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Kerry is going to be a more formidable opponent than Dukakis.

I have seen this guy up close and personal in various stages of his career.

Strengths

(1) Women do love the guy. He has to fight them off with a stick. I actually saw him on CSpan have to fight off the attentions of one female staffer who just didn't want to get out of his face.

(2) He is very intelligent and probably will avoid the obvious stupid mistakes. He will run in the primary as a moderate and run from the center in the general election. He is a liberal but is too smart to admit it outside Massachusetts and the halls of the Senate.

(3) His wife's money.

(4) The media will suck up to him if the going gets tough.

(5) Vietnam Vet.

Weaknesses:

(1) Aloofness, arrogance. He thinks he is God's gift to the planet and he has a hard time hiding it. His tone of moral superiority should grate blue collar voters.

(2) Conventional thinking. He is used to a closed environment where everyone agrees with him on political matters in Massachusetts. He has never had to weather a frontal assault by determined adversaries (at least in politics).

(3) He is from Massachusetts. That alone should lose him every state in the South. It is the equivalent of the Republicans nominating a candidate from Alabama.

(4) He is part of a corrupt Massachusetts machine. Political contributors can buy favor from the state government through his machine. Eventually this could come back to haunt him.

(5) Has he always been successful in fighting off those female advances? Rumors are he may have submitted to temptation from time to time. Could he have a "Gary Hart" problem in his future?

Great analysis. Kerry knows that to win, he will have to be tough on national security, so he will be. He will play up the "choice" issue, also trying to target tax cuts to the middle class. Kerry will try to occupy the Left and Middle, and Bush will need to stay in the Middle as much as he can, because the Middle decides elections. Fortunately, Rove knows this.

Good analysis. And you are correct, people down South are never going to warm to this guy. If he gets the nomination, Bush will have a lock on the South.

Up here, Kerry had the nickname "Liveshot Kerry" because whenever there was any news out of Washington, local Boston stations would always do the obligatory liveshot of Kerry on the Capitol lawn. Howie Carr used to say that the most dangerous place to be was to be between Kerry and a TV camera. Kerry is telegenic and he'll play this to his advantage (to many women voters, being telegenic is often the most important thing). But he'll annoy the hell out of the men with his East-coast Ivy League "I'm-superior-to-you" attitude.

I should have read your post first. Good job. You pegged him.

He will run in the primary as a moderate

The he won't win their nomination. The loony left are going to be fired up to put a lefty on the ticket (see Harold Ford versus Pelosi). They are all going crazy thinking that the reason they lost this midterm is because they were not waving Red Flags.

(5) Has he always been successful in fighting off those female advances? Rumors are he may have submitted to temptation from time to time. Could he have a "Gary Hart" problem in his future?

If the long national nightmare known as the Clinton presidency has taught us nothing else it's taught us that this is no longer a problem.