Kerry. I have to say, however, that I didn't expect this outcome at all. I assumed that Dean's Birkenstock Brownshirts still had too much of a stranglehold on the nominating mechanism to be denied (which may yet prove true, he's leading in New Hampshire). It seems that John Kerry has far more appeal then I had imagined. Maybe that's because I come from Boston, where Kerry has been the Senator for the better part of a quarter century. My impression of him was always that of an unscrupulous panderer and ambition-corrupted political hack who would do or say damn near anything to advance his career. A machine politician in the classic Boston mold. He's never had any strong ideological positions and his personal charisma is negligiable (I've seen him speak live, believe me, its less than inspiring). Its possible that he's undergone some sort of personal growth in the course of the campaign, but I doubt it, I think his appeal that he's familiar. He's Mike Dukakis, Ed Muskie, Anthony Cuomo and every other good government mediocrity the Democratic Party's churned out over the last thirty years all rolled into one. His ideology is standard meat and potatoes bring-back-the-New-Deal Massachusetts Liberalism. Faced with Dean's psychopathic, bleeding from the eyes rampaging, they picked the easiest and most comfortable alternative, not surprisingly, it was Kerry, a man who's worked all his life to make himself an outstandingly inoffensive mediocrity.