Kerry Won't Run For White House

Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the Democrats' losing presidential candidate in 2004, said Wednesday that he will not run for the White House in 2008.

"Two years ago, I sought the presidency to lead us on a different course," he said on the Senate floor. "We came close, Mr. President, certainly close enough to be tempted to try again. There are powerful reasons to want to continue that fight now. But I have concluded this isn't the time for me to mount a presidential campaign."

Instead, Kerry said he will continue to try to change the Bush administration's Iraq policy from the Senate. Officials said he would run for a fifth six-year term in the Senate.

"We have to find a way to end this misguided war and bring our troops home," he said.

Kerry, 64, who lost the White House when the state of Ohio voted for President Bush by 118,601 votes on election night in November 2004, made the announcement at the end of a lengthy speech on Iraq.

Though he never formed a committee or took any other legal steps, Kerry clearly had been eying a second run for the White House, CBS News correspondent Bob Fuss reports. But following a week in which two other Democratic senators, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, announced their intentions to great fanfare, Kerry decided to bow out.

Kerry's decision leaves a field of nine Democrats running or signaling their intention to do so, including his 2004 running mate John Edwards.

The Republican field is similarly crowded with Mr. Bush constitutionally barred from seeking a third term.

Kerry's 2004 campaign drew widespread criticism from fellow Democrats after his defeat. His critics said he had failed to make a forceful enough response to Republican criticism as well as charges by conservative groups that he did not deserve the medals he won for combat in the Vietnam War.

The Massachusetts senator stirred unhappy memories for Democrats last fall, when he botched a joke and led Republicans to accuse him of attacking U.S. troops in Iraq.

He apologized, then hastily scrapped several days of campaigning for fellow Democrats as party leaders urged him to avoid becoming an unwanted issue in a campaign they were on the way to winning.

Polls showed Kerry trailing his Democratic rivals. Last October, an Associated Press-AOL News poll had Kerry at just 1 percent and recent surveys indicated he had gained little among Democrats.

Still, Democratic strategist Mark Mellman, who served as a senior Kerry adviser in 2004, says the senator would have been a "serious contender" in 2008. Mellman notes that Kerry received more votes and raised more money than any Democratic nominee in history and maintains "a lot of assets." As to where those assets go, Mellman tells CBSNews.com there will be a competition among contenders for Kerry's long list of staffers, donors and volunteers but doesn't see any individual Democratic hopeful gaining an immediate advantage.

If anything, said Mellman, Kerry's absence will help lower-tier candidates. "The thinner the crowd is below the frontrunners, the easier it is for those guys to stand out," he said. "There's one less guy sitting up there in those multi-candidate debates, one less set of ads on the air, one less person competing" for staff.

Despite his difficulties on a national level, Kerry customarily rolls up large victory margins at home in Massachusetts. He won his first term in 1984.

While Kerry was saying privately as recently as December that he would likely wage a second campaign, the tone among his aides changed in recent weeks as Clinton and Obama announced their White House bids.

Instead, aides began talking about Kerry's concern about the personal toll a campaign would take. Kerry had millions left from his 2004 run – a sore point with some Democrats. Despite the advantage, he would have faced intense competition with Obama, Clinton and Edwards for campaign dollars.