Kerry run in '08 called conceivable

Page 2 of 2 -- Kerry would also face the challenges of history and age. He will be 64 in 2008, one year younger than Ronald Reagan when he ran for president in 1976. Reagan narrowly lost to Gerald Ford in the primaries and then successfully challenged Jimmy Carter for the presidency in 1980.

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The last Democratic nominee for president to run a second consecutive time as the party's standard bearer was Adlai Stevenson, who lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. Stevenson was renominated in 1956 and defeated by President Eisenhower in the general election. The only candidate in the 20th century to be the party's nominee and lose the White House and then run successfully in a future election was Republican Richard M. Nixon, who was defeated by John F. Kennedy in 1960 and then beat Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968. Humphrey ran again for the Democratic nomination in 1972, but withdrew in the face of overwhelming odds at the party's convention.

In the meantime, Kerry is weighing whether to start a political action committee to advance his ideals. He used a similar account, the Citizen Soldier Fund, to support Democratic candidates for state offices and operations in Iowa and New Hampshire in advance of his just-completed race.

Bush won last week's election by a margin of 3.5 million votes -- 59.4 million to 55.9 million. The tallies were the two highest ever received in a presidential race. The incumbent president received 286 Electoral College votes to Kerry's 252. Bush claimed victory after winning Ohio by a margin of 136,000 votes.

While exit polls indicated Bush beat Kerry by a wide margin among voters who declared that morals and leadership were most important to them in a president, Karl Rove, the president's chief political strategist, said Sunday on "Meet the Press" that Bush won by first convincing voters he would be stronger in the war on terror and a better custodian of the economy through a program of expanded tax cuts.

Rove had a strategy of turning out more votes from the president's base, including Christian conservatives, and Democrats have said in recent days that is what won the race for Bush in Ohio, an economically ailing state that has lost more than 260,000 jobs during his term.

The former aide said Kerry plans to work closely with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who is expected to replace Tom Daschle as Senate Democratic leader, to form the "loyal opposition" to Bush. He also plans to revamp his staff and meet this week with Senate and former campaign aides to plot strategy for his political reemergence. The Senate returns to business in a lame duck session next week, and Kerry is determined to have an agenda when he steps back into public view.

Toward that end, "he has been working the phones like crazy," the aide said, and "is determined that he will never let Democrats get beaten again on the ground game."

While there had been some speculation that Kerry might challenge Reid for the Senate leadership, two top Kerry advisers said he has already thrown his support behind Reid.

Cameron F. Kerry said that while last week's results left his brother "profoundly disappointed," "I think he feels in many respects good. I think many people feel good about his performance in this race. I think he feels like he did what he had to do. But I think he's really looking ahead -- at the next steps -- and not dwelling on what might have been."

He said that in their weekend conversations, John Kerry "talked about next steps" and "how to be a voice."

Glen Johnson can be reached at johnson@globe.com.