Everything he has written since then has been very negative for the Democrats. he spoke of his town losing people, but so did towns all over the tri-state area (and elsewhere). It's beginning to sound like it traumatized him. He may very well still be liberal on social or economic issues. He writes more on foreign policy though.
I think liberal/conservative may have insufficient dimensions - especially now that foreign policy and security issues are so dominant. There likely is an axis maybe defined as neo-con vs real politics that made the old designations useless. This would explain why the reporting of the NYT and WP, always designated as liberal were so willing to help Bush in the run up to the war and why their coverage on Kerry's Iraq and terrorism policies was so negative. Consider the coverage of Bush's second inaugural address, where he spoke of "spreading democracy" as the reason behind Iraq. Now, this was NOT what they told Congress or the American people.
I remember speaking to someone in 2006, who was impressed with Kerry's September 2006 Real Security speech, he couldn't get why Kerry didn't speak of this in 2004 - and was stunned when I sent text of the April MO speech, the NYU speech and the University of Pennsylvania speech. All in line with the 2006 speech, all labeled major policy speeches by the nominee of Democratic party. There were op-eds in both the WP and NYT, remarking that although liberals had typically been the ones with the idealist foreign policy, it was Bush, who was idealistic and Kerry merely pragmatic - both making the point that idealistic, of course sells better.
In fact, Kerry's foreign policy world view is also idealistic and the same themes are there even in his Yale 1966 speech or the end of his Senate testimony in 1972. Kerry has been better than anyone I can think of in articulating an alternative (sane)idealistic, moral philosophy to the neo con one. (Here's a link to his AFghanistan speech this week -
http://www.sais-jhu.edu/) or listen to this short, informal Utube from a MA forum -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXd66eae9K8 ) It was never true that Kerry didn't have an articulate, idealist foreign policy POV.
The problem was that many people covering foreign policy in typically liberal, Democratic leaning, papers were on the neo-con side of the axis. This hurt because people reading anything attempt to factor in the expected bias. A slightly negative article in a source that people expect to be positive is deadly - where if the expectation was that the POV would be negative, an article that was only slightly negative would seem neutral or even somewhat helpful.
Now, Kerry won't be the nominee, but assuming that the Democratic team will reject the neo-con ideas, how can they get past the perception that even their media "allies", like Klein, the NYT and the WP are less than impressed?