Nothing personal, GUEST. I just think you're unreasonably blaming Kerry for something other people are saying. You said that he was hiding his background under a bushel, for example. But I've seen no evidence that Kerry is hiding anything, and you didn't provide any.

Fact is, some candidates (like Clinton) talk a lot about their background, others (including Bush AND Kerry) don't. Dukakis did, Bush the first did not. I STILL don't know if Pappy Bush is from Maine or Texas! But Bush still won.

Remember, Kerry's been a public figure since 1971, and the first President to hire a professional investigator/smear artist against him was Nixon. He figures everything about his background that HE knows is in the public record already, so why belabor it.

By the way, it doesn't always work to be open about your background. Growing up, Al Gore spent his summers on a farm in Tennessee, where his father made him work from dawn to dark doing backbreaking chores. Neighbors and friends vividly remember how mercilessly he was worked by a father who didn't want him to get soft and lazy. When he tried to talk about working on the farm, Bush's spin doctors attacked him, saying he was the son of a Senator and never did a day's work in his life. The media reported what Bush's people SAID, rather than what was true, and Gore's true statement became another part of the "exaggerations and lies" that the Republicans charged him with.

Every one of those "exaggerations and lies," by the way, was true, from Gore "Taking the Initiative in Creating the Internet" as a Senator, to Gore reading in the paper that he and Tipper were the models for Love Story. Everything he said about his background was true. He was fully transparent. And it helped him not one bit.

So my point is just this: I don't see any evidence that

(1) Kerry is hiding anything
(2) It's better to be transparent