No one has ever accused Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry of being ironically uncool, but if he keeps wearing his Livestrong bracelet, it could happen. The yellow rubber bands, championed by Lance Armstrong, have long been abandoned by Oprah and the cool kids who snapped them up in 2004, but Kerry still flashes a band underneath his suit jacket sleeve on the Hill everyday.
“I’ve been wearing it for nine years now, I guess,” Kerry wrote to Yeas & Nays by email. “I try not to take it off.” The band brings back memories from the 2004 campaign trail, when Kerry says people loved to show him their own bracelets, including “big guys with tears in their eyes who wore the bracelet because their father died of prostate cancer, but they beat it.” Kerry himself survived a bout with cancer, as did his wife Teresa.
Kerry has no plans to stop. “I’m still keeping up the fight,” he wrote, “so I’ve kept the bracelet along with it.”
