Kerry is Everyman

John Kerry wants to show he's just a normal guy, you know, blue-collar instead of blue blood:

"They said it had to be a place where Senator Kerry could appear to just make an impromptu stop, nothing planned," says a Democratic National Committee staffer doing work in Florida. "The campaign had a bunch of people scrambling for the right spot."

That spot turned out to be a Jenkins' Quality Bar-B-Que franchise. Kerry, who arrived at the restaurant with Brown in tow, made a point of ordering some ribs (on the house, as it turned out), asked to look at the kitchen, then announced to all that none of the workers had health insurance! With that, he and his contingent of staff and reporters left. Kerry the everyday guy barely touched his ribs. Perhaps because there wasn't a knife and fork and silk napkin around.

"That they have to stage these things, and then he can't even perform isn't a good sign," says a Democratic media consultant in Washington, D.C. "You'd think they'd have learned from that cheesesteak fiasco in Philadelphia, where Kerry didn't even know what the sandwich was. Just give up and let him be who he is."

He's not serving the down and out in his home state however:

Democrats tried to attach the benefit to a corporate tax bill. On a 59-40 vote in the GOP-controlled Senate, they fell just shy of the 60 votes needed to overcome objections that extending the benefits violated last year's budget agreement.

Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites), the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, was the only senator who missed the vote. Kerry was campaigning Tuesday in Kentucky.

The amendment would have offered emergency federal unemployment benefits for six months, temporarily giving 13 weeks of extra assistance to people who exhaust their state benefits — typically 26 weeks.

I bet the unemployed folks in Mass and the rest of the country could've used those extra 26 weeks.