And He's Off: John Kerry becomes the first to become an (unofficially) official candidate for '04. Is he as bad as Kaus makes him sound? I think he might be. His carping on Afghanistan was third-rate armchair generalship, and the kind of silly talk Kerry himself would've been all over had it been his cause. His hairsplitting on Iraq was just as bad. (Yeah, he's for it, but not really, plus don't blame him if it goes sour, since he's said that it could go badly.) So, no, he doesn't seem to be particularly an antidote to the Al Gore problem.