Horse sense.

John Kerry came to town yesterday, and here's the report of his doings that appeared in the local paper, the Capital Times. It's worth going to the link to see the picture of him raising a beer mug, while sitting next to a local guy who was just hanging out in a Mount Horeb bar, trying to watch the Packers game, when Kerry dropped in to make a photo op out of him. I'd bet Kerry made a point of saying the name of the Packers' stadium a few times as he was waving that beer glass around. Today, the article says, he spoke in a middle school in Spring Green (where he is preparing for the debate):

Kerry said a Madison man told him yesterday that he feared voting for Kerry because he didn't want to change horses in mid-stream.

Kerry told the man, "When your horse is headed down the waterfall, or when your horse is drowning, it's a good time to change."

"May I also suggest we need a taller horse. We can get through deeper waters that way," Kerry said.

We'll never hear the end of this horse in the stream business. It just keeps getting new frills. So we need a "taller horse," because the current horse "drowning" as we go into "deeper waters." And now we've added a waterfall. So I guess we need a special kind of horse that's especially good at surviving a precipitous drop, which you'd really want in a situation where two horse were simultaneously going over a waterfall and you decided your horse was less crashworthy and that it would be a good idea to try to get onto the other horse while you were still in the waterfall. That's quite the metaphor.

How come we don't hear about Kerry's penchant for poetry anymore? (Here's an old post of mine making fun of Maureen Dowd's column about Kerry's interest in poetry. Key line: "Maureen, the man isn't a poet, he's a windbag!") Who even remembers when--or why--there was an argument that Kerry was better than Bush because of his interest in poetry?