If you’re at all interested in how John Kerry forged his comeback, you’ve got to read this long Boston Globe piece from yesterday. The big ingredient was an Iowa ad featuring a tribute from one of his Vietnam crewmates. It improved Kerry’s poll numbers almost immediately in Iowa. A few details: Kerry is a worrier and “compulsive telephoner,” and regularly had yelling matches with campaign manager Jim Jordan, who was eventually fired. I don’t want to make Derb a Kerry voter, but apparently at one down-and-out moment, Kerry recited in a powerful way Rudyard Kipling’s “Gunga Din” (he used to chant it with his crewmates in Vietnam). And for those who think only George Bush is capable of muddled language, check out this statement about Iraq from a September debate: “‘If we hadn’t voted the way we voted, we would not have been able to have a chance of going to the United Nations and stopping the president, in effect, who already had the votes and who was obviously asking serious questions about whether or not the Congress was going to be there to enforce the effort to create a threat.”