It's the Independence Day parade in Amherst, N.H., and John Forbes Kerry, the elegant Senator from Massachusetts, is wearing a button-down, long-sleeve tattersall shirt, khaki pants and topsiders. He is surrounded by about 100 supporters, many of them young people toting signs. There is a Kerry truck blaring music. "It doesn't get much better than this," he says, a statement meant to convey enthusiasm but which comes off as Kerry's awkward guess at what a politician ought to be saying in such circumstances.
Other candidates--Joe Lieberman, Bob Graham--are in the parade, but you would hardly know it. This event is...