Kerry to postpone decision on '08 run

WASHINGTON -- Senator John F. Kerry's election-eve "botched joke" about the war in Iraq -- and the fierce denunciations his comments drew from fellow Democrats -- has led him to reevaluate whether to mount a run for the presidency in 2008 and has led him to delay an announcement about his decision, according to Kerry associates.

The Massachusetts Democrat is now leaning toward waiting until late spring before declaring his intentions, even as other candidates jump into the race and begin building organizing and fund-raising teams in early-primary states. Before the joke derailed his comeback, Kerry had signaled that he would decide whether to run by the end of January.

Kerry -- who had methodically resurrected his political standing after a tough loss to President Bush in 2004 -- was stunned by the swift, angry reaction to his Oct. 30 statement that underachieving students would end up "stuck in Iraq." Aides and friends say the senator was particularly stung by the fact that so many Democrats had joined Republicans in rebuking him.

The incident laid bare to the senator the lingering skepticism and resentment of him two years after he failed to unseat Bush, according to Kerry advisers who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In recent media interviews, Kerry has downplayed the impact of the incident, and has declared himself ready to jump into Senate business with renewed vigor when Democrats take control of Congress in January.

"I botched a joke; they botched the war," Kerry said on CNN's "Larry King Live" on Wednesday. "We've had an election. We won, incidentally. And I think now we have an opportunity to move the country in a new direction, and that's important."

Kerry aides say he always intended to delay an announcement of his presidential intentions if Democrats became the majority in Congress, because much of the focus in early 2007 will be on the party's agenda. They argue that the $14 million he has in his campaign coffers gives him the luxury of time: He can watch the presidential field solidify before committing.

Since the Nov. 7 elections, Kerry and his advisers have evaluated the damage his remark made to his image. For many Democrats, his verbal stumble revived memories of Kerry's famous campaign-trail equivocations, said Dan Payne, a Democratic consultant who has worked with Kerry.

"It's had the effect of reminding people of his worst moments in '04," Payne said. "It's not the joke; it's what it revealed that was damaging. It represents John Kerry's failure to learn the lessons of his last campaign, to watch what you say because Bush and [Karl] Rove might be listening."

Kerry might have expected Republican attacks, but prominent Democrats, worried that the gaffe would hurt them at the polls, were just as quick to distance themselves from their former presidential nominee. Representative Harold E. Ford Jr. of Tennessee, a longtime ally, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, one of Kerry's possible 2008 rivals, were among those who publicly scolded him.

Philip W. Johnston, chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, called it "disgraceful" that Kerry's own party quickly rebuked him. But he added that the incident showed that many Democrats are still angry about Kerry's defeat in 2004.

"People did not trash him after the election two years ago, and it's almost like all of the pent-up frustration came after the joke," Johnston said.

"We won the '06 election," Johnston said. "I think it's pretty much over [for Kerry]. Now we can move on."

Speaking eight days before the elections, Kerry said: "Education: If you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

According to a text his aides issued later, Kerry was supposed to say "you get us stuck in Iraq," and then point to the president. Yet when critics called it an insult to the troops, Kerry did not clarify his remarks or apologize for two days, and he shifted only after the White House whipped it into a firestorm .

Kerry was forced into political exile for the last week of the campaign, canceling four 11th-hour public appearances. The incident also drained much of the good will Kerry had meticulously built in the preceding months, helping Democrats raise money and refining his antiwar message.

David Thorne, Kerry's friend and former brother-in-law, said it was "very hard to determine" the full impact of the mistake because it was difficult to separate the partisan "noise" from the substantive damage to Kerry's image.

Thorne said Kerry will make his decision about the presidency mindful of how analysts predicted he'd lose both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary; he ultimately won both en route to the Democratic nomination -- and a narrow loss to Bush.

"One thing I can assure you of is that the Washington pundit class really gets it wrong a lot of the time," Thorne said.

Kerry and his top aides reached out to his network of fund-raisers shortly after the incident and in the weeks since, to reassure those concerned about whether the senator could secure the nomination.

Yet a Quinnipiac University poll released this week offered Kerry a sobering snapshot of his standing with voters. Respondents were asked to judge 20 national political leaders based on the warmth of their feelings toward them, and Kerry came in dead last -- well behind several other possible Democratic candidates, and even below the president, who was repudiated in last month's congressional elections.

(Correction: Because of an editing error, a quote by Massachusetts Democratic Party chairman Philip W. Johnston was altered in Saturday's Nation pages. Johnston said the controversy over Massachusetts Senator John F. Kerry's verbal blunder is over, not the possibility that Kerry could run for president.)