Trench Warfare: Kerry was cranky and his campaign began to drift

[CaliGirl]

Nov. 15 issue - John Kerry was really ill. In November he had picked up a cold, the ubiquitous campaign grippe, and by February he had walking pneumonia. He had lost his voice. He looked even gaunter than usual; Lincolnesque, maybe, but he was losing weight and he couldn't sleep. A week after the New Hampshire primary, while campaigning in Kansas City, Mo., he went back to the holding room after an event and lay on the conference table. "I'm really sick," he said. He couldn't seem to get up, making his staff very nervous. "I just want to lie here for a few minutes," he croaked. But then he got up, as he always did. When Teresa was on the road with Kerry, she fussed over her husband, recommending various cures and soothing potions. "Sometimes my mom is very happy when John is sick because she gets to brood over him," said Teresa's son Chris Heinz. But Teresa did not like to campaign constantly with her husband, and she had her own duties running the multimillion-dollar Heinz Family Philanthropies.

Campaigning can energize a natural politician, like Bill Clinton, who feeds off crowds and sucks up adulation. For the more solitary, shy Kerry, campaigning—the day-in, day-out grind of meeting and greeting and staying "on"—was always a labor, sometimes an ordeal. Kerry's best friend from Yale, David Thorne, his former brother-in-law who had stayed close even after Kerry's divorce from Julia Thorne in 1988, worried about the toll on the candidate. The campaign was "depleting" Kerry, Thorne believed. His old friend was stoic and dogged, and Kerry rallied under pressure, but there was never enough time to truly recover.

Continued (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6414892/site/newsweek/print/1/displaymode/1098/)

This article is 6 pages long.

[Wyatt_Junker]

The man lacked the physicality of the job, the mental steel, the freakish ability to rub stranger's elbows and fake a smile like one of momma T's knock-off orgasms. And he looked it. Runt of the litter. It was more than evident that Kay Fukker had a weak constitution. His bitch didn't kerplunk her long brown teat into his squawking baby bird mouth as a chile. And thereafter, he always got the beat down in a dozen playgrounds of his childhood.

All one has to do is just look at a person for a quick study. Physically, are they assymetrical? Do they lack proportionality in their limbs? Is their an awkward hitch in their git along? Do they have a goofy gait? A stutter. A constant klutziness?

Kerry looked like a picture perfect, textbook example of Marphan's Syndrome. It was like his face was always catching up with him in slow motion. And he was in the acute and final stages of the kind of acromegaly that could go on a circus freak's employment application. He was anatomically exaggerated, perpetually clay-mated, like someone ran his image through a salt water taffy machine puller.

He wasn't presidential material.

[SunnyBrook]

Good read!

[Warlady]

Kerry could be cranky. He was not a petty tyrant, like some bosses. He could be generous to his staff, who stayed loyal to him. But "he will whine constantly," said one top aide, quoting Kerry's bouts of petulance: "
Except for the part about not being a petty tyrant he sounds just like all libs.