For Kerry, a new mission

AND SO the dream ends for John Kerry. He will never be president.

For a man who has craved the job virtually his entire adult life, that's no doubt a crushing realization, the more so because of the way his ambitions died.

Having clawed his way back into campaign consideration, if not exactly top-tier contention, he was done in by a botched joke, a stumble that reminded too many Democrats of the missteps of his 2004 presidential campaign.

The knowledge that Kerry administered his own coup de grace in a few inattentive, irretrievable seconds on the stump must be agonizing. It's unfair, because, right-wing nonsense aside, the senator obviously didn't mean to disparage the intelligence of US troops with his poorly delivered punchline. But then, as his idol John F. Kennedy observed, life isn't fair -- and presidential politics is even less so.

And yet, once the disappointment fades, this might just prove liberating for Kerry.

Those who have followed Massachusetts politics for a few decades no doubt remember Ted Kennedy, post-1980, taking himself out of contention for future national campaigns every few years.

When, in December 1982, Kennedy said he wouldn't be a candidate for president in 1984, his people couldn't quite admit that the dream had died. I distinctly remember one adviser insisting that Kennedy would still be viable in future years. But time moves on, and by December 1985, when the senator announced that he wouldn't run in 1988, the truth had become obvious to everyone.

"I know that this decision means that I may never be president," Kennedy said. But, he added, "The pursuit of the presidency is not my life. Public service is."

Kennedy meant what he said. No longer the human grail of fading Camelot restoration hopes, he reinvented himself, digging into his Senate job and becoming a legislator of legendary importance.

Historians have ceased to see JFK's as an epochal presidency. But except for confirmed Kennedy loathers, few doubt Ted Kennedy's place in the pantheon of Senate giants.

There's a lesson there for Kerry. For most of his career, the knock on the state's junior senator has been that he was too cautious, always carefully calculating the angles as he looked ahead for a chance to run nationally. Long on ambition, he's seemed short on conviction.

That's rendered him a politician respected for his brains, but hardly loved. It's an imbalance that's kept him from having the kind of stature his talents might otherwise lend him.

Now his chance for a national future has passed. But his opportunity to have a real effect on the nation's future has not.

There's hardly an aspect of domestic policy where Kennedy's mark hasn't been felt over the last quarter century. Kerry, who said yesterday he will devote his energies to trying to end the war in Iraq, might well come to have the same kind of influence, particularly in foreign policy.

After long service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he knows many of the world's leaders and understands international issues and geopolitics in a way that few of his Senate contemporaries do.

Freed of the self-imposed need to consider every move, to weigh every consequence, to worry about how each and every remark might affect his future, he can become a senator who tells the hard truths this nation needs to hear. And if ever we needed an uncowed truth-teller on the international scene, the time is now.

Let's be blunt. To fill that role, Kerry will need to pick up his game.

The senator is impressive when he's focused, but too often that focus has come only when his own ambitions are at stake and his back is against the wall. He's long been prone to lose interest when the cameras leave and he's faced with the unrelenting toil it takes to build a coalition or move an issue forward.

And then there are the mundane micromatters. If one had a dollar for every Kerry constituent who has complained about calling or writing the senator's office for help with this matter or that, and having nothing happen until he or she turned to Kennedy's office, well, you could certainly enjoy a tasty dinner at Olives.

But a determined Kerry could certainly rectify those shortcomings. At 63, his presidential hopes are dead -- but as a US senator, his best days might just lie ahead.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.