Kerry finds clarity

John Kerry's announcement that he won't run for president is the end of a dream, not merely a campaign, so it was no surprise that he seemed choked with emotion on the floor of the US Senate yesterday.

Finally, the facts had become too stark to ignore: His inability to ignite his supporters, his trouble in overcoming a botched joke, and the sheer star power of his opposition all combined to make the moment inevitable.

That doesn't mean he accepted the inevitable willingly. But he deserves credit for accepting it with grace. He is once again what he was back in 1971: an antiwar activist.

Drawing on a famous line from his congressional testimony of that year, he said yesterday, "I believe now as strongly as I did then that it is wrong to ask more young Americans to die for anyone's mistakes. And I believe that a Congress that shares responsibility for getting us into this war must bear responsibility for getting us out."

Kerry's decision was an acknowledgment of cold reality. He had no chance. It didn't matter how many fact-finding trips he took to Iraq.

His chances were slim even before he botched his punch line just before last November's election.

You remember the joke, the one in which he told students that if they didn't study they would end up in Iraq, and he ended up implying that the troops are a bunch of dummies.

One on one, Kerry can be very funny. As a public speaker, not so much. Kerry got pounded; even dour Dick Cheney got off a nice line about Kerry being "for the joke, before he was against it."

The Iraq war may define this moment of Kerry's career as surely as Vietnam launched it. He lost the presidential election largely because of his inability to articulate what he really thought about the war.

Now, that same war has given him a way to gracefully bow out of the presidential sweepstakes, declaring that the greatest thing he could do is to fight for a deadline for withdrawing the troops.

While Kerry appeared out of step with much of the electorate on the war in 2004, much of the country now joins him in scorning it.

There's a role for any senator who can find a sensible and honorable way forward, even if that isn't the role Kerry had hoped to play over the next few years.

Senators are by definition an ambitious group, but there can't be many who pined for the Oval Office as desperately as Kerry has. He has been running virtually since the day he got back from Vietnam, and he dreamed of it for a decade before that. It's no exaggeration, really, to say his whole career has been aimed at the While House.

Still, the death of a dream can be liberating. For an example, he doesn't have to look any further than his Senate colleague, Edward M. Kennedy, who fashioned a great career in the Senate after his presidential ambitions were dashed.

Kerry's demurral was not without his usual moments of awkwardness. He put up a five-minute video on his website, explaining his decision to his supporters.

Where one might have expected a stirring conclusion, perhaps an appeal to the greatest American values, there was instead this: "I hope you will come to www.setadeadline.com and take the opportunity to speak out on the importance of setting a deadline to redeploy our troops and bring our heroes home. Speak out at www.setadeadline.com."

No threat to Lincoln's legacy there.

Still, eloquence is not everything. Clarity counts for a lot, too, even clarity imposed, as this was, from outside.

John Kerry is a smart, able politician who, as it happens, will not be the next president of the United States.

But to take him at his word, he has a new dream: working to bring home the troops. It is less lofty, to be sure, but no less worthy.

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.