A prez candidate's daughter looks back

By Jeff Dufour and Patrick Gavin

POSTED August 20, 2008 | 12:35 AM

On the trail

It's not easy being a politician's daughter and it's certainly not easy when your dad loses one of the tightest elections in American history.

Alexandra Kerry (daughter of Sen. John Kerry) discusses both of those topics in "Notes from the Trail: Presidential Politics From The Inside Out." The book, released yesterday, takes readers into the mind of a daughter not familiar to campaign life.

"If there is such a thing as a typical child of politics, I am not it," Kerry declares from the outset. But: "My father brought home politics like a baker brings home an extra loaf of bread.” Instead, "I was the kid who stared out the window during political science class." In fact, Alexandra even sat out some elections. “I didn’t vote in the 1996 election … Despite my upbringing and all the exhortations to the contrary, we felt no compulsion to take part in something that seemed so disconnected from our experiences.”

Still, Alexandra found herself in the middle of a tight presidential race in 2004 and campaigning hard for her dad.

Some of her memories of the campaign:

-The campaign bus while campaigning in snowy Iowa: “Wet leaves lay buried like sediment under tracked-in road slush. I felt as if I’d stepped into the Old Testament scene in which Jonah hangs on for dear life inside the belly of the whale.”

-On reporters: “Growing up, I learned quickly to avoid reporters. … Sometimes I felt as if the reporters treated the candidates like films to be reviewed.”

-On trail fashion: “Pulling myself together for public appearances day after day from a diminishing stock of wrinkled clothing in a suitcase was a challenge; I was constantly discovering that I’d left a shoe beneath the skirt of a hotel bed or that I didn’t have the right pair of stockings. Not to mention the added problem that, for the first time in his life, my father had taken an interest in my clothing. ‘Can you wear something besides jeans?’ he’d ask, or frown pointedly at my Converse speakers.”