The Economist ($) gets a little Defamer-style snark when it considers Senator John Kerry …

WHERE do Democratic presidential candidates end up? The answer, to judge from recent headlines, is that they go to global gabfests in posh skiing resorts. Al Gore was at Sundance the other week with the likes of Robert Redford, Paris Hilton and various film people who claim they are interested in “issues”. John Kerry was at Davos with the likes of Kofi Annan, Angelina Jolie and sundry slobbering journalists. The skiing was excellent in both places, we’re told; the networking was au point; and the opportunities for meeting hoi polloi, other than as conveyors of drinks and canapés, just about zero.

… Mr Kerry remains a professional politician—the perpetual junior senator for Massachusetts, playing the pale thin man to Teddy Kennedy’s florid fat man. Conversely, he has also retained his tin ear for politics. Last week, he not only made the mistake of calling for a filibuster of Samuel Alito that had no chance of succeeding (to have any chance of making this archaic senatorial device work with a Supreme Court nominee, you first need to have demonised your victim); he also made the mistake of making that call from Davos.

From the perspective of Davos Man, this was doubtless an impressively global stunt (how Ms Jolie must have purred on the chairlift). But in the real world of American politics, it was disastrous.

Scott McClellan, George Bush’s normally lacklustre press secretary, joked about it being “pretty serious yodelling to call for a filibuster from a five-star ski resort in the Swiss Alps”. The Wall Street Journal sniped that Mr Kerry had been “communing with his political base” in Davos. Democrats were furious. They saw it as a transparent play for support from the party’s over-excited activists, the insider turned calculating insurgent (Mr Kerry even wrote about the filibuster on a left-wing blog). Barack Obama, a newcomer to the Senate, said it was silly to oppose a nominee unless you’ve won the hearts and minds of the country.

Mr Alito has now been confirmed for the Supreme Court, blue-collar America has been reminded why Democrats are not like them and Mr Kerry has confirmed his position as one of the perennial losers in American politics.

And that’s from a magazine that supported ($) Kerry in 2004 (albeit reluctantly, in an endorsement titled “The Incompetent or the Incoherent”).

If Kerry wants to get rid of the loser cloud over his head, this was not a good start.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2006 at 12:21 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Election 2008 Live Team Coverage!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.