Ignoring the pleas from Howard Stern for Kerry to appear on his show. It instantly showed America that he had no sense of humor and that he had no sense of pop-culture which made him "outdated" in many young people's minds.
Look at the finance reports and you'll see a correlation between the March 3rd Fundraising Boost adn Howard Stern's first appeal to his 6 million listeners to donate to the Kerry Campaign.
Shunning all of his listeners, which, by the way span the political spectrum was a huge blunder.
Hundreds of Stern fans poured onto the Internet Town Meeting shortly after Stern made the appeal. They wanted to be recognized, they deserved to be recognized. In many cases these were people who didn't vote before or were too young to vote in the last election. Were these people recognized? No, they were seen as a nuisance and ushered off as soon as possible.
What happened next? The political machinery went into work so that the dispair these people felt were reinforced by mockery of Kerry.
End Result 6 million neutralized votes.