which reminds me of this article:
http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_4129It's a great article, long but worth reading. I heard the man speak several times, couldn't tell you one thing i remember from those speeches.
So it goes for the man who, a year ago, was 60,000 Ohio votes short of learning the nuclear codes. His party is ?nally ?nding 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.”
snip
nate staffer adds, “There is this weird cognitive dissonance. You see Kerry in the Dirksen 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.
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