The Air Up There
Sometimes Kerry feeds the caricature.
"I don't fall down," Kerry said to a reporter who asked him about a spill he'd taken during a ski vacation in Ketchum, Idaho, last month. "That son of a bitch ran into me," he said, pointing to a Secret Service agent who'd accidentally skied into him.
Kerry was once pulled over by a D.C. cop for making an illegal turn -- a vignette made semi-famous in a 1996 profile of Kerry in Boston Magazine.
Instead of shrugging his shoulders or feigning mortification to the reporter in the back seat, Kerry said: "You know, constitutionally, he can't pull me over when we're in session. That's the law." And also the lead of the story.
Such episodes mount, circulate:
About how Kerry could be heard chewing -- he was apparently eating dinner -- during a conference call with his stunned staff to discuss the firing of campaign manager Jim Jordan in November.
About how staffers from rival presidential campaigns say Kerry was the candidate least likely to greet them backstage at Democratic primary debates.
About an oft-recounted incident that allegedly happened on the night Al Gore won the New Hampshire primary four years ago. Early in the evening, exit polls were predicting an upset win for Bill Bradley. Gore was waiting in a holding room at the Holiday Inn in Manchester. He was in a bad mood, and his aides were treading lightly.
Not Kerry, who approached Gore and, according to accounts by two people who were at the hotel that night, began explaining to the vice president why he was losing. Gore retreated to another room and told an aide to "get this [expletive] out of here," referring to the Massachusetts senator, who had been campaigning for him. Tony Coelho, Gore's campaign chairman, led Kerry away.
Kerry strategist Bob Shrum, who also advised Gore and who was present that night, says he doesn't recall the incident and doesn't think it happened. Gore, through a spokeswoman, says he can't recall it, either. But the vignette endures within Gore's circle as an example of Kerry's social tone-deafness at times and his tendency to misread situations.
Teresa Heinz Kerry observes that her husband tends to concentrate intensely on what he's doing to the exclusion of people around him. "Whether he's playing the guitar, or on a windsurfer, or writing poetry, or riding a motorbike, he's in his own world," Heinz Kerry said in an interview two years ago. "So maybe that's why he can come off as aloof."
Kerry is 6-4 and leans over people when speaking to them one-on-one. "It makes him look like he's above people," Heinz Kerry said.
After meeting Kerry during the primary campaign, Sen. John Edwards's father, Wallace, remarked that he believed Kerry was "talking down" to him.
Impressions calcify. Kerry "doesn't warm anybody up," according to a memo summarizing the views expressed in a focus group of undecided union voters assembled by the AFL-CIO and published by the Associated Press earlier this month. Participants in the focus group sessions, which were conducted in St. Louis and Philadelphia, said they found Bush more likable than Kerry, and that the perception that he is aloof remains a problem.
