John Kerry will have to do something on Thursday night that he has failed to do during 30 years in the public eye, if he wants to win the United States presidency. He will have to show Americans who he is and what he stands for.
When he reaches the podium at the Democratic national convention in Boston, his party will be there looking up at him and expecting a performance beyond anything he has delivered to date.
Verna King, a delegate from California and an activist for the past 60 years, summed up the sheer weight of anticipation and yearning of a frustrated party.
”I hope he fires it up to get everybody going, because I don’t know what’s going to happen if we don’t make it this time,” she said in the deserted arena on Wednesday as she waited for the speeches to begin.
Compared with Bill Clinton and the party’s new star, Barack Obama, Kerry has had trouble connecting with audiences emotionally and boiling down complex policy issues to a few simple, emotive phrases.
As the National Journal, a political insiders’ weekly, put it on Wednesday: ”John Kerry has delivered many speeches that have told his listeners plenty — and made them feel considerably less.”
The opinion polls show that about a third of voters do not have a clear idea who he is. More than 40% echo the Republican portrayal of him as a ”flip-flopper” who changes policy with the political wind.
The majority consistently think George Bush can do a better job of keeping them safe. Kerry will have about 40 minutes to change that.
Democratic aides say he has put his speechwriters on standby and has been writing his own drafts, in longhand, and only then distributing them for comment.
”Even before he went on the road, he cut back on the daily speeches he was writing so that he could concentrate on this one, because he realises how important this speech is,” said Lee Feinstein, one of his foreign policy advisers.
”Iraq will be discussed, but the emphasis is going to be about what we do now. It’s a speech about moving forward,” he said.
In the past Democrats had ”played for a draw in national security,” but with Kerry’s national security credentials they expected that eventually they would win that battle.
He said it would also be a personal speech, drawing on the senator’s life story.
Party insiders are glad the words will be coming from the heart, but they are tangibly nervous, none the less.
”Unfortunately, there’s a lot of people in America who don’t know him,” said Al Franken, a leftwing comedian who has been playing a leading role in the campaign.
He was out early on Wednesday surveying the great oval arena, alight with neon signs and digital screens.
”We have to see enough of a human being — get a feel for who he is,” he said.
”He has to go over a certain bar to show he’s an acceptable president.”
Kerry and his senior campaign adviser, Bob Shrum, are reported not to subscribe to the theory that tonight’s convention speech is a make-or-break affair.
They are said to believe that the three debates with President Bush expected in the autumn may be more important.
But Ron Brownstein, a political commentator on the Los Angeles Times, said Thursday night’s event provided an opportunity that might not repeat itself.
”After the convention you can do news events, but you can’t do a news event about your life story after the convention. Nobody would cover it,” he said.
”The gold standard for a convention speech is when you can connect the biography and the agenda,” he added.
”Voters are much more likely to give credence to your proposals if they think they come from your life experience and your convictions.”
Clinton famously made that connection in his convention speech in 1992, when he broke free of his reputation as a womaniser and presented himself as an everyman ”from a place called Hope”.
The speech gave him a double-digit jolt in the opinion polls, a ”convention bounce”.
The size of Kerry’s ”bounce” will provide an immediate measure of whether he has done tonight what his party is anxiously awaiting from him. – Guardian Unlimited Â