lefty freeperville, plus. Sometimes it's the stupidest who speak the loudest.
You always see these idiots saying something like, "Well, I'm from Massachusetts and I think Kerry is a flip-flopping right-winger who hates gays. No one in Massachusetts likes him."
I find that interesting, seeing as Kerry was elected Lt. Governor and Senator - FOUR TIMES. Too bad no one likes him. :sarcasm:
It is the New England way to be outwardly unenthusiastic about such things. So you'll hear people say disparaging things about Kerry (and, I might add, Kennedy too). Here's a case in point. Charlie Pierce is a wonderful MA-based writer who is a huge Kerry supporter. He wrote one of the three best pieces on Kerry during the campaign, and my personal favorite. It was published in Esquire, and is still available at the Kerry reference library,
The Misunderestimation of John Kerry: Beware of this man. He's won every race that he was supposed to lose. Highly recommended. Here's a bit:
John Lewis looks down from the stage at John Kerry, who's shaking every hand and smiling a craggy smile that's not in any way easy or glib, but no less genuine for that.
"Look at him," Lewis says. "He's doing fine, isn't he? I mean, he's getting better, and we're working on him. We're working on him."
Lewis then gives me a grin, and it's the same damn grin that Chris Greeley gave me in that Falmouth saloon twenty years ago. Go on, this grin says, underestimate him. Lose yourself in the surface bull"expletive deleted"—the moneyed wife, the plummy accent, the windsurfing. Go ahead, it says, throw yourself into the national cartoon in which it's a story every time the guy receives communion because he's getting heat from a bunch of Roman Catholic bishops who ought to be lighting candles every day for the next decade in thanksgiving that they weren't all hauled off in a RICO proceeding. Go ahead and do all that, the grin says, and there he'll be at the end of it—stubborn, willful John Kerry, with his Ent-like presence and his drifting periods of political walkabout, dipping into the crowd until he looks something like a pol.
Does he feel it coming back at him again? you wonder. Does he feel the heat as well as see the light? The magic is there, a gift, right there in his hand. Does he have it in him to close his fingers around it? And if he does, will he notice that he's made a fist?
That's a native talking. Notice the blend of affection, jabs, and dry humor? That's the true MA attitude towards its pols. Just because we're not drooling at their feet doesn't mean we don't love them.
Those assholes out there claiming to represent the state? Not so much.
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