The bust: John Kerry was to have a stellar candidacy--oops.

Manchester, N.H.

JOHN KERRY is unveiling his early-childhood agenda at a day-care center. During the primary season, no child-care center either here in New Hampshire or in Iowa is safe from Democratic presidential candidates showing up to talk about how they will protect children. And Kerry is going to protect them but good. His agenda includes better pediatric food labeling, a Department of Health and Human Services investigation of "allergen residue contamination," more laws mandating the use of automobile booster seats, and measures to counteract the distressing fact that "nearly half of all the foods advertised during children's programming are cakes and candies."

Other than in the press release handed out to reporters, however, Kerry's proposals don't come up. Instead, his campaign has enlisted a handful of parents to sit around a table with Kerry and provide him the opportunity for a concerted bout of listening, to be observed by journalists. Kerry nods often and makes sympathetic sounds in the course of furrowing his brows and asking very concerned questions. He routinely says, "No, I understand." Occasionally he'll make an attempt at levity, unfolding one of his long arms to touch someone's shoulder in a gesture of good humor as he looks up and smiles for the cameras. After a good 20 minutes of this, Kerry addresses the reporters to make sure they've gotten the point of the exercise: "Uh, this is about people ..."

John Kerry is running perhaps the most labored presidential campaign in history. With a heroic war record, a long career in the Senate, a host of standard-issue Democratic positions on the issues, and a distinguished personal bearing, he has everything a political consultant would want in a presidential candidate. Except for the fact that he just doesn't connect. The emotionally hot candidate, Howard Dean, to whom supporters feel an intense, nearly spiritual connection, is stomping the cool, distant John Kerry. Since Dean is running almost even with Dick Gephardt in Iowa, it is mostly his success against Kerry in New Hampshire that is driving the image of him as a runaway, unstoppable force. After Dean's rise, Kerry's flop is the biggest story of the Democratic race.

The flop, just like Kerry's superficial attractiveness as a candidate, has much to do with his resume. It is not that his resume has any flaws, but that it is the main rationale for his candidacy. Presidential candidates who have long assumed that they would be their party's nominee--think Bob Dole--tend to run on their "experience." Initially the presumed front-runner in the Democratic race, Kerry followed the pattern, talking obsessively about his resume and long service to country. Even now, trailing Dean in New Hampshire by more than 20 points, Kerry touts his experience as the first selling point for his candidacy in stump speeches.

He is a slow learner. Experience is important, but no substitute for ideas, passion, and imagination. Worse, Kerry has talked his experience into the ground. His service in Vietnam should be one of his foremost assets, but he has almost neutralized it by talking about it so relentlessly. At times, you could be forgiven for thinking he is the senator from the Mekong Delta. McCain in 2000 made more deft use of his Vietnam experience. When he mentioned it on the stump, he tended to be self-deprecating, joking that it took no talent to get shot down. Otherwise, he didn't talk about his heroism as a POW, because it went without saying. And his war record dovetailed perfectly with his campaign's themes of duty and patriotic service.

Kerry's war record, so far, has dovetailed only with his resume obsession. The biggest item on his resume, of course, is his 20 years in the Senate. Commentators trying to make sense of his miserable showing have argued that service in the Senate makes a politician lose his common touch. Maybe. At the beginning of a foreign-policy speech in New York City at the uber-establishment Council on Foreign Relations, Kerry stands at the podium and banters with his introducer. Kerry briefly sounds like a normal human being. Then when he turns to his prepared text, he abruptly shifts to Senate Voice, a deep, I'm-a-great-leader, Orrin Hatch/Joe Biden/Ted Kennedy tone of voice that is so self-consciously serious, it almost hurts.

But maybe Kerry never had a common touch to lose. One underappreciated asset of the Dean campaign is that it is such rip-roaring fun for its supporters. Kerry never seems to be enjoying anything. He is an extremely finicky candidate, always concerned with protecting his own sense of dignity. No one will ever catch him in a Michael Dukakis tank-helmet moment. Nor will they catch him seeming genuinely free and easy.

After the Democratic debates, the candidates go to the "spin room," where scrums of reporters and cameramen surround them, jostling for position to get shards of post-debate comments. Kerry usually makes a point of not going. Surprisingly, he has decided to go to the spin room after a debate at the University of New Hampshire. But it turns out that Kerry has just come to do two stand-up interviews with television networks. So reporters find themselves standing behind him in a semi-circle, straining to hear what he's saying. His back is to the little crowd, who can only stare up at the mute back of his head, his silvery hair brilliantly illuminated by the klieg lights. It's a perfect metaphor for Kerry's storied aloofness.

The next day, Kerry boards his campaign bus, dubbed, heavy-handedly, "The Real Deal Express." An aide urges him to sit in the back to be "among people." Kerry objects, but eventually relents and sits in the last seat on the bus, sandwiched between supporters wearing red "Real Deal" T-shirts. Soon the aide returns to get him to address the bus. She hands him a bullhorn. He doesn't want to take it and instead asks if there isn't a microphone at the front of the bus. There isn't. Kerry hems and haws, and finally takes the bullhorn for what must be one of the most reluctant pep talks ever delivered.

For all of Kerry's struggles, Dean is not yet a lock. The former Vermont governor's chief vulnerability is that he is something of a phony--his left-wing populism a conscious effort to exploit an unfilled niche in the Democratic field. Shrewd Kerry supporters are on to this. A local Democratic county chairman tells me, "I had Howard Dean in my living room a year and a half ago. He's a different person now. Then he said he would get elected because 'I'm a moderate and I won't frighten them by being a liberal.' Now he's saying anything he needs to appeal to those leftwing people."

Kerry himself picks at this theme while taking questions at his day-care event. Kerry says that "the great missing story" of the campaign so far "is the truth about Howard Dean's judgment" on the Iraq war. He recounts that Dean supported a war resolution just like all the other major Democrats and that Dean was talking about Saddam Hussein's having weapons of mass destruction as late as February. "Howard Dean," Kerry says, "exercised the exact same judgment as the rest of us exercised." But Kerry is in a poor position to criticize other candidates' Iraq flip-flops, since he himself has lurched from voting for the war resolution to voting against the $87 billion to reconstruct Iraq and fund our troops. Kerry also seems to lack a certain killer instinct.

When Kerry briefly sits at the back of his bus, near a few reporters, I ask him if there are any other issues where there are two Howard Deans. He stares at me blankly for a moment. I think maybe my question is too opaque. I elaborate. Are there any other issues where Dean talks one way when his record suggests something else? Kerry still stares blankly. Finally, after an agonizing silence, Kerry lets loose with a "Yes." I venture a follow-up: "Like what?" He says, "Well, I'll, this is not, I'll, at the appropriate time ..." He sounds like a senatorial version of the marble-mouthed King of the Hill character Boomhauer. Then, after a pause, he adds, "You guys know it, you just want me to say it."

Well, yeah. He's the candidate in the fight of his life, getting trounced by an upstart running under partly false pretenses. Shouldn't that rouse him, provoke some unmodulated, unhesitant passion?

For now, it seems Kerry has another six weeks or so to go through his paces before his candidacy sinks forevermore. Before the University of New Hampshire debate, reporters wait with a Kerry aide for the arrival of a procession of supporters, who will do a brief march with Kerry before the debate begins. At one point, the aide leaves to see if a clump of people are Kerry supporters. He comes back to report, no, it's only people standing at a bus stop. Oh.

Eventually, the Kerry rally shows up and it's actually quite large. The New Hampshire firefighters have endorsed Kerry and are always good for providing manpower and bagpipers. Once it gets going, the procession stretches as far as you can see in the freezing night. Kerry walks at its head, lit up by TV lights, taking huge strides. He cuts an impressive figure. Right behind him is aide Bob Shrum, a large, unglamorous man who looks like the battle-hardened political consultant he is. He carries a briefcase that seems about two feet wide. Even now, he is calculating Kerry's next move. Whatever that calculation is, the chances are that it will be painfully obvious.