Turnabouts
While watching my Georgia Bulldogs demolish LSU this weekend, I couldn't help but think about the last time I watched these two teams play. 'Twas early December of last year, and I was visiting a friend of mine who was working for John Kerry in New Hampshire. This was the absolute nadir of the Kerry campaign; he was trailing HoDean by more than 30 points in NH, and had just begun to shift staff and money to Iowa in a high-stakes gamble to revive his candidacy there. The Boston press was pounding its junior senator day in and day out, and every sign pointed to a humiliating defeat.
Kerry's staffers were putting on a brave front, and were still working insane hours (I watched my friend spend 30 minutes in a restaurant trying to talk our waitress into attending one of those ubiquitous firehouse chili dinners). But there was a smell of death about the whole thing.
Thanks to a blizzard that shut the campaign down for a day, I was able to talk my buddy and a couple of other pols into watching the SEC championship game. It was a brutal LSU wipeout, just not competitive at all, made worse by the fact that we ran out of food and beer during the first quarter. I left Manchester the next day feeling like I had escaped the Village of the Damned.
It's hard to believe that was just ten months ago. The recent brief swoon of the Kerry campaign--which has apparently ended--was laughably minor compared to what it went through just weeks before its Iowa and New Hampshire wins. The cliche is that Kerry is a "good closer." Where I come from, we'd say his campaign is a fourth-quarter football team.
P.S.--Let me be clear that no, I am suggesting any ties between the University of Georgia football team and John Kerry, or between LSU and George W. Bush (or Howard Dean, for that matter). I actually love the "Gret Stet of Loosiana" and all its honorable traditions of both football and politics.
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