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A fluff piece in Men's Journal, but noteworthy considering masculinity is going to play a big part in 2004. Will Americans feel more secure with Kerry or Bush in the White House? Will Bush's tough-talk make him seem more "manly" to Americans? Or a strutting peacock? http://www.independentsforkerry.org/uploads/media/john_kerry_mj.html"It's just the kind of ride I wanted," Kerry told me later. "It's a straight-up, easygoing, watch-the-country-side-go-by kind of ride. Really, I just got tired of those crotch rockets. All the time feeling like" - at this he leaned forward, extending his fists as if riding, crunching up his face - "you're racing. I just got tired of that, being in the racing position." --- Kerry reads the morning papers as quickly as he does everything else, meaning very quickly, muttering as he flips the pages ("Well, that's not good")... he Post is reporting that U.S. forces somehow allowed Osama bin Laden to escape during the Tora Bora offensive in Afghanistan, something Kerry had been fearing. Kerry grabs his cell phone, dialing as he reads. "Did you see my story in the Post?" he says to a press aide on the other end. "Top of the fold, page one right." He reads bits of it aloud, sentence after sentence seeming to further stoke his anger; this was the worst-case scenario of a military strategy that Kerry had been quietly criticizing for months. "They let him go," he says. "It's disgraceful."
Swearing softly as we slow through a construction zone, Kerry tells me, by way of explanation, "I've been saying this privately for months now, and my staff at times has had to restrain me. They talk tough, but it's a risk-averse strategy.
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It's never far from him, the war. At one point, I ask him if it's like Chekhov's old playwriting adage: If there's a gun onstage in the first act, it must go off in the third. "No, not like that." he says quietly, but the gun always seems to appear, as unpredictably as the nightmares that still dog his sleep (though less frequently now, he says). In Boston, Kerry and I are discussing has poetry, a longtime and private avocation.
He begins buoyantly, "I don't claim to be a poet at all; I just like the expression, the form of it," he tells me. "I like Pablo Neruda, who's a great romantic. I like all the Romantics: Percy Shelly and Byron and Keats. I like Kipling; I like to mimic some of that doggerelish stuff. Oh gosh, obviously Yeats. I used to read poetry on airplanes - to get the images, you know? When I was in high school we formed a poetry group. I don't even know if we had a name, though it was not the Dead Poets Society." It's a joke, but then Kerry slows, and for a moment he seems to amble away somewhere inside his mind, to a place friends and family say he often returns. "One of them," he says, "was a buddy who was killed in Vietnam, Peter Johnson," and the buoyancy is gone. It wasn't a joke after all.
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Historians agree that marked a turning point in public opinion; it was a larger turning point for Kerry, who rocketed to stardom as a darling of both the counterculture and the culture-culture - a bridge, as Morley Safer anointed him in a postprotest 60 Minutes profile, "between the Abbie Hoffmans of this world and Mr. Agnew's so-called silent majority."
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Can he win?
A key to that may lie, at least symbolically, in the brand-new Harley-Davidson Dyna Wide Glide now sitting in Kerry's garage - which is to say, in whether Kerry can chip some of the crust off his upper- crust image. Like the scent of clubroom leather, an old-world, old-money aura hangs about Kerry, manifesting itself in his formal erudition, his effortless parlor eloquence, his ability to quote great reams of T.S. Eliot from memory. George W. Bush, who was two years behind Kerry in Skull and Bones at Yale and raised in a similar milieu, rose through politics by disavowing his mandarin roots; he revels in his willful ignorance, his grits-and-guns demeanor, his embrace of common-sense bumpkinry as a means of endearing himself to common-sense bumpkins who vote.
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Glad-handing, har-doin' bonhomie, buttonholing voters while they're trying to eat their lunch at a diner - this is called retail politics, and it's never been Kerry's forte. "Being reserved doesn't mean you're arrogant or rude," says Kerry's second wife, Teresa Heinz, whom he married in 1995. "It means you're reserved. He likes to be alone - he likes to windsurf, likes to be on his motorbike." And it's true; Kerry's sporting endeavors, except for hockey, do lean toward the solo variety: rollerblading, windsurfing at Nantucket, and snowboarding and skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho. Sports in which the only competition is with himself - and, some would say, with the pricey, exclusive swaths of nature they're set in.
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Look, he's never going to be a regular guy," says Paul Sullivan, the political columnist of the Lowell (Mass.) Sun. "It's like trying to teach a fish how to yodel. But he'll stand up and say, ‘Okay, I may not be the one you want to go bowling with, but I know the issues, and I fight for the issues.’" Which brings up a seemingly valid point: Do we really want to recruit our presidents at bowling alleys? Kerry is hoping the answer is no, but in the meantime, as he revisits those primary states, he'll be playing up his regular-guy street cred, talking about his new Hog, for instance, or the hockey games he sometimes plays at the Fort Dupont rink, in Anacostia, Maryland, or his fondness for "unorthodox" sports, like NASCAR.
But an analysis of what Kerry can't do obscures what he can do: tout the level of experience he's gleaned from three terms in the Senate, tout the broad intellect that occasionally weights his speeches with wonkiness, and tout the expertise and foresight he displayed in his 1997 book, The New War, which dealt with terrorism. ("It will take only one mega-terrorist event in any of the great cities of the world to change the world in a single day," he wrote.)
Since first joining together on a 1992 Senate Select Committee to investigate the contentious Vietnam POW/MIA issue, have partnered on enough legislation to insure that a segment of the populace believes "Kerry McCain" is one tireless individual. McCain is not shy about his admiration for Kerry, singling out his friend's maverick streak for particular praise. "His efforts on behalf of raising CAFE standards alienated the labor unions, and for a guy running for president, that's not a bloc you want to alienate," he told me.
The partnership is so tight, in fact, that insiders in both camps are speculating about the pair teaming for a 2004 presidential ticket, according to a source close to the buzz - even without McClain switching parties, as Beltway rumors have previously hinted. As one well-placed Democratic strategist says, "Kerry and McCain together would form an almost nonpartisan 'unity tickets' that would keep the attention on Vietnam heroics, something sorely lacking in both Bush and Cheney."
When I ask Kerry about the prospect, he doesn't nix it. "I've seen enough in my a life to know that tomorrow can I be a completely different world from today, and I think John McCain would tell you the same thing," he says. "I wouldn't rule out or rule in most anything, other than you learn to do what feels right in your gut." And although a McCain advisor dismisses the idea as "summertime chatter," McCain recently shouted, "Kerry for President" as he was leaving a Washington luncheon in their honor - perhaps a clue, or perhaps a glib wisecrack.
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He's jaunty, feisty; at the DCCC dinner he'd joined his old friend and occasional guitar partner, Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul, and Mary fame, onstage for a singalong of "Puff (the magic Dragon)." Sometimes Yarrow stays with Kerry in Washington, the senator whispers to me during an earlier song, and they noodle around together on the guitar a bit. The senator has jammed with pal James Taylor, too. "At least he nodded approval," Kerry tells me. "I mean, there you are playing something for James Taylor and you feel like a total nit. Is he being polite, or am I being crazy? Probably a combination of both."
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