Traffic choked Elm Street in Manchester, N.H., on Friday night. Throngs of people walked through the middle of downtown. The first two parking lots I entered on my way to Senator Kerry’s speech for the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner were already full. I finally got into one further from the event. The lot attendant offered me tickets for free. Gauging the lines of people I saw lined up in the streets, I contemplated accepting the man’s offer. Then I looked at the tickets: Boston Celtics vs. Cleveland Cavaliers.

With the New Hampshire primary some 15 months out, the New Hampshire public might be more interested in watching a basketball game than in seeing a potential presidential candidate. Nonetheless, the battle for activists, field organization, and money is very much in evidence. A function room in the Radisson Hotel was filled to capacity for Mr. Kerry’s address. Members of the broader public, conservatives at large, and even late night comedians might be gasping with astonishment at the prospect of another presidential run from Mr. Kerry. But the reality is that the junior senator from Massachusetts just had himself a very good week. A well-financed, charismatic, and center-oriented Southern rival, Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia, took himself out of the presidential contest. Mr. Kerry has roughly a reported $14 million in cash on hand to Senator Clinton’s $15.8 million. At the Democratic dinner in Manchester he proved something else: He can now give a crisp, energetic, relatively brief speech.

Well, sort of brief. It was more than 30 minutes. And there was at least one “my friend,” that old phrase he ought to have removed from his lexicon.

In his remarks, Mr. Kerry rounded up the usual suspects of a Democratic wannabe: the war in Iraq, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and the congressional page scandal. Mr. Kerry, who made his name criticizing the Vietnam War 35 years ago, wears his current critique of the American effort in Iraq more comfortably than he did his painfully nuanced Iraq position in the lead-up to the 2004 campaign. This will appease the left-wing bloggers who boosted Howard Dean during the last election cycle.

Interestingly, however, Mr. Kerry earned his biggest applause of the night for two domestic issues that receive less attention in the daily news cycle of late — heath care and the environment.

Activists in the room were still undecided about which candidate to back in the 2008 cycle. Still, the sentiment was that his performance was impressive. In 2003, Arnie Arnesen, a former Democratic candidate for governor in New Hampshire, dubbed Mr. Kerry, “the shroud of Turin.” “There was no passion, no message, talked too much,” she said of her view back then. “Tonight I came with low expectations. He overcame them by a lot.”

A recent University of New Hampshire poll suggests that Mr. Kerry has his work cut out for him. Receiving the support of 9% of voters, Mr. Kerry is well below Mrs. Clinton’s 30% and John Edwards’s 16%, and even under Vice President Gore’s 10%. Ms. Arnesen discounted Senator Clinton’s high poll numbers as “name recognition.” It’s hard to ignore a poll find that seems to reflect a perception that voters are still exhausted from Mr. Kerry’s 2004 performance. At the same time, though, the early portion of any campaign is about raising money and starting to build an organization. Mr. Kerry has retained the support of primary field organization guru Michael Whouley and maintains a strong fund-raising core.

One of the most unlikable traits of Mr. Kerry is his focus on himself. In Boston, the joke uttered by William Bulger, a past president of the Massachusetts Senate, at a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast was that Mr. Kerry’s initials, JFK, which mirror another Boston presidential candidate, really stand for Just For Kerry. All politicians have this trait —they have to — but Mr. Kerry seems less able to hide his. But this inability to let the views of others pierce his lofty self-image, coupled with his fundraising ability, could turn him into a formidable force in 2008, just as it helped him win the Democratic nomination in 2004. Even when the press became infatuated with Mr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, and others saw Mr. Edwards as the great Southern hope, Mr. Kerry and his team of tenacious field operatives remained convinced he would be the nominee. As Messrs. Dean and Edwards faded, Mr. Kerry was there to win the day.

Mr. Kerry’s partially Brahmin roots, his elite educational background, his aristocratic demeanor, even his Hermes ties, have often helped contribute to a misreading of his basic nature. Unlike his upper-crust 1996 senatorial opponent, William Weld, an artful dilettante who was a quick study and fluid speaker, Mr. Kerry is a plodder who has had one thought in his mind for much of his life: Someday, he will be president. Most look at his run in 2004 and think, make room for someone else. Mr. Kerry behaves as if he thinks he came close in 2004 and can win if he tries again. Michael Crowley put it this way in “GQ” magazine in January 2006: “He remembers the 59 million votes he received, more than any other presidential candidate in history — except for the guy who got 62 million that same day.”

That sets a stage for the 2008 nomination, where there are three potential candidates with a substantially similar character, Mr. Gore (plodder), Mrs. Clinton (grinder), and Mr. Kerry. The pro-Kerry spin discounts Mr. Gore on the grounds that he appears more interested in a television partnership with Rupert Murdoch than being skewered nightly on Mr. Murdoch’s cable television.As far as Mr. Edwards and the other potential candidates go, some contend they haven’t shown the ability to compete financially with either Mr. Kerry or Mrs. Clinton.

I was with Mr. Kerry the night Mrs. Clinton won election to the Senate in 2000. I asked him about the possibility that given her national prominence, she might be given a seat on a high-profile committee. Ice seemed to form behind his eyes and his face tightened. Seniority, he told me, was always a factor when it came to committee assignments. That great warmth is what we may have to look forward to in the upcoming presidential race.

Mr. Gitell (www.gitell.com)is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.