"Like a caged hamster, Senator John Kerry is
restless on the road," wrote the New York Times ' Jodi Wilgoren
(6/13/04), beginning a piece that promised "authentic insights" into
the Democratic presidential candidate. Aside from the banalities (Kerry
dislikes wearing suits on hot, humid days, and uses a cellphone more
than John Glenn did when he ran for president in 1984), what's most
striking about the piece is how closely it mirrors the Republican
caricature of Kerry, portraying him as an elitist with "a prep-school
cultivated competitive sensibility," whose speeches "are filled with
multisyllabic upper-crust phrasing," and as a "contradictory" character
who "is anything but simple and straightforward." Even his playing a
musical instrument is portrayed as somehow weird and un-American: "And
where former President Bill Clinton plays cards and President Bush
turns to the treadmill, Senator Kerry strums his Spanish classical
guitar in a kind of musical meditation." [more ]
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