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It may be the scariest thing you can say about a Democratic presidential candidate at this early stage of the game: John Kerry is starting to look like a front runner. "Perish the word — please!" the Massachusetts Senator said last week when that possibility was gently broached. "I think of myself more as an insurgent against George Bush and the Establishment."

That's a bit of a stretch, coming from a fellow who went to a Swiss boarding school, who favors Hermes ties and who's married to Teresa Heinz of the condiment megafortune. With the public at large, Kerry has yet to make much of an impression. Polls show him planted in the middle of the pack of six (thus far) declared candidates. But the Democratic cognoscenti are beginning to think that Kerry just might be the one.

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Two weeks ago, on his first trip to Iowa since announcing for President, Kerry drew 600 to a theater in Des Moines — the size of a crowd you would expect when that state's first-in-the-nation presidential contest is weeks away rather than a year. He has the most fully developed political network in the early-primary states (including a leg up on everyone else in neighboring New Hampshire). His marriage to Heinz, widow of Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz, gives him the option of tapping substantial financial assets. And he has assembled the strongest and toughest team of campaign operatives, including Michael Whouley, who ran Al Gore's impressive ground operation.

That's the kind of thing even the Bush White House notices. "See who gets Whouley," a senior official there fretted a few months ago. "He really matters." And more important, it's the kind of thing donors notice. "I think that John Kerry is the Democrat most likely to win back the White House, and that's what this election is about," says Alan Solomont, a Boston-area nursing-home executive and former Democratic National Committee finance chairman, who hasn't always supported Kerry in the past.

Democratic insiders are nearly unanimous in praising Kerry for his intelligence, his thoughtful manner and the forward-thinking positions he has taken on issues from foreign policy to the environment. They say he can fill the party's gaping need for someone who can speak cogently on national security. Kerry's credential as a decorated Vietnam veteran not only makes a useful contrast to President Bush but also adds some ballast to the surefire applause line he drops into every speech about Iraq: "The United States should never go to war because we want to; the United States should go to war because we have to."

But the noontime address Kerry gave last week to a packed auditorium at Georgetown University shows how hard it will be for him to navigate in a political environment in which foreign policy matters more than it has in a long time. He criticized Bush for a "belligerent unilateralism" and implored, "Mr. President, do not rush to war." But one of the first questions Kerry got from a student in the audience challenged him to explain why he voted last fall in favor of a resolution authorizing force in Iraq. The speech drew the first attack from within the Democratic field, when Vermont Governor Howard Dean accused Kerry of "trying to have it both ways."

Even Democrats who admire Kerry are worried that he comes across as too calculating — which is why more than a few say they wish he would do something, anything, from his gut. It didn't happen last week, when all six candidates appeared for the first time together, at a dinner in Washington sponsored by NARAL Pro-Choice America. About the best thing that could be said about Kerry's speech on the emotional abortion issue was that it wasn't as flat as North Carolina Senator John Edwards'. The biggest crowd pleasers: Dean, with his bold defense of the procedure opponents call partial-birth abortion, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, who made the sassy declaration that the Christian right should meet "the right Christians."

Front running has its advantages — as long as you're not a Democrat. While Republicans generally anoint someone early, Democrats have a history of treating their early front runners like hors d'oeuvres. "I'm going to do everything in my power not to be the Establishment candidate," Kerry insists. But it's looking more and more as if the Establishment thinks otherwise.

• Karen Tumulty