<p>I was trying to recall the exact moment I lost interest in the 2004 presidential race. It was March 7, the day The New York Times published Maureen Dowd's gushing paean to John Kerry.</p>
<p>Dowd gloried in the "vast palette of cultural preferences" that paint the Kerry persona. Why, he not only reads Keats and Shelley and T.S. Eliot, he writes his own verse on the "barren desolation of the desert."</p>