Just. Go. Away.

Away Team to Captain Picard: "Captain, we've discovered a flux in the time space continuum. An earthling named John Kerry is trapped in it and still seems to think it October 2004 and he has a chance to be president of the United States. We're trying to release him from this time warp, but he doesn't seem to want to leave."

UNFORTUNATELY, KERRY ISN'T GIVING UP.
Long Run
by Michael Crowley
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 09.23.05

emember John Kerry? It's been a busy week for the 2004 Democratic nominee. On Monday, Kerry delivered a long speech at Brown University blasting the Bush administration's inept response to the Katrina disaster and just about every other thing it's laid a finger on. Two days later, Kerry gave a floor speech in the Senate declaring his unsurprising opposition to the John Roberts nomination.

Make no mistake: Kerry designed these to be attention-grabbers. His staff hyped both of them relentlessly. Four e-mails from Kerryland popped into my inbox before and after his Brown speech, which Kerry aides billed as a "major address." Meanwhile his Roberts speech was garnished with no fewer than six e-mail alerts, a pace that might embarrass some Viagra spammers.

And the net result was ... well, not much. Kerry's "major address" was ignored by The New York Times, while The Washington Post lumped it in with a similar anti-Bush speech delivered by John Edwards. His Roberts broadside earned only fleeting mentions in both papers. No one seemed very interested. Even bloggers didn't pay much attention. (New York Times columnist David Brooks did use the occasion to slam Kerry as a cheap partisan--hardly the attention Kerry wanted.)

So it goes with John Kerry these days. Had 60,000 Ohioans voted differently, he would now be leader of the free world. After the election it seemed possible that Kerry would soldier on as the voice of national Democrats. Yet in a matter of just months he's gone from the face of his party to another face in the crowd.

It's not that Kerry isn't trying. Kerry has done anything but slink off into a post-defeat hibernation the way some other recently vanquished presidential nominees--Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, even Al Gore (remember the beard and the European vacation?)--have done. Well before this week, Kerry was traveling the country campaign-style to promote a children's health care plan he has, at least for the moment, made his top priority. Even as I write this, I see from the latest Kerry, Inc., email that the senator is touting another new plan to fight global AIDS.

No, Kerry seems hell-bent on redemption at the ballot box in 2008. You can see it in his strident attacks on the Bush administration, which he laid out in rhetorically goofy fashion on Monday:

Brownie is to Katrina what Paul Bremer is to peace in Iraq. What George Tenet is to slam dunk intelligence, what Paul Wolfowitz is to parades paved with flowers in Baghdad. The bottom line is simple. The "we'll do whatever it takes" administration doesn't have what it takes to get the job done. This is the Katrina administration.

You can also see Kerry's '08 ambitions in hints dropped by his political operation, which has never shot down speculation that Kerry would run again. As The Boston Globe's Peter Canellos wrote, Kerry's Katrina speech "had the air of a major political moment," surrounded as he was by his family and several top aides who "scrutinized his performance from the front row somewhat like the judging panel on 'American Idol.'"

And you can see it in that most reliable barometer of political activity: fundraising. As of August 15, Kerry's leadership PAC had raised around $750,000 this year, second only among his potential 2008 rivals to Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, who has practically declared his candidacy.

Yet while the political world hangs on every word from Hillary Clinton's mouth, and Joe Biden seems to be getting more airtime than Anderson Cooper, no one appears terribly interested in what John Kerry has to say anymore.

It's not just the media--it's Democratic voters, too. Kerry placed second in an August CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll which asked Democrats whom they preferred as a 2008 nominee. That doesn't sound so bad until you consider the numbers. Kerry finished with 16 percent, while the front-runner, Hillary Clinton (of course), had a whopping 40 percent. And Kerry was barely ahead of John Edwards, who placed just one point behind him. A June Fox News poll yielded similar results.

And it gets even more ominous. Kerry is especially unpopular within the world of netroots Democrats--the blog-based crowd who nearly lifted Howard Dean to the Democratic nomination and whose influence over the 2008 primaries will only be more powerful. The bloggers and their acolytes are still trying to figure out which candidates to promote for the next presidential nomination. But at the moment there seems to be no groundswell for the last nominee. In a summer straw poll conducted by DailyKos.com, perhaps the Grand Central Station of netroots liberals, Kerry finished with a pathetic 2 percent--putting him behind the likes of Biden, Virginia Governor Mark Warner, Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, and the estimable "No Freakin' Clue." (Wesley Clark finished a clear first with 34 percent.) Meanwhile in another recent straw poll over at the Kos-like site MyDD.com, Kerry tallied just 3 percent among 14 Democrats.

None of this should come as a shock. Kerry was never an inspiring candidate. He overcame Howard Dean at the last minute in large part because he could afford to give his primary campaign a huge loan. His feeble response to last summer's swift boat attacks revealed his clumsy political skills. Everything good about the Kerry campaign--its phenomenal fundraising, the passions it harnessed--derived mainly from Democrats' Bush-hatred, not from Kerry himself.

In the midst of Kerry's typically windy John Roberts speech, he paused and looked up to the Senate rostrum. "Mr. President, how much time do I have left?" Kerry asked. "The gentleman's time has expired," came the reply. And so it has.