Elisabeth Reiter slept late, avoided the television and then donned her Kerry-Edwards baseball cap and her Kerry-Edwards fleece jacket to meet her campaign friends at the Front Page, a smoky watering hole in Dupont Circle.
"Is this a particularly bad day for you?" a man asked the former press advance aide as she sat down at the bar.
"Yeah," said Reiter, her face a picture of sadness as she sipped a beer.
As Republicans partied across the nation's capital Thursday, Democrats here and around the country marked President Bush's inauguration in their own defiant, sorrowful ways.
There were, of course, anti-Bush demonstrations in several major cities. But for many, the grieving was more private, either in bars or an array of "mourning parties" and "bawls" that Democrats held at their homes.
At the Tune Inn on Capitol Hill, Carrie James wore her John Kerry for President T-shirt and drank Bloody Mary's with a couple of friends.
"I'm not going to let the festivities upset my day," insisted James, an unemployed veteran of the Kerry campaign staff.
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