John Kerry

IF YOU'VE LIVED in this town long enough and remember the great Allan Prell and wonder what he's been up to, I can now supply that information. Oh, you'll love this one. For starters, Prell is involved in another major project. By my count, this is about the 800th major project he's been involved with since he left WBAL-Radio (AM 1090) in a huff back in 1999, when he was the absolute best thing on the morning airwaves. This time, Prell, flaming liberal that he is, has written and produced a song called "Help Is on the Way," which he's trying to peddle to the John Kerry presidential campaign as a rallying anthem for the Democrats.

Anne Smedinghoff wanted to help the people of Afghanistan, those who knew her say. The 25-year-old Johns Hopkins University graduate was attempting to deliver textbooks to school children there when she and four other Americans were killed in a car bomb blast Saturday. She was "always trying to get out and do things for the population," her father, Tom Smedinghoff, said from his home in Illinois. "She really felt she was making a difference. ... She was doing what she loved and she was doing great things.

THE FIRST inkling I had that Sen. John Kerry would lose Tuesday's election came exactly a week before, when I participated in a telephone conference call that the Massachusetts senator had with about 350 black clergy. After former President Bill Clinton introduced him, Kerry told the group that the issue of gay marriage was a red herring. "I ask you not to be diverted from the real issue in this case," Kerry told the ministers. "Fifty percent of the African-American men in New York City are unemployed.

So my boss, a nice enough fellow, wanders up to my cubbyhole the other day with an idea for a column: Lay out the positions of Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama on outdoors issues. As that great political observer John McEnroe might reply, "You cannot be serious." For if there's one thing I have learned about our relationship, dear readers, is that elections come with their own scorched-earth policy. No one survives. It's bad enough that every four years or so, some politician goes to a sporting goods store and buys himself (yes, it is almost always a guy)

TO: JOHN KERRY, Republican mole From: Karl Rove, White House political adviser I just wanted to let you know that the game plan is working perfectly. By all logic, the president should be packing boxes for his move back to Crawford by now. He's got a sluggish economy, Iraq is turning into such a disaster that even Republicans accuse the president of "incompetence," and Martha Stewart is going to jail while Osama bin Laden is free as a bird. Given all this, the Democrats had every reason to think they not only could defeat George W. Bush - again!

WASHINGTON - Reactions to the two men who want to be president come January could not have been more dissimilar. On one day, Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry won standing ovations and warm cheers at a conference of minority journalists. On the next, President Bush received polite applause, some snickers and a heckler's rant from the same group. The disparate responses to Bush and Kerry by a hall filled mostly with newspaper reporters, broadcasters, photographers and editors have raised the specter of press bias and partiality, with academicians, critics and journalists themselves condemning both reactions, raucous and rude, for putting the media in an unflattering light three months from Election Day. A crowd, which filled roughly three-quarters of a 5,000-seat hall, applauded 18 times for Bush during his speech and a question-and-answer period yesterday morning, while a similar-size audience interrupted Kerry with applause on more than three dozen occasions on Thursday and rose to its feet in appreciation more than once.

THE SIGNIFICANCE of election-year poll numbers often depends on who's reading them. Maryland Republicans and Democrats both claim that a statewide survey released last week favors their candidate. The telephone survey taken this month by Gonzales Research & Marketing Strategies found that Democratic nominee John Kerry holds a 10 percentage point lead in Maryland over President Bush, 52 percent to 42 percent, with a 3 1/2 percent margin of error. Republicans say the numbers show progress.

He had slaved over the speech for weeks. He had written and rewritten, consulted friends and professors. He wanted it perfect. But as he stood before his Yale graduating class and thousands of others in 1966, critiquing American foreign policy and questioning U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in his most polished oratorical timbre, John Kerry had just one problem: He was a little too well-rehearsed. "It was a political science student, policy wonk's speech. It was pretty analytical and dispassionate," recalled his brother, Cameron Kerry, who was listening that day. Five years later, fresh off a harrowing and heroic stint commanding a patrol craft in Vietnam, Kerry delivered a strikingly different speech, a wrenching anti-war diatribe to a Senate committee that he concluded with a question: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

WASHINGTON - Bored stiff in his eighth-grade classroom in Baltimore, Terry Edmonds did something he had never done before: He picked up his pencil and wrote a poem, "Release Me." It was his first crack at finding the lyrical in what seemed like the unbearably mundane, but it would open up a new world. Forty years later, that restless boy from the projects is still using poetry to lift up what might otherwise seem dull and spiritless - politics and policy - as chief speechwriter for Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Anne Smedinghoff wanted to help the people of Afghanistan, those who knew her say. The 25-year-old Johns Hopkins University graduate was attempting to deliver textbooks to school children there when she and four other Americans were killed in a car bomb blast Saturday. She was "always trying to get out and do things for the population," her father, Tom Smedinghoff, said from his home in Illinois. "She really felt she was making a difference. ... She was doing what she loved and she was doing great things.

"It is funny to hear all these Democrats who nominated John Kerry, who also had an heiress millionaire wife and quite a few homes, now making fun of McCain, who married an heiress wife with quite a few homes. ... No matter how many times conservatives point out all the Democratic millionaires, from Ted Kennedy to Nancy Pelosi to John Kerry, it doesn't matter. Those guys have noblesse oblige and it's okay for them to be rich." Betsy Newmark, conservative blogger

The country watches - some admiring, some aghast, many simply agog - at Bill Clinton's omnipresence on Hillary's campaign. His husbandly defense of her has opened up a huge can of waggish worms. Among them is the suggestion that the famous Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein song from Show Boat, "Bill," will be Senator Clinton's swan song, if she doesn't get a grip on him. I think it's time for former President Clinton to rejoin with former President George H.W. Bush and ... go to Kenya or something.

Billy Donovan's waxing and waning on whether to leave Florida and take the head coaching job with the Orlando Magic follows a long tradition, not just in sports, but in the public arena of flip-flopping. Or as Jimmy Durante once sang, "Did you ever have the feelin' that you wanted to go and still had that feelin' that you wanted to stay?" Here are some other flip-floppers who come to mind: Bill Belichick -- For several heartbeats in 2000, he was head coach of the New York Jets. But the news conference to introduce him turned out to be his exit interview.

BOSTON -- Last spring, when the tender shoots of Sen. John Kerry's ambition were rising again like a hardy perennial, I uttered a shriek: "Stop Him Before He Kills (The Democrats' Chances) Again." Mr. Kerry is a good, honorable, thoughtful man but an awful presidential candidate. And so the one person who choked up at last week's announcement that he wasn't going to run again was, well, John Kerry. But no sooner do we celebrate the demise of one Massachusetts candidate when up pops the next one. The unlamented former Gov. Mitt Romney is becoming a true contender, harvesting endorsements and attention in pursuit of the Republican nomination for president.

Finally, someone isn't running for president. To the relief of Democrats - and the dismay of columnists - John Kerry has decided that he won't be seeking the presidency after all. His window has closed, time isn't on his side, and nearly every cliche in America was exhausted by his previous run. Mr. Kerry is dropping out - before he dropped in - and he'll try to find better ways to serve his country than making bad jokes, modeling Spandex and insulting the...

An elitist insult to patriotic soldiers As the very proud mother of a U.S. Army soldier, I find Sen. John Kerry's recent remark sickening ("Tight races, harsh words," Nov. 1). I sincerely hope that the senator has plans for making a public appearance on Veterans Day. Perhaps when he hears the crowd's reaction to his introduction, he will then comprehend just how far he went and the hurt he has caused to military families everywhere. If, however, Mr. Kerry chooses seclusion on Veterans Day, perhaps he will hear instead the "tick, tick, tick" of his chances for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination slipping away from him - as they rightly should.

"It is funny to hear all these Democrats who nominated John Kerry, who also had an heiress millionaire wife and quite a few homes, now making fun of McCain, who married an heiress wife with quite a few homes. ... No matter how many times conservatives point out all the Democratic millionaires, from Ted Kennedy to Nancy Pelosi to John Kerry, it doesn't matter. Those guys have noblesse oblige and it's okay for them to be rich." Betsy Newmark, conservative blogger

CLEVELAND - Signaling a shift in tactics, Sen. John F. Kerry yesterday aggressively challenged whether President Bush completed his National Guard service during the Vietnam War, hammering at an issue he had declined to pursue earlier in the campaign. The presumptive Democratic nominee, a decorated Vietnam veteran, questioned the service of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, telling the Dayton Daily News that the administration is disparaging his national security credentials because they lack their own military record.

WASHINGTON -- Ever since he came within 120,000 Ohio votes of winning the presidency, Sen. John F. Kerry has refused to give up the idea that he could try again. He kept much of his 2004 finance team together and campaigned aggressively this year for dozens of fellow Democrats who could turn around and help Kerry make a comeback in 2008. But with one botched joke this week in California, Kerry not only sapped some momentum from his party in the final week of a competitive election but dealt a damaging blow to his own White House aspirations.

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? - John Kerry, 1971 Apparently, the state of denial at the White House is worse than I thought. In a speech last week to the annual convention of the American Legion, President Bush declared that if the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, "we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities. So the United States will not leave until victory is achieved." He didn't say what "victory" in Iraq will look like.