From the left leaning news weekly City Pages:

50,000,000 Kerry Fans Can't Be Wrong Can They?

Many longtime Kerry watchers still insist that down deep, he's made of wood. In Boston, Kerry is a famous target of mockery for liberal and conservative columnists alike. The criticisms usually concern his imperious manner, his love of privilege, his unerring sense of what is best for John Kerry. For years his nickname among reporters was "Live Shot," a reference to Kerry's gift for turning up in front of any camera in his vicinity. If he is elected, his wife's nearly half-billion-dollar fortune will make him the wealthiest president the country has ever had...

For a generation now, the Democratic Party has played me-too politics and unswervingly followed Republican leads...

In the Clinton era, the Democrats became adept at drinking from the same corporate fountains as Republicans. But as Alan Murray wrote in the Wall Street Journal on January 27, "those days are over. If any Fortune 500 CEOs are backing John Kerry, they are keeping quiet about it."

Thus the Democrats, for the first time in modern memory, find themselves forced to sing to the people in the cheap seats for their supper.

The public has begun to see that left versus right is not the name of the game. "Left" and "right," after all, have not had a consequential public disagreement in many years. The split that is inflaming the public mood is the one between insiders and outsiders.

This is the taproot of popular animus toward Bush, but it also happens to be Kerry's great weakness. The real payoff in Republican attacks on Kerry will come from taking shots not at his voting record but at who he is: a mainstay D.C. insider who can be shown, without much trouble, to have twisted with the political breezes all through his career. They will point out that although Kerry may have awakened one recent morn on the wrong side of "special interests," he is still the leading recipient of lobbyist contributions in the US Senate over the past 15 years.

They will pound at the frequent and cheerful hypocrisy of Kerry's collected public utterances, the most famous being his Yes vote on the Iraq war he now condemns. But there's no shortage of examples. JK on the Patriot Act now: "We are a nation of laws and liberties, not of a knock in the night. So it is time to end the era of John Ashcroft. That starts with replacing the Patriot Act with a new law that protects our people and our liberties at the same time." JK on the Patriot Act then: "It reflects an enormous amount of hard work by the members of the Senate Banking Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. I congratulate them and thank them for that work... [I am] pleased at the compromise we have reached on the anti-terrorism legislation."

And they will trawl up story after story about the kind of guy Kerry is. Howie Carr, one of those Boston columnists who's made a cottage industry of mocking his state's junior senator, recently published a brief compendium of some popular yarns. It's worth quoting at some length to catch the flavor:

"The tales often have one other common thread. Most end with Sen. Kerry inquiring of the lesser mortal: 'Do you know who I am?'

"And now he's running for president as a populist. His first wife came from a Philadelphia Main Line family worth $300 million. His second wife is a pickle-and-ketchup heiress.

"Kerry lives in a mansion on Beacon Hill on which he has borrowed $6 million to finance his campaign. A fire hydrant that prevented him and his wife from parking their SUV in front of their tony digs was removed by the city of Boston at his behest.

"The Kerrys ski at a spa the widow Heinz owns in Aspen, and they summer on Nantucket in a sprawling seaside 'cottage' on Hurlbert Avenue, which is so well-appointed that at a recent fundraiser, they imported porta-toilets onto the front lawn so the donors wouldn't use the inside bathrooms."

Democratic partisans and Bush haters of every stripe will rightly retort that Kerry's sins are far less egregious and consequential than Bush's, but that's not the point. Karl Rove saw the numbers of "nontraditional voters" giving money to Dean at the start, and he has no doubt noticed the record numbers turning out for primaries and caucuses. He's not stupid. The eventual Republican endgame will be to stifle public interest in the whole mess and depress the number of voters that turns out in November.