http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=0185b192-e74f-41cc-a687-f0d49f2ee039&p=1I don't like the title at all, but it isn't the worst thing ever written about Kerry.
In early January, two days after Barack Obama lost the New Hampshire primary to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry appeared at Obama's side at a rally in Charleston, South Carolina, and gave the Illinois senator his endorsement. "Sometimes, the hardest thing for the established political world to do is make a clean break with the past," Kerry said. "The old guard sometimes has a hard time acknowledging an individual who breaks the mold. But let me tell you something: Barack Obama isn't going to just break the mold. Together, we are going to shatter it into a million pieces and rebuild our nation."
Kerry's endorsement came at a critical moment for Obama. Not only did it help him knock some of the "Clinton Comeback" stories out of the news cycle; an endorsement from the party's most recent presidential nominee signaled to other establishment Democrats--many of whom were still wary of crossing the Clintons-- that they, too, could jump on the Obama bandwagon. At the lowest point of Obama's presidential campaign, Kerry had given him a much-needed boost.
What was most remarkable about Kerry's endorsement, however, was not the endorsement itself but the run-up to it. After being courted by Obama and Clinton for nearly a year, Kerry finally decided, a few days after Christmas, to offer his endorsement to Obama. But Obama did not want it--at least, not at that moment. The Obama campaign (rightly, as it turned out) believed that it was already on its way to winning the Iowa caucus on January 3; it also (wrongly) believed that it would win the New Hampshire primary five days later. As Kerry later recalled for me, "We just agreed that ... we should let it have its own energy, not change that dynamic, and sort of hold it until it might be needed." And so, just before midnight on January 8, hours after getting pole- axed by Clinton in New Hampshire, Obama placed a call to Kerry to say he needed that endorsement now--that is, if Kerry was still willing to give it.
It's a general rule in politics that you don't keep endorsements in your back pocket, lest circumstances--and offers--change. In the case of an endorsement from Kerry, that rule would seem particularly apt. (A senior Clinton adviser says that, had Kerry offered Hillary his endorsement in late December, she would have announced it immediately; her campaign coveted Kerry's organized support in Iowa and New Hampshire, both of which he won in 2004.) Fair or not, Kerry has been dogged by a reputation for flip-flopping since even before the Bush campaign made it a central line of attack in his presidential run. For years, Democrats and pundits have complained that he lacks political backbone and that he can't be counted on when the chips are down. And, as Kerry himself realized, the chips were definitely down for Obama after New Hampshire. "The Hillary people, they were convinced that it was over--they'd punctured the balloon and it was done," Kerry says. "They'd won the big one, ... and they were going to win the rest of the states."
Given all this, any politician in Kerry's shoes that night might have been forgiven for telling Obama that he'd had some second thoughts, that (to borrow a phrase) he was for the endorsement before he was against it. But when Obama called, Kerry was ready with his answer. "Barack said, 'Do you still want to go down to South Carolina?'" Kerry recalls. "I said, 'Absolutely, let's go.'"
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