Spotlight Back on Kerry, but Reshaped Role Eludes Him

[Mass]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/us/politics/deficit-talks-put-john-kerry-back-in-spotlight.html

A feverish scrum of reporters was in such pursuit of Senator John Kerry last Friday that he was chased all the way from a Senate meeting room to the subway under the Capitol, where in the chaos a blizzard of secret papers from debt reduction talks went flying from his arms. It was an inelegant moment, particularly for a onetime Democratic nominee for president, but Mr. Kerry stooped down and gathered up his own documents before he made an escape.

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This week the nation learned just how tough as the bipartisan panel tasked with deficit reduction announced its failure, triggering $1.2 trillion in automatic budget cuts over the next decade and enough recriminations to last through next year’s presidential election. For Mr. Kerry, an American foreign policy elder and an unlikely member of a panel that delved into the minutiae of federal finances, the breakdown deprives him of a role he sought, a domestic policy statesman as comfortable with tax codes as statecraft.

A victory would have burnished, or so the Washington wisdom went, his résumé for secretary of state, should there be an Obama second term.
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Mr. Kerry does in many ways appear changed from the presidential candidate of 2004, when he exasperated his party as stiff, slow to respond to President George W. Bush’s attacks and trapped in his own labyrinth of words. For a few hours on Election Day, exit polls indicated that Mr. Kerry would be the victor, but he needed 59,000 voters to go his way in Ohio (he lost by more than three million votes nationwide) and returned to the Senate tagged with the reputation of a liberal, highly partisan loner. He was largely missing from major action on Capitol Hill for the next few years.

Mr. Kerry, 67, disputes that narrative by saying that he was busy as the chairman of the Senate Small Business Committee, but that few paid attention. “I wasn’t going to sit around and mope,” he said. Still, he acknowledges how difficult it was to come back.
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I am not sure what to do with this article.It seems to me that, though the article is polite and respectful, the goal is to portray Kerry as a loser.