E-Mail This Article to a Friend Facing the finish line (continued)

WHAT’S ESPECIALLY embarrassing about all this is that it’s playing out in Kerry’s political back yard. New Hampshire — especially the southern tier, where most of the voters live — has evolved into an outer suburb of Boston over the past several decades. And though there are plenty of jokes that New Hampshire is where folks go to get away from Massachusetts politicians, the fact is that the Granite State has been exceedingly kind to Massachusetts Democrats who run for president.

John F. Kennedy got his start there in 1960. Ted Kennedy lost to Jimmy Carter in 1980, but Carter was the incumbent and Kennedy’s challenge was ill-conceived. The Granite State gave Michael Dukakis the push he needed to win the nomination. The late senator Paul Tsongas, whose seat Kerry holds today, beat Bill Clinton in New Hampshire in 1992 even though Tsongas’s was little more than an anti-budget-deficit protest candidacy.

In short, Kerry’s entire strategy was to win New Hampshire, thus generating enough momentum to carry him all the way to the podium of the FleetCenter this July.

Kerry partisans can and do argue that the senator’s advantage has been negated by the presence of another New Englander, Howard Dean. (Not to mention Joe Lieberman, of Connecticut.) But according to Tobe Berkovitz, associate dean of Boston University’s College of Communication, that doesn’t wash. New Hampshire, he notes, is saturated with Boston media — not just the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald (neither of which has been especially kind to Kerry), but Boston television stations as well. By contrast, Vermont media are invisible in New Hampshire.

"Before this election started, you could have asked the average New Hampshire voter who was Howard Dean, and probably as many of them would have thought he was the guy who ratted out Dick Nixon as he was the governor of Vermont," says Berkovitz.

Kerry’s problems, as Berkovitz sees it, are that he let Dean play to the "red meat" Democratic base without competing for those same voters himself; that he tried to have it both ways on Iraq rather than simply defending his vote as a necessary step toward getting rid of a "horrid dictator"; and that Kerry fails the regular-guy test.

"The problem is, Kerry is not engaging as a human being," says Berkovitz. "Kerry is not engaging as a leader. That’s the problem. It’s the old adage, who’d you like to have a drink with? Who’d you like to have in your living room? I don’t know why people would want to have Dean in their living room, but they sure don’t want Kerry."

Kerry’s dilemma now, Berkovitz adds, is that the only way he can bring Dean’s numbers down is to go negative — which, in fact, he has been doing in recent weeks. But in a multi-candidate field, every vote peeled away from Dean is as likely to go to someone else as it is to Kerry — perhaps more likely, given the electorate’s disdain for negative campaigning.

Andy Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, attributes Kerry’s failures to overconfidence, to thinking that his impressive résumé would be enough to win him the primary.

"Dean comes in here and essentially out-hustles Kerry for four or five months without opposition," Smith says. "By the time Kerry realized what Dean had done, it was already too late."

Smith also offers a fascinating insight into the minds of New Hampshire Democrats: contrary to conventional wisdom, he thinks, they are actually more liberal than Massachusetts Democrats. The reason, he explains, is that in New Hampshire moderates tend to align themselves with the Republicans, whereas in Massachusetts they tend to be Democrats.

This is the basis of Dean’s Internet appeal. Essentially, Dean has run a very liberal (far more liberal than his record as governor of Vermont would suggest) anti-war, anti-Bush campaign aimed at high-income, high-education, technologically savvy, youngish voters. Seen in this light, it’s not that Dean and his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, had any blindingly brilliant insights about the wonders of the Internet, although it’s fair to note that their decentralized, community-oriented approach works better than the top-down model of the typical candidate’s Web site. It’s that Dean and Trippi designed a campaign that was tailor-made to appeal to those who already spend a lot of time on the Internet.

"There’s nothing as compelling politically as having your friends get involved in politics," says Matthew Stolling, who’s worked for Kerry’s and Clark’s Internet campaigns and who now produces Blogging of the President (www.bopnews.com), a Web site devoted to the Internet and politics.

JON KELLER saw it coming. One year ago, the WLVI-TV (Channel 56) political analyst wrote a piece for Boston magazine arguing that Kerry’s then-lead wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. He even predicted that Dean was likely to be Kerry’s most formidable nemesis.

Yet Keller professes to be stunned by what has happened since that piece was published. "I’m as surprised as anybody by Dean’s precipitous rise, and the rapid manner in which he has clicked. And also somewhat surprised by the precipitous nature of Kerry’s collapse, although the two are inextricably linked," he says.

"It was sheer fantasy a year ago to think that he had some big lead," Keller adds. "He led in polls in New Hampshire because of the name recognition. And as soon as that was no longer an issue, he dropped like a rock. To know him more is not to like him. And, frankly, that’s the experience that the Massachusetts voters and press have had with him."

Now, Keller is no fan of Kerry’s, to say the least. But he touches on something that helps explain why it’s all gone wrong for John Kerry. Even here, in Massachusetts, Kerry is respected by many but loved by few. For 19 years he has had to labor in the shadow of the state’s senior senator, Ted Kennedy. Reporters don’t seem to like him much. Local officials complain that he pays little attention to their concerns. To put it mildly, Kerry disdains the "Senator Pothole" job description embraced by former New York senator Alfonse D’Amato.

Consider Kerry’s 1996 re-election campaign against then-governor Bill Weld, often held up as an example of Kerry’s strength. Yes, Weld was popular, perhaps the most popular Massachusetts Republican in memory. Yet he ran a lousy campaign, focusing on non-senatorial issues such as crime, welfare, and taxes. On Election Day, Kerry won with 52 percent — beating Weld, but running well behind then-president Bill Clinton, who carried Massachusetts with an eye-popping 62 percent of the vote.

Polling in New Hampshire suggests that voters there do not detest Kerry. It’s just that they don’t like him enough to vote for him. Consider, for example, the results of a month-old poll by the Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication, at Franklin Pierce College. That poll showed Dean trouncing Kerry, 39 percent to 14 percent; no one else was even in double digits.

Yet the same poll showed that 64 percent of New Hampshire Democrats held a favorable view of Kerry, as opposed to just 22 percent unfavorable — not as good as Dean’s 77/12, but far better than anyone else. And when asked who their second choice for president would be, Kerry led.

"I think the thing that’s most striking to me, when you look at the polls up there, is that his favorability ratings are actually quite high," says Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic strategist who has worked for Kerry in the past and knows him well. "People really do like him. But what that says to me is, he never made the case, or he hasn’t made the case."

Another way of looking at it, according to Boston College political-science professor Marc Landy, is that it’s not about Kerry at all — it’s about Dean. "What really threatens Kerry is nothing that he could have done much about — it is the Dean phenomenon," Landy says. "Dean found a way to touch the passions of an important faction of the Democratic constituency. He did that by mobilizing an unvarnished opposition to the war. That really wasn’t open to Kerry. He voted yes, and he has a view of these matters that is inherently more ambiguous. And I don’t think he is to be faulted for that."

Landy adds: "Kerry is not the sort who is going to stir the passions of voters. He is congenitally a more moderate figure in this highly charged atmosphere."

Still, Kerry slogs on. This past Sunday it was another day, another debate — this one sponsored by the Des Moines Register. Clark (and Sharpton) skipped it, giving Kerry a rare chance to score points without being diluted by his fellow war hero. But it was the same old story. John Edwards beat up on Dick Gephardt. Joe Lieberman took a tire iron — well, a blue pen — and pounded Dean over the head with it, comparing his refusal to release all his gubernatorial records to the secrecy of the Bush-Cheney administration. Kerry went after Dean, too, but nothing he said stood out. It rarely does.

Alan Schroeder, a Northeastern University journalism professor and the author of the 2000 book Presidential Debates: Forty Years of High-Risk TV, says the format has not been kind to Kerry. "I would say that for any of these nine candidates, if you don’t have the other advantages that Howard Dean has, you have to use that debate to really separate yourself from the pack," Schroeder told me several weeks ago. "And Kerry has not been able to do that. I’m not sure the others have been able to do that, either. But he just really blends into that scenery on the stage."

THE CHILI FEED in Milford is over, and Kerry’s volunteers are cleaning up. The room is festooned with rectangular KERRY signs alternating with circular posters proclaiming THE REAL DEAL, the latest Kerry slogan.

Kerry has changed slogans and campaign managers. He criticized Dean for dropping out of the publicly financed system of spending limits and matching contributions, then dropped out himself. None of it, really, has made much of a difference.

On the way out, I talk with a Massachusetts volunteer who won’t give his name. He only recently signed up, which I find interesting. The Kerry ship may not have sunk, but it’s certainly listing. Why Kerry?

"I’m utterly convinced that he’s got the best chance of beating Bush in the general election," he tells me, adding that Kerry is a "hero of mine" for his stand against the Vietnam War.

Well, what about this war? "I was disgusted at the time, but I understand it a little better now," he says. "It was the right thing to do if you’re a serious presidential candidate."

The right thing or the political thing? "Both." He pauses before adding, "I’m not the idealist I once was."

On that suitably downbeat note, I leave. In Union Square, about a dozen Kerry volunteers wave on the town common, a lighted Christmas tree in the bandstand behind them.

It must be great to go to a concert there in July, spreading out a blanket on the grass. But it’s cold and raining now, and I can’t help but admire their idealism, holding signs, smiling, and trying to ignore the presence of Dean’s local headquarters across the street.

Even if none of us is as idealistic as we once were.

The shame of it is that John Kerry, too, was an idealist who became a pragmatist. In another campaign, at another time, his pragmatism might have served him well. But not this time, not in New Hampshire, not with a president who launched a pre-emptive war under false pretenses, and who enrages Democrats like no Republican president since Richard Nixon.

In such an environment, the surest way to fire up voters is with pure, unadulterated passion. Howard Dean, a pragmatist, understood that. John Kerry, a different kind of pragmatist, didn’t.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com