Campaigning for another lets Kerry be Kerry

Senator offers lessons of '04

Senator John F. Kerry said goodbye to supporters at the home of state Representative Josh Shapiro in Abington township, Pa., on Saturday. Kerry spent the weekend in the Philadelphia area talking to Democrats about his support for Barack Obama. (Scott lewis for the boston globe)

CARLISLE, Pa. - When speakers address the Cumberland County Democratic Party at its red-brick headquarters, they stand before a daunting pantheon lined with framed portraits of party heroes, including Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and various combinations of Roosevelts and Kennedys.

On Sunday afternoon, John F. Kerry entered through a back door, rushing past a lesser shrine to his own failed presidential aspirations: an 8-by-10 photo of him and John Edwards as they accepted their party's 2004 nomination, taped to a wall, unframed. Kerry mounted a chair, his pompadour nearly brushing the low ceiling, and launched into what he calls his stump speech to 150 or so activists at the party's steak-sandwich fund-raiser.

Kerry was making a case for Barack Obama, traveling the 2008 campaign trail as though a continuation of 2004, bearing cautionary tales and lessons learned, relieved of a burden of self-consciousness. Campaigning for a colleague may have finally let Kerry be Kerry.

"I'm very liberated about it," Kerry said last weekend as he toured Pennsylvania - the 13th state he has visited on Obama's behalf - in a white minivan. "What happens happens. I'm not worried about things. I know who I am."

Indeed, Kerry emphasizes Obama's most Kerry-like traits without apology. Kerry celebrates his colleague's campaign as a continuation of the 1960s tradition of lefty activism that first drew him into public life. Mocked for awkwardly campaigning in legislative language, Kerry proudly lists the other Senate graybeards (in addition to his own committee and subcommittee assignments) who have affirmed Obama's good judgment about the complexities of foreign policy.

"I think Kerry felt that he would have been a transformative candidate," said Robert Crowe, a longtime friend and finance chair for Kerry's campaign. "It might be easier to talk about somebody else than yourself."

Derided for suggesting in a 2004 debate that American policy should be measured against a "global test," Kerry today tells voters of the encouragement he received for Obama's candidacy from foreign heads of state on his recent trips through Asia and Africa.

"They're fascinated by the potential that he brings to our country to put forward a different face," Kerry said.

When Kerry, who attended boarding school in Switzerland, offered himself up as that face four years ago, a White House adviser sneered publicly that he "looks French." Kerry lauds Obama's cosmopolitanism - "years of exposure to other cultures, other parts of the world," he told voters. "I think there's a feeling that it gives you something that shouldn't be ridiculed or diminished," he later elaborated.

Kerry tends to avoid talking directly about Obama's rival, Senator Hillary Clinton, offering at one point the modest praise for her as "a wonderfully engaged and capable and competent public person." Kerry said he considered supporting her, but last year "began to feel her campaign was running more on a message of inevitability and whatever," he told a veterans' gathering.

Kerry exhibits little concern that the increasingly fierce contest between Clinton and Obama will damage the party. "It's going to end in unity," said Kerry, who calls undecided superdelegates on Obama's behalf.

"They ought to announce who they're for by early June," Kerry said. "There's no excuse for going to Denver in doubt, no excuse. People have to make up their mind and declare and count the votes. I think after Pennsylvania and North Carolina, personally, a lot of people are going to. I've been talking to superdelegates. I think they're moving."

Kerry said he decided in the fall to support Obama and "told him somewhere in December that I was prepared to take the plunge," although he did not want to damage the candidacies of Senate friends Joe Biden and Chris Dodd. When they withdrew in January, Kerry endorsed Obama.

Kerry was the first party elder to back Obama and has sent 25 million e-mail messages to his supporter list to raise money for Obama and to defend him against Internet rumors claiming that Obama was a Muslim.

Such attacks were "personal for me," Kerry wrote, because of his experience defending his Vietnam War record against the independent Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Kerry emerged as a self-styled expert on the nature of viral campaigns and the need for rapid response.

"The lesson of it is you have to be super-aware of exactly where they are, what they're saying, and what they're spending," said Kerry. "The Obama people have shown great dexterity in that - they did a very good job early on the Internet stuff - on the Muslim thing and the religion thing, and I think they've done a very good job on the Rev. Wright thing."

Above all, Kerry seems to present himself as an early-warning system for the difficulty of beating Republicans: a canary that managed to escape the coal mine, dirtied but able to offer a warning to others in the flock.

Kerry told crowds repeatedly about how the limited public funds he accepted in the general election forced him to withdraw resources prematurely from Colorado, Virginia, and Missouri - moves that he said jeopardized states he could have won.

"That's why I strongly urge Barack if he can to be outside [the public-financing system] because you can't run a 50-state - you can't run a national campaign," Kerry said. "I'm only saying this stuff in the context of what he ought to do. There's no rehash. It's water under the bridge."

While Kerry accused a voter of making him "wistful" by bringing up 2004, Kerry has trouble shaking off a contrail of sentimentalism that follows his campaign stops.

"Many of us put our blood, sweat, and tears into John Kerry," said Patrick Murphy, a Pennsylvania congressman who started his political career as Kerry's state veterans coordinator. "We still have faith in him."

Kerry received a standing ovation during a town-hall meeting when a woman told him, "You should have been our president, but you can't change that," and a chorus of "we're sorry" when he introduced himself "as I always come before people now: not as president" at a suburban house party.

"When we were inviting people to our house, there was a little bit of nostalgia, a little bit of 'Oh, I wish he had won,' " said state Representative Josh Shapiro, who hosted Kerry in his living room.

Much of the glory is gone from the campaign trail for Kerry, who now travels without Secret Service protection, goes into the store to fetch his own bottled water and Oreo and Chips Ahoy cookies, and fends off wrong-number calls on his BlackBerry, including three in a row apparently originating in Georgia, the former Soviet republic. "He was asking for Mr. Quasha," Kerry reported.

At each appearance in Pennsylvania, Kerry reminded voters that he had carried the state in both the 2004 primary and general election.

"I came here to plead with you to keep that lucky streak going," he said.

It is hard at times to discern whether Kerry's self-awareness is in surplus or deficit, as when he told a joke whose punchline involved Biden and hot air, or when he attempted to compare Obama to Abraham Lincoln.

"There was this lanky, awkward, gangly but interesting fellow - once upon a time," Kerry said in Carlisle.

"Not talking about me," he added quickly.