I’ve been saying for a while that Kerry needs to lighten up a bit, so I was glad to see an article about Kerry’s use of humor on the stump. Unfortunately, this excerpt was the funniest part :

But there are signs that Kerry is improving in the crucial closing weeks of the campaign. Like on Monday, when he predicted the president would continue to paint a rosy picture of the ailing economy, Kerry used an idiom likely to be heard among teenagers in a shopping mall, but not on the senate floor.

“You’re going to hear all this talk, ‘Oh, we’ve turned the corner, we’re doing better, blah, blah,”‘ he said, running on the phrase as his Wisconsin audience erupted in laughter. “You know, blah and blah and blah.”

Kerry isn’t just using the lingo of the younger generation. He’s thrown in a couple of old-fashioned folksy phrases, too….

“The younger generation”??? Was the person who wrote this article a hundred years old? I’m surprised it didn’t chastise him for using vulgarities like “swell” and “bee’s knees”.

Kidding aside, there was one really good quip that I’d love to see used tomorrow night :

Kerry was cracking up his partisan crowd by telling Wisconsin voters they shouldn’t be wary of changing horses midstream when the horse is drowning. He tied the metaphor to reports that the Bush campaign insisted that podiums in Thursday’s debate be set relatively far apart to obscure Kerry’s five-inch height advantage.

“May I also suggest that we need a taller horse?” he said. “You can get through deeper waters that way.”

On the same subject, Liberal Oasis has a great post with some joke-telling advice for Kerry. The real gem is this reader-submitted one-liner :

Congress, myself included, voted to give the president permission to put the bullet in the gun.

We did not give him permission to shoot us in the foot.

Liberal Oasis is also calling for people to send in their best jokes for Kerry to use. Mine would be something like this :

“It’s obvious to experts, intelligence officials, and the general public that Iraq is getting worse and worse every day, yet the President still insists that things are going well. I guess George has gotten so good at misleading the American people, he’s even managed to mislead himself.”