"Look at that!" Kerry says roughly every five minutes to his 24-year-old daughter Vanessa, who has come with him today, as we drive through another gorgeous vista. "God's country," he says. He turns around and makes sure everyone in the car has seen the Berkshires' lush green rolling hills, as if we could miss them. We pass a cattle-crossing sign.
"Cattle crossing," Kerry says in his Yalie, Brahmin patrician way. "Swallows swooping."
Vanessa rolls her eyes, embarrassed a bit by her dad waxing poetic. "He's such a cheeseball," she says lovingly. "I mean, it comes out that way. But he's really sentimental. He really means it."
There is something about the Kerry style that has made him an easy target for critics, ones a bit harsher than his daughter. "Aloof and pompous," says a senior Democratic Senate staffer. Similar criticisms come fast from Democrats, especially those allied with any of Kerry's possible rivals. He's arrogant, a show pony, a media hog, hyper-ambitious.
"Show me one of these people who isn't ambitious," McCain says, defending Kerry, and paraphrases a famous line from the late Rep. Morris Udall, D-Ariz. "Unless you're under indictment or detoxification every senator automatically consider himself a candidate for president of the United States."
McCain says Kerry could be a good candidate. "John is tenacious, which is an attribute that I admire, obviously. He's willing to work hard. One thing we all know -- those who have observed and those who have been in a presidential campaign -- is it's a lot of work. And a number of people who decide to run find out how hard it is and have a tendency to kind of pull back and relax. John Kerry will not do that. He will go out like a bulldog."
Moreover, McCain says, Kerry is one of the smartest people in the Senate. "You may accuse him of a lot of things, but not knowing the issues is not one of them." Though, McCain allows, "sometimes he has a tendency to over-explain the issues."
And he can seem too ambitious, off-putting to even would-be supporters.
As soon as Kerry became a public figure, even Garry Trudeau, a liberal, someone who one normally might think would be a supporter, was knocking him in his cartoon.
"If you care about this country at all, you better go listen to that John Kerry fella," a stranger lectures Mike Doonesbury and B.D. in the Oct. 21, 1971, comic strip. "He speaks with a rare eloquence and astonishing conviction. If you see no one else this year, you must see John Kerry!"
"Who was that?" B.D. asks as the stranger leaves.
Responds Mike: "John Kerry."
In the Oct. 22, 1971, comic strip, Kerry is shown giving an impassioned speech at the end of which he is revealed to be thinking, "You're really clicking tonight, you gorgeous preppie."
Jim Jones, a longtime Kerry staffer who's worked as both his policy and communications director, says that the sneers that come Kerry's way are usually over his style rather than his substance. "He may have his flaws, but he wears them," Jones says. "What you see is what you get, he has no hidden agendas. And he's a very complicated person."
That "gorgeous preppie" -- or what passes for gorgeous in politics, at any rate -- has harsh words for his younger self, for the "brash" way he conducted himself when he was with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, for his fairly shameless district-shopping back in 1972 when he ran, and lost, a race for Congress. But those close to Kerry think that he's gotten something of a bum rap. It isn't something that has much affected what voters think of him, or what his national profile will be should he run, but among elites -- particularly those in the media -- there is a dismissal of Kerry that his supporters argue isn't fair.
Sure, he can be demanding and headstrong and longwinded, they say. But welcome to the U.S. Senate. During the '96 campaign, Kerry was slammed for crashing at the ritzy manse of a lobbyist. But that was during his divorce, say his supporters. He sure seems to love Hollywood, and his time between his two marriages (he separated from his first wife, Julia Thorne, in 1982; they divorced in 1988) seemed to be filled with lots of young women. He was single, counter friends, and much of that was overblown. (A 1997 Boston Herald gossip column had Kerry walking "with an unidentified woman" into a 7-Eleven for "some after-dinner snacks." Says daughter Vanessa: "That was me.")
Even Kerry's 1995 marriage to heiress Heinz, widow of former Sen. John Heinz, R-Penn., was cast in a cynical light, though Kerry says he hasn't spent one dollar of her money on any political activities. Other than that, Kerry himself won't touch the subject of media snarkiness, lest he be seen as whining. Though he did briefly brush by the matter in his Georgia speech, bemoaning "the cynicism of a press that wants to make entertainment out of news."
Next page: McCain: "Kerry's got courage"