This could be big. But the MSM will do everything they can to spike the Clinton connection.
On the Go, but Not Running, Kerry Looks Like a Shhh!
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
The New York Times
May 7, 2005
WASHINGTON, May 6 - Ask Senator John Kerry if he will run again for president in 2008, and the answer comes back swift and sure: "I don't have any clue." But from a clean, well-lighted carpenters' union hall in St. Paul, where Mr. Kerry talked to 250 enthusiastic supporters about children's health care on Tuesday, a very different picture emerged.
Nurses, union members and former campaign volunteers threw Mr. Kerry softball questions, while a half-dozen College Republicans, including identical twins dressed up as "flip-flop" sandals, staged a protest in the parking lot. Inside the hall, parents who said they were unable to afford insurance shared tearful stories.
At one point, a 12-year-old boy with curly red hair and tortoise-shell glasses asked plaintively, "Do Republicans know what they're doing?"
The candidate - or noncandidate, as Mr. Kerry might say - cracked up. "Young man," the senator replied, "I'm taking you with me."
The big question, of course, is where Mr. Kerry is going. Six months after his loss to President Bush, Mr. Kerry, in a brief interview in St. Paul, insisted he wanted to "move on." Yet moving on has proved complicated.
More than an ordinary senator, less than a presidential nominee, Mr. Kerry is a politician betwixt and between. He has more than $8 million in the bank and an e-mail list of three million supporters, yet must still prove himself to fellow Democrats, keeping his presidential prospects alive even as he insists it is too soon to talk about 2008.
Mr. Kerry has made children's health care his signature issue; his stop in St. Paul was part of a national four-city swing this week to highlight his "Kids First" plan, which would provide coverage to 11 million uninsured children, a central theme of his presidential campaign.
He is expanding his political organization and wooing other Democrats, through the time-tested method of political courtship - money. He has given more than $3 million to various Democratic campaign committees, and on Friday night he held a fund-raiser in Boston for the 2006 re-election campaign of the woman widely regarded as his major rival for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
"We've been friends and colleagues for a long time," Senator Clinton said on Thursday in a telephone interview from New York, adding, "I'm so pleased that he would do this for me."
Yet Democrats say Mr. Kerry has little choice. "He needs to show that he's a party guy, that he's willing to help anybody out," said Steve Jarding, a Democratic strategist, adding, "When you don't have reporters and opinion leaders coming to you saying, 'You're the opposition leader, you're the titular head of the party,' it's tough to break in."
So tough, in fact, that not a single Democrat interviewed described Mr. Kerry as the front-runner in 2008. Most echoed Senator Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, a member of the Democratic leadership, who said: "There is not going to be a clear path for anybody to the nomination. I think it would be helpful to our party to have an aggressive competition."
Within the Senate, Mr. Kerry has irked fellow Democrats by twice canceling plans to talk to the Democratic Policy Committee about the lessons he learned in 2004. He said he had decided that the time for such discussion had come and gone.
"That's going backwards," he said, "and I don't want to go backwards. I want to go forwards."
But going forward has sometimes meant clashing with fellow Democrats. Earlier this year, Democratic aides said Mr. Kerry had exchanged harsh words with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader - a report Mr. Kerry dismissed as "absolutely absurd." More recently, Senator Mark Dayton of Minnesota was quoted in his hometown newspaper as saying Mr. Kerry had approached him on the Senate floor with "daggers in his eyes" to complain about Mr. Dayton's introduction of Senator Clinton at a dinner where he called her "the next great president of the United States."
Mr. Dayton waved off questions about the incident, and Mr. Kerry said, "I was joshing, and I think it got misinterpreted."
Some Democrats say Mr. Kerry deserves a lot of credit. Al Gore retreated from public view after losing the 2000 race, while Mr. Kerry is using his position as a senator to speak out on issues like health care and Mr. Bush's judicial nominees. From his seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has raised pointed questions to potential cabinet officials, most recently John R. Bolton, the nominee to be ambassador of the United Nations.
"I think the way he has been willing to dig back in is a real tribute," Mrs. Clinton said, adding that Mr. Kerry had "come back even better and stronger as a senator."
Donna Brazile, who ran Mr. Gore's campaign, said, "John Kerry is making sure he doesn't disappear from the political radar, and I applaud him for that."
But Mr. Kerry is not alone in that effort. His former running mate and potential 2008 rival, John Edwards, is also making political appearances and building an organization, and has criticized tactical decisions made by the Kerry-Edwards campaign last year. To that, Mr. Kerry said tartly, "He's entitled to speak about whatever he wants to talk about."
In St. Paul, Mr. Kerry said he relished his new role. "I love this advocacy," he said. "I love this organization effort." He said he did not miss running for president, though the Minnesota event looked a lot like the 2004 campaign, writ small. With no rope lines and no Secret Service agents to usher people away, his supporters crowded around him, posing for pictures, asking for autographs. Mr. Kerry obliged them all, saying afterward that he had become convinced that the only way to "change the current political dynamic" was "to go out to the grass roots."
Back in the Capitol, though, Mr. Kerry is elusive, rarely seen at news conferences and other public Democratic events. Still, he cannot escape the intimacy of the place; the man who came within inches of being leader of the free world could be seen, one recent afternoon, standing in the salad bar line in a Senate basement cafeteria, waiting alongside bureaucrats to scoop lettuce into a plastic carryout container.
"You know," Mr. Kerry said, when asked about that, "I don't think about it. I just move on." |
