WASHINGTON, 24 January 2005 — John Kerry, remember him? After being narrowly defeated by President George W. Bush in November, Kerry opted to take the low ground and disappeared from the public eye.

The senator from Massachusetts mostly remained at his Boston home since election day preparing for his return to the Senate. He also traveled to Iraq, visited some countries in the Middle East, and then chilled out in London and Paris while pondering his new place in the political landscape.

Observers say he plans to use his credibility to become a major force on legislation that will extend well beyond his previous portfolio of national security issues.

Kerry’s return to the Senate — two weeks after the new Congress got underway — seemed intended as an attention getter, and deal with the problem of how to re-enter the same political theater as the president he fought so hard to defeat, while keeping himself politically viable.

So Kerry returned to the spotlight last week to attend the presidential inauguration on the steps of the Capitol and take a few jabs at the some of Bush’s key officials.

Taking his seat at the inauguration last Thursday, he received a few scattered boos from Republicans in the crowd, but maintained a brave face. He playfully lifted the cowboy hat off the senator sitting in front of him, examined it and threw it back. At another point, he stood on his chair to wave to someone. At one point, just before Bush arrived to take his oath of office, he leaned over the inaugural platform and called down to a high school group occupying prime seats, “Who’d you vote for?”

The teenage Republicans said they were too young to vote, but supported Bush. “We’re going to convert all these kids for the future,” Kerry joked to a reporter.

Some of Kerry’s colleagues silently showed their support for him. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who sat next to him, reached over to pat Kerry on the back several times immediately after Bush took his oath of office.

Kerry made headlines and showed his political defiance days earlier by sharply questioning Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s nominee for secretary of state. On Wednesday, he renewed his criticism and cast one of the two Judiciary Committee votes against her nomination.

Kerry has also renewed his demand that the president fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “It’s a question of competence,” he said. “Poor planning at the Pentagon is letting our American soldiers down.”

Rarely does a defeated nominee come back to win the White House. But Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University, told reporters that Richard Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and came back to win the White House in 1968, partly by campaigning vigorously for fellow Republicans in the intervening years. “Nixon gathered up every i.o.u. within the party,” Lichtman said.

“He’s still got the fire in the belly,” Charles Black, a Republican strategist with close ties to the White House. So the Clintons better watch out,” Black told reporters.