LIKABILITY:

Kerry's Pride Goeth Before a Fall: If Kerry goes down in the fall, trace the blame to . . . Butchy Cataldo. (Larry Elder, April 2, 2004, Townhall.com)

Kerry's critics point to his shifting stands on NAFTA, the war in Iraq, the No Child Left Behind Act and the Patriot Act. Kerry detractors expect the public to catch on when Kerry -- a fiscal liberal -- attacks Bush for "fiscal irresponsibility."

But, actually Kerry has a deeper problem -- his lack of likability and the Butchy Cataldo Factor.

Butchy Cataldo?

Well, Sen. Kerry doesn't know, either. Precisely the problem, according to a window-to-the-soul story in the New Republic.

The people who know Kerry best consider Kerry aloof, imperious and condescending. Even worse, Kerry can't seem to retain their names. At a 1996 Massachusetts political affair, a Democratic Massachusetts State legislator said to his friends, "Watch this."

He walked up to Kerry and said, "Hi, Senator -- Representative Butchy Cataldo." At this, Kerry smiled, slapped his back and exclaimed, "Butchy, so good to see you again!" One problem -- the guy, the state rep -- was not Butchy Cataldo. In fact, Butchy Cataldo ran and lost to this Kerry-greeting legislator whose name is Bill Reinstein, a man bearing no resemblance to the tall, dark-haired Cataldo.

The point here is not that Mr. Kerry fell for a trick that might trip up many, but that his Democratic colleague dislike him enough to do it to him and retell the story because it confirms their image of him.

Compare that story to this oft told one, The Know-'Em-All: How President Bush is smarter than the intellectuals who disdain him. (MICHAEL SEGAL, February 4, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

Many people look back on their college years and regret how much they missed of the great intellectual resources of the university. Not me. My regrets are about failing to meet more of the remarkable people who were my fellow undergraduates at Harvard and nearby MIT. I thought of such socializing as mere fun, which came after coursework. As a result, there were a lot of interesting students I never got to meet, from Benjamin Netanyahu to Benazir Bhutto, from Bill Gates to Scott McNealy, even though some of these people knew friends of mine. But my regrets are more wistful than realistic, since no one knew everyone in college.

Except George W. Bush. His Yale classmates claim that he knew everyone in their undergraduate class, and one can almost believe this was literally true. Classmate Clay Johnson recalled the time when he and George Bush were freshman pledges for the DKE fraternity. Upperclassmen were berating them as "the sorriest bunch of pledges that they had ever heard of," Mr. Johnson told PBS's "Frontline" in 2000:

Normally most pledge classes are very tight and very supportive of one another, and we were 50 individuals and were not interested in each other and there was no unity in our class. And they said it was really quite deplorable.

To make this point to us, they started calling on people to get up and name their fellow pledge members. And they called the first person, and he named four or five. And then he didn't know anybody else's name, and they told him what a sorry human being he was and how little he cared about his pledges. Then they called on somebody else and he named eight or ten but didn't know anybody else.

Anyway, the third or fourth person they called on was George. He got up and named all 50. There was this hush that fell over the room.

Mr. Bush went on to become the president of the fraternity. He didn't know just the names--classmates marvel about how he could sum up each person's essence with great insight and humor.

Want to know why John Kerry can't beat George W. Bush? John Kerry is the kind of guy who can, and will, tell you who the president of Outer Micronesia is. George W. Bush is the kind of guy who can tell you who you are.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 2, 2004 4:26 PM