One of the biggest signs of a campaign’s runaway success is when the candidate can be understated in victory and encouraged by defeat. Another is when his target shifts from his party rivals to his ultimate opponent: George W. Bush. Kerry may be a long way from securing his party’s nomination, but he’s already gunning for November’s fight against the president. He dropped almost any hint that he was running against other Democrats as he campaigned early this week, directing his standout lines entirely towards President Bush. “Like father, like son, one term and you’re done,” he intoned inside an aircraft hangar in Spokane, Washington, to roars of approval. At his victory rally in Seattle yesterday, the 2,000-strong audience was far more pumped up by the prospect of the battle to come than the ones Kerry had just won. “In November, we will beat George W. Bush,” he said to his loudest cheer of the night.
Kerry’s win in Missouri was indeed enormous, far outweighing the symbolic first-in-the-south contest in South Carolina. Unlike South Carolina, Missouri is an almost perfect cross-section of American life and a key swing state in the upcoming general election. President Bush won Missouri by a whisker from Al Gore in 2000 and it remains a critical test of whether any Democrat can win the White House. Behind Kerry’s huge 26-point win, the voter surveys in Missouri showed him to be attractive to all sexes, ages, religions and ethnic groups. Kerry took a third of the Republicans and independents who showed up to vote in the Democratic primary, and performed especially well with voters who say they are moderates.
But was his South Carolina result really an “enormous” performance? That depends on your starting point. Compared to his single-digit position in the polls before his victory in Iowa, Kerry’s second-place finish is impressive. Yet some polls gave Kerry a slight edge over John Edwards last week, suggesting his eventual 15-point defeat was disappointingly weak. What happened? Kerry’s aides say it boils down to two factors: time and money. Edwards outspent Kerry five-to-one in South Carolina, just as Wes Clark did to win in Oklahoma (where Kerry came in third by a three-point margin). Edwards and Clark also spent far more time in both states than Kerry. “If you are running for president of the United States, you have to run a national campaign,” Kerry told reporters on his plane Tuesday. “You can’t cherry-pick.”
That may be true, but it only tells half the story. Kerry started out with a national strategy, and he’s running one now. But in the meantime he spent the vast bulk of his time cherry-picking his way back to the frontrunner’s position in Iowa. That focus brought his campaign back from the dead, but left him exposed in places like South Carolina, which he’d abandoned since September. Now the challenge for Kerry is to build his campaign across several states while his remaining rivals stake their ground in just one or two strongholds. Since Kerry is as short of cash as his opponents, that leaves the Democratic frontrunner stretched thin.
Where Kerry goes from here is a good measure of whom he fears most. After his trip to Washington and a rest in Boston, Kerry will spend the rest of the week in Maine and Michigan. Michigan and Washington vote on Saturday and Maine follows on Sunday. More importantly, they are all states where Howard Dean was once considered a shoo-in. Dean’s new campaign manager, Roy Neel, said his candidate was concentrating his resources on those three states after skipping Tuesday’s contests. The former Vermont governor’s hope is to make a final stand in Wisconsin in two weeks’ time. For Kerry, that means this weekend’s votes offer a chance to bury Dean long before Wisconsin. In spite of his weak performances to date, Dean remains the darkest cloud on Kerry’s horizon. Marveling at the huge turnout that followed Kerry across Washington state, one Kerry aide said: “We got 3,000 people today in Washington, and this was supposed to be Howard Dean’s backyard.”
What about John Edwards, or Wes Clark? Kerry’s nonchalance about Edwards’s challenge led some commentators to speculate that Kerry had effectively withdrawn from South Carolina to allow his fellow senator a chance to prove himself. According to that theory, a stronger Edwards’ performance would make him a better candidate for the veep slot on a Kerry ticket. That strategy, however, may be a little too sophisticated for a campaign that has only just risen from the dead. “We’re not that smart or strategic,” said one staffer. In reality, Kerry continued to spend on ads in South Carolina this week and would dearly have loved to win there.
So why not prove he can win in the South by concentrating his firepower on Virginia and Tennessee, where Democrats will vote next week? In part because he thinks this weekend’s states are more critical in November. When Kerry says he wants to run a national campaign, he also means he can’t wait to take on President Bush. Michigan, like Missouri, is a must-win state in November. As Kerry has pointed out in less than diplomatic fashion, Al Gore could have won the White House without taking a single southern state if he’d picked up somewhere like New Hampshire instead.
Of course, the Kerry campaign is many weeks away from securing the nomination. Edwards could use another southern victory to springboard his way into the big primaries on March 2. Dean could still use Wisconsin as part of his war of attrition to grind Kerry down. And Kerry could yet mess up on national TV, much like his supporter Norm Dicks, the U.S. Representative for Washington’s sixth congressional district on Tuesday night. As he tried to whip up the crowd for Kerry’s victory speech in Seattle, Dicks recalled the now famous bumper sticker: DATED DEAN, MARRIED KERRY. Now, he shouted, it’s for all Democrats “to support John Dean!” “John Dean,” he then had to stutter rhetorically, “who the hell are you? John Kerry!” Once his supporters all get his name straight, Kerry should find the campaign trail a whole lot smoother.
