Bob Kerrey is trying to once again win election as senator from Nebraska.

Acknowledging that his old colleague “faces a tough road,” Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts has tapped the base of supporters he built during his 2004 presidential campaign to boost former senator Bob Kerrey’s bid to return to the Senate.

In an email fired off to supporters Thursday, Kerry solicited funds for Kerrey’s campaign to once again represent the red state of Nebraska.

“More than ever, at this make or break time in our history, the Senate needs leaders who are willing to step up and put love of country first, like Bob Kerrey,” Kerry says. “My friend and former colleague has shown a lot of guts and grit in running once again for the United States Senate from Nebraska.”

Kerrey, who retired from the Senate in 2001 after two terms, earlier this year announced that he would run to try to hold the seat for Democrats, currently held by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.). Nelson, perhaps the most conservative Democratic senator, is not running for re-election this year.

Nebraska state Rep. Deb Fischer this week won an upset victory for the Republican nomination to be the GOP Senate candidate, which gives her  ”a lot of momentum … right now,” Kerry says, seeking contributions of $25 or more to fill Kerrey’s coffers.

Kerrey faces a decidedly uphill climb to regain his old Senate seat. After retiring from the Senate, he left Nebraska behind entirely to live in New York City as a university president. Several years ago Kerrey even flirted with the idea of becoming a Democratic candidate for mayor of New York.

American Crossroads, the deep-pocketed GOP influence organization associated with Republican strategist Karl Rove, has been running ads in the Cornhusker State attacking Kerrey for his time in the Big Apple. Kerrey responded by pointing out he still owns businesses in the state.

Like his friend with the sound-alike name, Kerrey also is decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, and lost part of a leg in that conflict.

“In 1996, Bob was one of a small minority of senators who stood with me in voting against the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) — and he was certainly the only senator from Nebraska who opposed it,” Kerry says of Kerrey. “And now Bob’s facing a candidate who, when she was asked, couldn’t name a single Democrat she would ever be willing to work with once in office.  That’s not how we will ever solve America’s challenges.”

Although he took such liberal positions on matters such as DOMA, Kerrey took more-conservative stances on other issues, such as free trade and taxes.

Since few before recent days expected Fischer to win the nomination, there’s been no reported polling testing her in a head-to-head match-up with Kerrey. However, polls consistently showed him behind the other, better-known Republican contenders for the contest.

Furthermore, a poll released in March found Kerrey’s overall favorability had taken a nosedive.

Democrats this year are struggling to maintain their Senate majority while defending twice as many seats as the Republicans. A loss of just four seats would hand control to the GOP.

The failure this week of the so-called congressional supercommittee to agree on a package to reduce the federal budget deficit comes down not only to Republican intransigence, but really to that of just one conservative in particular, a man referred to as the “13th member” of the committee.

Specifically, many on both sides — including Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, a prominent member of the supercommittee — called out Grover Norquist, the extremely powerful anti-tax activist in Washington, for his role in keeping Republicans from agreeing to any new taxes.

Norquist wields much of his power due to the anti-tax pledge signed by most Republicans in Congress, and his ability to enforce that oath by working to defeat any who renege.  All six of the GOP members of the supercommittee had signed on to the Norquist pledge.

Perhaps this doomed the supercommittee from the start, given that Norquist had blessed the Republican supercommittee members this summer.

The supercommittee was supposed to recommend more than $1 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years to be considered by Congress on a fast-track basis. The panel, known formally as the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, bogged down mostly on partisan lines, however.

Indeed, after the co-chairs of the bipartisan supercommittee announced that the panel would not be agreeing to a deal, the conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal ran an article headlined, “Thank You, Grover Norquist.”

“Democrats on the Committee made clear everything was on the table. Our offers were balanced. We walked the line of shared sacrifice, however difficult, and we proposed painful choices for programs we care about deeply,” says Kerry, who reportedly tried until the very end to get the supercomittee to forge a compromise. “However, we simply could not overcome the Republican insistence on making tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans permanent. We would not give another $550 billion tax cut to the wealthiest. Shifting the tax burden to the middle class was not the way to reduce the deficit. This was simply doctrine for some of our Republican colleagues, even as many worked very hard in good faith to find a better way forward.

“I believe it would have been unconscionable to ask middle class Americans to finance more tax cuts for the wealthy while seniors on fixed incomes paid the price,” Kerry adds. “People need to remember: The Committee was created to cut the deficit not to cut taxes for the wealthiest, the exact tax policies that didn’t create jobs and gave us deficits in the first place. The bottom line is that no Super Committee can succeed with Grover Norquist as its 13th member.”

YOU CAN WATCH A VIDEO PRODUCED BY SENATE DEMOCRATS ABOUT NORQUIST’S INFLUENCE HERE:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.