' " a senior Senate aide told me recently. "Many calls were made between offices in an effort to make sure we didn't have two competing events with two messages, because we had ours pretty well eshed out." Rather than make way for Reed, though, Kerry agreed to appear with him at a joint press event. Plenty of Democrats predicted what came next: Kerry was "droney and repetitive," the aide says, but the press nevertheless overlooked Reed and went with the story line of Kerry, yesterday's Democrat, still taking swings at the guy who beat him. "Jack Reed did a great job, but in the end he was overshadowed by John Kerry," said the aide. "The story fell into the lazy narrative of John Kerry versus George Bush on Iraq, and that's not where we wanted to go."
The bitter clincher came on that night's Daily Show. After riffing on the Bush speech, Jon Stewart turned his attention to the Democrats. "Naturally, the political opposition would pounce on the president's vulnerability by choosing as their spokesman an inspiring rhetorical speaker with the proven ability to defeat the president," Stewart said. Cut to a shot of Kerry stammering, then back to Stewart. "Kerry You went with Kerry"
After more footage of Kerry rambling incomprehensibly, Stewart stared at the camera and screamed, "No one understands you!" The next day, a link to the clip bounced among the e-mail accounts of angry Senate Democratic staffers.
So it goes for the man who, a year ago, was 60,000 Ohio votes short of learning the nuclear codes. His party is finally finding its voice and tormenting Republicans on everything from Katrina to Iraq to the seedy corruption revealed in the Tom DeLay/Jack Abramoff/Duke Cunningham scandals. But Kerry—who Democrats almost unanimously say is keenly interested in running for president again in 2008—keeps reminding people of the bad old days, when the country had a choice and chose Bush. "There was so much pent-up anti-Bush anger that has not dissipated," says Carter Eskew, former chief strategist to Al Gore in 2000. "There was no catharsis, and he's a reminder of that frustration and anger."
Don't think Republicans fail to get this. When Bush delivered an earlier Iraq speech, he took a conspicuous swipe at Kerry, quoting from the senator's remarks just before he voted to authorize the Iraq war. (Kerry had said that "a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in [Saddam Hussein's] hands is a real and grave threat to our security." Not very convenient for Democrats saying the WMD threat was a White House lie.) But Kerry's office was delighted by the attention. "Republicans are going after him because they are scared of the support he has inside the party," says Kerry consultant Jenny Backus. But that reaction is like a battered wife who'd rather be abused than ignored. Clearly, even though Kerry came oh so close in the election, Republicans don't think he stands up well in the public's memory, and they're more than happy to address him as the face of the Democratic Party.
Which is why, as another frustrated senior Democratic strategist puts it, "congressional Democrats are spending an awful lot of time trying to figure out how to maneuver around him. They want some new ground. They want the basis for a new conversation. And Kerry's very much stuck in reverse. It causes a lot of resentment."
For a brief golden October afternoon in Washington, D.C., precisely fifty-one weeks after the 2004 presidential election, the past was indeed present, at least in the mind of John Kerry. A crowd filled Georgetown University's Gaston Hall for what had been billed as a "major address" by Kerry on Iraq. There was the battery of TV cameras, the stand of American ags, Teresa in the front row, and Marvin Nicholson Jr., Kerry's "body man" from the '04 campaign, adjusting the mike the way he'd done a thousand times before.
In came Kerry, slim and straight as an ironing board, with that rectangular coif of silver hair. But there was something else, too, a subtle sheepishness in the body language, a certain lilt to his grin, something intangible that seemed to say, I'm sorry, folks.
"Whatever else might be said about the campaign," said the Georgetown professor introducing Kerry, "he certainly fought it hard and honorably." Whatever else might be said There's plenty else that might be said. On that day, in fact, in that very room, people were saying it. "So he's finally come up with an Iraq policy!" one reporter sitting in the back offered with a grin.
As Kerry took the podium, you couldn't help but wonder how he'd break the ice and cut through the unavoidable awkwardness. Al Gore was surprisingly expert at this back in 2001, cracking that he used to be the next president of the United States. But Kerry seemed incapable of mustering a good joke. "I had thought about coming back here in a different role," he said with a wan look on his face. "But I'm honored to be back." Clang. Maybe the wounds are still too raw for self-effacing humor. Or maybe self-effacing just isn't his thing.
To be fair, Kerry's speech wasn't half bad. "For misleading a nation into war, they will be indicted in the high court of history!" he thundered, and then he referred to Iraq as "one of the greatest foreign-policy misadventures of all time." It made you wonder where this guy was back in 2004. But then the Georgetown kids lined up to ask questions, and the pain of it all came rushing back. Kerry's responses were brutally long-winded, as if he were intent on slowly suffocating their earnestness with leaden filibusters. Eyes glazed. Yawns unfolded. Even the kids at the mike shifted their weight impatiently. Afterward, a few dozen students swarmed around Kerry, and he momentarily shifted into high glad-handing mode, soaking up the attention. Alas, the mutual love, such as it was, had to be cut short because of pressing business back in the Senate. "The senator's only got twenty minutes on the vote!" announced Marvin, the genial body man, as he shooed people away. "He's gotta go!" A budget amendment to increase spending on home-heating oil awaited him.
In presidential politics, defeat is usually total. Salvaging dignity and honor is no easy task, and by historical standards John Kerry has actually had it pretty good. Better than an instant punch line like Dukakis or Viagra salesman Bob Dole.
But it can't be fun, either. "He's gone from being the guy in the bubble entourage of 150 to being one of a hundred senators," says one former Kerry aide. "That transition is not an easy one, I wouldn't think."
A Senate staffer adds, "There is this weird cognitive dissonance. You see Kerry in the Dirksen [Senate Office Building] cafeteria getting a salad, and you think, You were inches from becoming president, and now you're getting your own salad. And it's not even a good salad!"
Kerry was never much of a team player in the Senate, and staffers there say that hasn't changed. When he returned to the Senate after the election, his Democratic colleagues respectfully thanked him, but they didn't ask him to be their spiritual leader. He was just…back. Since then he's been reserved in meetings with his fellow Democratic senators, and off the Senate oor reporters generally let him pass unmolested. The smallness of the job must hound him. Back in October, massive ooding that threatened to burst a dam in the industrial Massachusetts town of Taunton forced him to y up there and help oversee his constituents' crisis. Kerry's aides say this is to his credit—it shows he believes in his work. "He didn't need to come back to the Senate," says David Wade, Kerry's press secretary. "He likes his job."
But never mind the present. Kerry, it seems, is still living in the past. He remembers the 59 million votes he received, more than any other presidential candidate in history—except for the guy who got 62 million that same day. He remembers the hours on election day when exit polls had him winning easily. He remembers his media guy, Bob Shrum, in a regrettably heady early-evening moment, addressing him as "Mr. President." Mr. President. To hear those words must be something like an acid trip that went too far. You're just never quite the same again.
"You've got to understand these dynamics," says one prominent Democratic Party insider. "For twelve hours on election day, he thought he was the president. A lot of people would never give up that ghost their whole life."
He may feel wronged, too. Kerry has said that Osama bin Laden's eleventh-hour video did him in. And in a November 2005 radio interview, New York University professor Mark Crispin Miller claimed that Kerry told him "he now thinks the election was stolen." Kerry's office denies this, but one former Kerry aide told me that Teresa, at least, always wanted a closer look at Ohio's voting machines.
Whatever the case, Kerry has never really stopped running. That was clear by spring of last year, when he started holding campaign-style events around the country, ostensibly to promote a children's-health-care bill. Over the past year, his travels have taken him to key states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida, and Pennsylvania. He's provided more than $5 million to Democratic candidates and committees. And in November he bought space on billboards in Indiana and New Hampshire and plastered his call for a phased Iraq withdrawal on them. Democrats say Kerry has been courting some of his former advisers, trying to keep them in his orbit in case he runs again. (Wade denies this.)
He's also crafting a sharper liberal message. Kerry has come out more clearly against the war than he ever did during the campaign. And at a mid-December event, he raised the prospect, perhaps jokingly, of impeaching George W. Bush if Democrats win back the Congress in 2006.
"He clearly believes more than ever that he'd make a great president," says Jim Jordan, Kerry's former campaign manager, who still defends Kerry despite being fired by him in late 2003.
Joe Lockhart, Bill Clinton's former press secretary and a senior adviser to Kerry last year (and who, like so many top advisers, had a strained relationship with Kerry during the campaign), adds, "He talks like he's still running. I don't mean he's keeping his options open but that he has every intention of still running."
But according to David Wade, the senator is just keeping up the good fight. "Anybody who tells you they know they're running for president in 2008 clearly doesn't know anything about the process," Wade says. "I think it would have been bizarre and out of character and utterly political if he pulled his punches and came back to the Senate and didn't keep fighting on the issues that he made a centerpiece of the campaign."
But what's arguably more bizarre is how obvious it is that the guy Democrats chose to lead them to the promised land is no longer a member of his party's A-team. Kerry clearly wanted things to be different, to serve as a kind of president-in-exile, but his fellow Democrats never made room for him. "He had hoped to make himself the voice of the opposition, and that has just not happened," says one prominent party strategist.
Instead, Kerry has become just one of a slew of Democrats cluttering up the party's message, complicating efforts to present a unified opposition against the president. "Normally, he would be the titular head of the opposition, but he's not, so we have this kind of ten-headed monster that's out there," says Mike McCurry, a former Clinton press secretary and senior adviser to Kerry in the late days of his campaign. McCurry, who remains fond of Kerry, says of him (and of the various other Democrats who seem to be already running for president): "People have to stop freelancing. The reason people think Democrats have nothing to say is that we have fifty people saying fifty different things." Kerry's not the only offender, McCurry notes. But plenty of other Democrats say he's the main one.
Party leaders might be warmer to Kerry if there were much evidence that Democrats still considered him their standard-bearer. But there isn't. When asked in a November NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey whom they would support in the 2008 primaries, Kerry was Democratic voters' fourth choice. Hillary Clinton blew everyone away with 41 percent. Kerry's former running mate, John Edwards, got 14 percent. Even Al Gore, who's almost surely not running, tallied 12 percent. Kerry He clocked in at a measly 10 percent—lower even than the number of people who said they definitely would not vote for him again in the next Democratic primary.
Kerry aides consider such polls "utterly meaningless," insisting he is still loved outside the Beltway. "People in airports walk up to him saying, 'I should have voted for you' or 'I'm so glad you're still out there,' " Backus says.
But it's in the sanctum of strategists, moneymen, and influential activists who control the party that Kerry fares the worst. These are the people who feel Kerry blew his best chance and that he's "delusional," as I repeatedly heard, to think he's still wanted.
"He thinks it's about him," says a former Kerry campaign aide who had significant responsibilities in a key swing state. "He thinks all those people worked so hard and gave so much of their time because of him. And that is a gross misreading of the situation. I think he's under the illusion that over 50 million Americans voted for him, as opposed to the reality that they voted against George W. Bush."
Joe Lockhart says, "I don't think there have been many people in the last year who have been sitting around saying, 'Now that he has this practice under his belt, boy, in 2008 he's gonna blow the doors off!' "
Another big-name Democrat who is close to party activists and donors, and who worked hard for Kerry in 2004, is even harsher: "Nobody has enthusiasm for him. We should have won that last time. He was running against that idiot." ("We were running against an incumbent president in wartime," counters Backus. "It was a challenge for any Democrat.")
There aren't even many Kerry loyalists remaining. By the campaign's end, Kerry had alienated much of his top staff (he's largely severed ties with key aides like his campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill), and many of them never loved him to begin with. "He was a decent guy who wanted good things for the country," says a former midlevel aide. "But everyone knew he was unable to express himself publicly about the things he cared about. He couldn't get people to trust him and to believe in his leadership. Some of his longtime aides had some affection for him, I think, but beyond that circle, I don't think anyone did. It's amazing how much ill will there was towards him."
The former Kerry swing-state aide says of Kerry staffers, "They were openly derisive of the guy. And I'm talking about people who were there since Iowa, not just the people who joined up for the general election. Very few were Kool-Aid drinkers."
Kerry hasn't helped himself by bad-mouthing his former aides over screwups like the inept response to the Swift Boat attack ads that shifted the campaign's momentum for good. "I think the key question is whether or not he learned anything, and it's not clear to me that he has," says one of his former top aides. "Because he's still traveling around town blaming people on the campaign for things that he should be taking accountability for."
It's true that Kerry's organization did not have the Swiss-watch efficiency that Bush's had. But it's also true that no one told Kerry to come out and say that he'd voted both ways on that $87 billion Iraq spending bill, or to go windsurfing and snowboarding in front of photographers (in fact, in these cases, his staff begged him not to), or to give wandering speeches with no clear message.
Among former Kerry staffers, there's particular anger over his refusal during the campaign to release his complete military record, which fueled conspiracy theories and made it nearly impossible to shoot them down. After the election, Kerry finally agreed to release everything. Reporters—and his aides—were stunned to find there was nothing to hide. The only black mark: The records revealed that Kerry had earned mediocre grades at Yale. Many people suspected intellectual insecurity had held him back. If so, says one former top aide, "that's pathetic." (A nonissue, Wade argues: The Swift Boat Veterans would have distorted whatever Kerry did.)
You also still find intense anger over unexpected things, like the nearly $11 million Kerry had left in his campaign account after—yes, after—election day, which even some of his top aides had no idea was there. The news shocked party insiders. "People were livid," says one Democrat who has close relationships with large party donors, because that money could have been used to buy a few more campaign ads and phone banks or gone to cash-starved Democrat House and Senate candidates. (Wade insists much of the money came in too late to be spent on the election but would have proved invaluable in case of a recount, and notes that Kerry gave some $30 million back to the Democratic Party.)
Kerry aides admit their man has never been loved by Washington insiders, but, Wade says, "I think you have to distinguish between inside Washington and outside Washington." And there are those who insist you can't underestimate how much he learned from running once. It's a point Kerry himself makes. "If I get into that race," he told CNN last November, "having learned what I've learned, and the experience I had last year, I think I know how to do what I need to do, and I will run to win."
Kerry does have a Rolodex thick with the names of rich Democrats. And he's got an e-mail list of 3 million Democratic activists. "Anybody who writes him off is a fool," says Jim Jordan.
Several Democrats told me that they worry that Kerry doesn't have anyone around who is willing to give him a candid assessment of his chances. "I don't think John Kerry has a lot of really close friends in politics," says a former adviser to Kerry's campaign. "I don't see a lot of people going to him and saying, 'John, for the sake of your own pride, don't do this.' "
"My guess," says another veteran Democratic strategist, "is that a bunch of those money guys are telling John that they're with him—and they're waiting for Hillary Clinton to call."
Proof that God is a comedian: In November of last year, Kerry was called for jury duty in Boston's Suffolk Superior Court. Somehow he actually made it onto the jury, for a case in which two men were suing the city for injuries sustained in an accident involving a school principal. Kerry was even chosen to be jury foreman. Thus were born dozens of snickering headlines noting that, one year after November 2004, John Kerry had finally won an election. Such are the indignities of life for a defeated nominee.
It's enough to make you feel sorry for the guy. But then you remember the $87 billion quote, and the turgid speeches, and the Swift Boat debacle, and your empathy turns to anger.
Clearly, Kerry's fellow Democrats aren't about to forget any of that soon. Even a media strategist who likes and sympathizes with Kerry concedes: "People inside the Beltway want him to, like they say in Harry Potter's world, disappearate."
Sometimes they act like he already has. I vividly recall a moment on the Senate oor one afternoon in the spring of 2005. A dramatic showdown was under way over judicial nominations, with Republicans threatening to invoke their dreaded "nuclear option" and change the Senate's rules so Democrats couldn't filibuster judges. A large circle of Democrats had formed on the Senate oor, including key party leaders like Harry Reid, Richard Durbin, and Hillary Clinton, and there they held an animated conversation. Kerry ambled up and stood just outside the circle a couple of feet behind Reid, clearly wanting to join in. But like a cocktail-party clique that rejects a dullard, the group didn't part to welcome him. In fact, no one paid him any attention at all.
Perhaps it was an insignificant moment. Or maybe it symbolized something important: a general sense among Democrats that no one is particularly interested in hearing from John Kerry anymore.
Either way, the circle of senators remained closed, and after a few more moments, John Kerry, the man who for a few hours on November 2, 2004, believed he was president of the United States, looked around awkwardly and tugged at his shirtsleeve. Then, finally, he did the thing that he hasn't been able to bring himself to do on the larger stage. He put his head down and walked away.
MICHAEL CROWLEY is a senior editor at The New Republic.