Kerry for president -- or Senate?

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Kerry for president -- or Senate?

By Scot Lehigh, Globe Columnist | October 17, 2006

MANCHESTER, N.H.

JOHN KERRY is out to show Granite State Democrats that you actually can teach an old dog new tricks.

And judging from the response he got to a Friday night speech here, the voters who helped launch him into orbit in 2004 are at least willing to give him another look as the 2008 campaign cycle approaches.

Still, as he plots a second presidential bid, Kerry finds himself in uneasy limbo. After a 2004 effort whose strengths were marred by equally glaring shortcomings, he is neither a particularly compelling aspirant for the Democratic nomination nor a completely implausible one.

Further complicating things is Massachusetts political reality: If Kerry does begin even an undeclared presidential campaign, as the months roll by he will come under increasing pressure to announce that he won't seek re election to his Senate seat, which is also up in 2008.

Should he commence another national campaign, something considered all but a foregone conclusion, Kerry will be running against party history. Adlai Stevenson, who lost two races to Dwight Eisenhower (in 1952 and 1956), was the last Democratic nominee to secure his party's nod a second time.

Last time around, Kerry gradually became the favorite of the Democratic establishment. But that won't happen this time, not if Hillary Clinton runs, anyway.

That said, every front-runner draws a serious challenge from someone somewhere along in the process. The question is: Who will the alternative to Hillary be?

Should Al Gore also jump in, that question would be definitively answered. And yet, absent a Gore candidacy, Kerry would start as well-positioned as any of the other hopefuls to emerge as Clinton's primary challenger.

In a race that will see everyone able to raise serious money opt out of public financing, Kerry will probably start 2007 with a $10 million kitty, plus one of the party's best fund-raising lists.

As important for Kerry, after a 2004 campaign in which he seemed as much calculation as conviction, the senator is finally in a liberal space where he feels comfortable: Adamant in urging a timetable for a US withdrawal from Iraq, scathing about what he terms the lies of the Bush administration.

The first words he spoke after welcoming Democrats to the Jefferson-Jackson dinner were these: ``This war in Iraq is a disgrace." (Blogging on the Huffington Post last week, Kerry wrote of his 2002 vote for the Iraq war resolution, ``There's nothing -- nothing -- in my life in public service I regret more, nothing even close.")

His speech brought the crowd to its feet at least a dozen times, and left the Democrats I talked to impressed.

Still, in pre-speech conversations with dinner attendees, doubts about Kerry lurked just beneath professions of respect.

Some wondered how a nominee, particularly one who had warned opponents not to question his patriotism, could have been caught so flat-footed when the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacked his military record. Although most said they weren't ruling Kerry out, they also stressed that 2008 is a whole new race, and said they planned on giving all the candidates a hard look before making any decisions.

Yesterday, when I asked Kerry about the concerns over his laggardly response to the Swift Boat mugging, the senator called that ``a miscalculation," but one he insisted shouldn't disqualify him from being president. He also had this challenge for his skeptics: ``Who would have come closer to beating a sitting president in time of war who had an enormous fear card to play?"

If and when he does start out on the national hunt again, Kerry will be under intense pressure to announce that he won't seek re election to the Senate seat he won in 1984.

Kerry says he has plenty of time to decide. But though it would be technically possible to switch courses and seek reelection to the Senate as late as spring 2008, close observers think he will face strong pressure from his own party to make his choice clear by fall 2007, particularly if a plausible Republican or independent candidate begins eying the Senate race.

``He is definitely going to have to choose," says one well-placed Democrat. ``At some point he is going to have look himself in the mirror and say, `Am I going to shoot craps?'

At that point, something will have to give: The Senate seat John Kerry has held for more than two decades -- or the still-distant dream he's harbored for most of his life.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com

Boston Globe

[Bottomfeeder 244]

Neither, he's a Bonesman just like Dungya.