With 50 days left in his presidential campaign and nearly 10 points behind in the polls, John Kerry found himself this week in a familiar situation: surrounded by people willing him on, but who were having trouble understanding what he had to say.
The venue was the cavernous semi-dome of Cincinnati’s art deco railway terminal, now a stunning museum, but a problematic place to hold a rally. Senator Kerry’s voice echoed like a forlorn platform announcement, and determined local supporters like John Figurel struggled to hear what he was saying.
”I want him to get tougher,” Figurel said, conceding that if Kerry had been tougher in the speech, he had missed it.
That has been Kerry’s problem all along.
After all the months on the road, many Americans are unclear about what he stands for, partly thanks to the efforts of the White House, which spent much of last week’s Republican convention in New York lampooning him as a ”flip-flopper”.
The charge has been hard to scrape off, because it contains a large fragment of truth.
The Massachusetts senator has altered course on key issues, most notably Iraq, and he has yet to convince people that changing your mind is better than making consistently bad decisions, as he insists the president has done.
A Washington Post and ABC poll published on Friday confirmed that George Bush had come out of his convention with a 52-43 percentage point lead nationwide.
The Kerry campaign, in its most difficult week, has consoled itself that the margin is significantly smaller in the swing states, where the election is really being fought, and among all registered voters, rather than just likely voters.
The man himself appears to thrive on bad news. Over the past few days, his tall, normally rigid frame seemed to relax, he has even attempted jokes, telling pensioners in St Louis they were lucky that he was not staying behind to beat them at bingo.
The sunny mood was reminiscent of the most difficult hours of his primary campaign in January, when the prospect of defeat seemed to inject much-needed urgency and clarity into his rhetoric.
But the inescapable truth is that the Democrats’ campaign has been blown off course; the president has succeeded in conveying his simple ”me strong, him weak” tune.
The tension has been noticeable in the Kerry camp, where speeches are being rewritten hours before delivery, and new faces have begun to appear on the team.
Kerry has brought on two distinct groups of reinforcements: political street-fighters from his Boston past, John Sasso and Michael Whouley; and famous faces from the Clinton White House, such as the former presidential spokesperson Joe Lockhart and Mike McCurry, and a prominent pollster, Stanley Greenberg.
Lockhart has become the campaign’s new front man on television, but on the road, Sasso is the battlefield tactician, constantly at the senator’s shoulder.
In Cincinnati, he watched the candidate from behind the television cameras. A short man with neat grey hair and a charcoal suit, he had more the air of a banker than the tough operative he is reputed to be.
The last time Sasso was in the national spotlight was in 1988. He was forced to resign from Michael Dukakis’s campaign when it was found he had leaked tapes to the press that showed that one of the Massachusetts governor’s opponents in the Democratic primary, Joe Biden, had plagiarised Neil Kinnock’s words.
His reappearance at least sent a signal that the Kerry campaign intends to play hard. Sasso politely deferred questions about his role to the woman standing with him, Mary Beth Cahill, the campaign manager.
”Look, it’s a general election,” said Cahill, who is widely credited with helping save Kerry from ignominy in the Democratic primaries. ”This is the way things happen when you come down to the crunch. Some of the most gifted operatives in the DNC [Democratic National Committee] have come on board.”
Robert Boorstin, a veteran of Democratic campaigns, explained his role more bluntly. ”He is a brilliant strategist, a tough guy, who doesn’t mind saying ‘screw you’ to the candidate,” he said.
That may be his most valuable role, as a trusted aide who is not afraid to tell Kerry where he is going wrong.
Sasso is also supposed to help the campaign respond faster to attacks such as the claims by hostile veterans that Kerry had embellished his Vietnam war record.
It was a fight the Kerry campaign marched into by focusing the Democratic convention in Boston on the candidate’s status as a war hero.
In Ohio, a Kentucky Republican infiltrated the Democratic crowd, and began ranting against Kerry’s 1971 claim that US soldiers had committed atrocities there. The heckler, however, made the mistake of jumping up next to a delegation of union sheet metal workers, some of whom silenced him with a headlock and wrestled him to the ground.
Since Sasso and the Clintonites have come on board, the Kerry message has become noticeably crisper.
For all the acoustic problems, the Cincinnati speech marked the start of the fightback. It was intended primarily for a TV audience, which heard it straight from the can didate’s microphone, and, in any case, the real eloquence of the message was the choice of venue. Kerry was standing on the spot from which Bush had warned Americans of a nuclear ”mushroom cloud” if Saddam Hussein was left to his own devices.
That Cincinnati speech in October 2002 clinched Bush’s case for war. Days later, a mandate for military action was passed overwhelmingly in the Senate, with the support of Democrats like Kerry.
By revisiting the ”scene of the crime”, Kerry was able to remind the country of the president’s unfounded claims and their cost so far — 1 000 lives and $200-billionn, and untold damage to the US way of life.
By the next day, when Kerry addressed a smaller rally in Des Moines, Iowa, the theme had been honed further into a fighting slogan, that played with George Bush’s middle initial, nickname and campaign trademark. ”That’s W. Wrong choice, wrong leadership and wrong direction,” he said repeatedly, punctuating his short speech with the phrase to the delight of the crowd.
His last slogan, ”Bring it on” saw him through the primaries, but long ago began sounding tired and vacuous.
The ”wrong choice” line has been turned into an advertisement that is intended to play in almost every state.
The Kerry campaign will now hammer home its main charges against Bush: that unemployment has risen by more than a million on his watch, that the number of Americans without medical insurance has risen by five million, and that Bush has taken the US into a war from which there is no easy exit.
Many Democrats believe the president’s lead in the polls reflects a fundamental failure in the Kerry campaign. New staff can help, but it is clear to a lot of Democrat supporters that much of the problem lies with the candidate himself.
His vote for the Iraq war in October 2002 has blurred the Democratic position on the central issue in the campaign. Some of his advisers have urged him to state simply that he, like a majority of Americans, was fooled by the president, and that the Senate vote was not a blank cheque.
As one Democratic strategist put it: ”If you sign an agreement with a credit card company, it doesn’t mean that if someone steals your card and spends $10 000 in Gucci, you should pay it.”
It is a persuasive argument, but not one Kerry has made himself. Instead, he has alternated between saying he would have fought the war differently, arguing it was fought on false pretences, and then baffling his staff by agreeing he would have voted for the invasion even if he had known Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. President Bush quickly seized on that admission and has not let go.
”Many smart candidates have a problem of being addicted to nuance, and it happens especially with legislators,” Boorstin conceded.
His supporters insist he is a ”good closer”, who saves his best to last. He demonstrated that in the primaries, and will have to do so again in the presidential televised debates, which are due to begin by the end of this month.
In the absence of an ”October surprise”, they are likely to be Senator Kerry’s last stand. – Guardian Unlimited Â