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• The New York Observer’s Joe Hagan, in a piece last week on Kerry’s not-exactly-Clintonesque abilities as a television performer, quoted — among others — Don Hewitt, the executive producer of CBS’s 60 Minutes, as saying, "The Democratic friends I have keep saying, ‘Wait, wait, he’ll get better.’ Well, I’m waiting, and I don’t know if he will or not. He may yet surprise me and make it apparent why he’s the guy I’d like to see as president of the United States. I haven’t seen it yet." Also weighing in on Kerry’s electronic shortcomings: former John McCain strategist John Weaver ("abysmal") and MSNBC talk-show host Chris Matthews ("almost like a Scandinavian winter").

• Ranting in last week’s Village Voice, columnist James Ridgeway went so far as to demand that party elders force Kerry out of the race. Wrote Ridgeway: "With the air gushing out of John Kerry’s balloon, it may be only a matter of time until political insiders in Washington face the dread reality that the junior senator from Massachusetts doesn’t have what it takes to win and has got to go." Now, Ridgeway is considerably to Kerry’s left, and he remains miffed that Democratic leaders "screwed" Dean. (Apparently the voters had nothing to do with it.) But what Ridgeway’s item lacked in seriousness it made up for in bounce: it was immediately picked up by everyone from Slate’s Kerry-loathing blogger, Mickey Kaus, a nominal Democrat, to John Fund, a conservative pundit for the Wall Street Journal.

"I think it’s not at all unique that this sort of thing happens," says Tobe Berkovitz, associate dean of Boston University’s College of Communication. "Since Kerry became the presumptive nominee, he’s been hammered by the Republicans, by Bush, by the media on and off for two months."

Berkovitz suggests a more crucial problem for Kerry as well: since the senator’s appeal during the primaries was based on the notion that he could beat Bush rather than on any particular stand on the issues or his ability to connect with voters, any evidence that maybe he can’t beat Bush creates an immediate backlash. "It’s not that right now he doesn’t look electable. It’s, ‘Well, why else did I like this guy?’" he says.

There are larger forces at work, too: the so-called buyer’s remorse that primary voters, especially Democrats, often experience after choosing their nominees, as well as a front-loaded schedule that left Kerry relatively unscrutinized by the media and the public. Some of it, though, has to do with the shortcomings of the candidate himself.

TAKE THE reconstruction money for Iraq and Afghanistan, which Kerry opposed in a Senate vote last year. (He was on the losing side.) Much to the delight of the Bushies, Kerry recently said, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." But though that cringe-inducing statement was damaging because it played into the perception that Kerry wants to be on both sides of every issue, he should have been able to turn it against Bush more effectively than he did.

Kerry switched his vote from "for" to "against" after he lost a battle to fund the $87 billion by partially rolling back Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. The wrong issue on which to take a do-or-die stand on tax reform? Perhaps — especially since the Bush campaign has claimed that Kerry’s vote would have denied desperately needed body armor to US troops. Yet Bush himself threatened to veto the entire $87 billion if Congress designated some of the money as loans rather than grants, something many members of both parties wanted to do. In other words, Kerry wasn’t the only presidential candidate willing to play politics over body armor. And as the nonpartisan Web site FactCheck.org has pointed out, the money for body armor in that appropriation amounted to just $300 million, or about one-third of one percent.

"It’s John’s fault for saying it. And that’s an example of him getting into the minutiae and overexplaining. It was in the context of explaining a procedural vote, and nobody gives a shit about that," says a source familiar with the internal workings of the Kerry campaign. He adds: "John’s been through a rough couple of weeks."

The Bush campaign has also attacked Kerry for voting against certain weapons systems over the years. An interactive ad on the Bush-Cheney Web site states THAT JOHN KERRY OPPOSED WEAPONS VITAL TO THE WAR ON TERROR. As Kerry, FactCheck.org, and others have pointed out, these votes were cast in the context of the military downsizing that followed the Cold War — and that many of the votes for which Kerry is now being criticized were supported at the time by Vice-President Dick Cheney, who was the first President Bush’s secretary of defense.

But the $87 billion and Kerry’s votes over the years are just chess pieces in a much bigger game: to deny Kerry the advantage he should have over Bush as a Vietnam War hero, and then later as one of that misbegotten war’s most prominent opponents. The Bush strategy came to its fullest fruition last week, when ABC’s Good Morning America broadcast a 1971 interview in which Kerry said he had thrown his medals over a fence at an anti-war demonstration in Washington. That seemed to contradict Kerry’s assertions over the years that he had discarded only his ribbons. Kerry blasted GMA host Charlie Gibson on the air, and, after the interview was over, muttered, "God, they’re doing the work of the Republican National Committee." Indeed they were: the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz and Dan Balz reported later in the week that ABC had actually received the tape from an RNC operative.

Republicans were thrilled; National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg went so far as to call the affair "Medalgate." The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby lovingly laid out Kerry’s shifting accounts over the past several decades. But Kerry — by letting himself get caught up in the details of whether he discarded medals, ribbons, or both, or whether medals and ribbons are or are not the same thing, ended up looking weak on an issue that should be his strong suit.

"That interview on ABC the other morning was just the worst. Nobody wants to see their presidential candidate look anything like that," says Republican political consultant Charles Manning, who worked for Kerry’s first Senate opponent, the late Ray Shamie, in 1984. "Why was he on there in the first place answering those questions?" Manning asks. "Don’t you put your press secretary on saying, ‘Here’s what Senator Kerry has always said’? I just don’t understand it. He looked so awful."

Later, Kerry began publicly challenging Bush to answer questions about whether he had completed his National Guard service, and to go after Cheney’s long record of deferments during the Vietnam War. It was a partial retreat from an earlier pledge not to make an issue of his opponents’ service, though it was understandable: the Bush campaign had drawn first blood, and in any event Bush’s choice to serve in the National Guard is not the same as whether or not he disappeared at some point during that service. But if it somehow becomes received wisdom that there’s something fishy about both Kerry’s and Bush’s service — if Kerry is perceptually denied the advantage of his remarkably distinguished military record — then Bush wins.

Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman, who worked on Kerry’s 1984 Senate campaign, notes that Kerry is not the first military hero to wind up diminished at the hands of Karl Rove’s political machine: in 2000, Bush’s Republican challenger, former prisoner-of-war John McCain, was subtly painted as mentally unstable because of his ordeal, and of course triple-amputee Max Cleland was characterized as unpatriotic in his losing Georgia Senate re-election battle in 2002. "They’re taking the asset of being a war hero and turning it into a negative. This is unbelievable. They ought to patent this," says Goldman. "They really do know how to play this thing brilliantly."