the soon-to-be-anointed Democratic presidential nominee was relaxed. “Now,” he said, “I’m ready for next week.”
But was he? Riding the wind was easy compared with the task Kerry faced when he sat down on his porch: figuring out how to use his acceptance speech on Thursday night in Boston to win the trust of voters. Writing in his angular script on legal pads, Kerry mixed his ideas with those of three speechwriters and a dozen kibitzers. The core metaphor is familiar by now: his role as a Vietnam Swift Boat commander, rescuing a mate from a river under hostile fire. He would pledge to strengthen the military and spy services in the post-9/11 era, and offer a list of “save us all from the river” proposals on education, health care and the environment. Issuing a call to public service, he will invoke his late parents–a father in the State Department, a mother leading Cub Scouts. But what would he say about himself? An often solitary figure, Kerry sometimes seems more suited to the role of kite-surfer–all alone on his wakeboard–than rock-jawed captain. “His No. 1 job in his speech will be to get people feeling comfortable about who he is,” says adviser Tad Devine. Meaning: commander in chief.
Judging from polls, undecided voters will at least be ready to listen. For nearly five months Republicans carpet-bombed Kerry with $100 million worth of attack ads, depicting him as a flip-flopping liberal elitist too indecisive and enamored of diplomacy to match President George W. Bush’s “High Noon,” hang-’em-high approach to the war on terror. The ads worked, but only up to a point. Kerry is seen as less decisive than Bush, and more willing to shift with the political winds. But Kerry remains tied with Bush, or even slightly ahead, in horse-race matchups, and the attacks did nothing to erase the profound doubts about the president’s stewardship. “The Republicans tried to distract attention from Bush’s problem by taking Kerry out,” says Kerry pollster Mark Mellman. “They failed.”
Now the task is to make the sale to the swing voters–and there aren’t that many of them to pitch. In 1992, says Bush-Cheney strategist Matt Dowd, nearly two thirds of all voters were up for grabs; this year, by his estimate, only 17 percent are. Bush and Kerry advisers agree on who those “available” voters are. They are more likely to be female, white, married, working at one or more jobs and earning a middle income. Many are Hispanic. By definition, they tend to pay far less attention to politics than others do, and are influenced more by fleeting impressions of character than by party identity, ideology or specific proposals. The warning sign for Bush, says Republican polltaker Tony Fabrizio, is that more of these voters say they approve of the way he is doing his job than say they are going to vote for him. That “approval gap,” in Fabrizio’s view, is the Kerry opening. “Those voters already know everything they want to know about President Bush,” he says. “They are willing to be convinced to abandon him.”
The targets of opportunity are equally clear in the Electoral College. “The math is pretty simple,” says one top political adviser to the White House. “The pivotal states are Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Whoever wins two out of three is elected.” Accordingly, Bush-Cheney ‘04 is lavishing fantastic sums on all three places–but so, too, is the Kerry-Edwards campaign. “We have played them even up across Florida, which wasn’t true in 2000,” says Devine. Industrial job losses give Kerry more than a fighting chance in Ohio, he says, and he insists “we are not going to lose Pennsylvania.” About 16 more states are in play, with Democrats foraging behind what used to be the enemy lines in states such as Colorado, while the Republicans do likewise in Wisconsin and Iowa.
The money race is a close-run thing, too. Kerry matched Bush in ad spending in recent months, but that may change. When Kerry is officially nominated, he will be limited to spending $75 million in federal funds for the rest of the campaign; Bush has about $50 million of his own campaign cash to spend before getting his $75 million and accepting the limits when he is nominated in New York City in early September. “Obviously, they’ll try to hit us in August,” says Devine.
But it matters less what Bush says about Kerry than what Kerry says about himself. In the post-9/11 world, his aides say, voters are less interested in a radical change in course than a different captain on the bridge. That’s convenient, since Kerry voted to authorize the war in Iraq and still wants to stay the course there. Nor, Kerry aides say, do voters want an outsider. That’s convenient, too, since Kerry, a senator for nearly 20 years, isn’t one. His chief adviser and speechwriting tutor is veteran Washington consultant Robert Shrum, who began working on presidential campaigns in 1972 (and who has never advised a winner). He and Kerry are the same age, and share the same source of inspiration and patronage: the Kennedys. And yet in recent decades, only those Democrats who have set themselves apart from the more liberal aspects of that legacy (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) have won. So although the convention is in Boston and Sen. Ted Kennedy will be featured, Kerry advisers insist that the proceedings won’t be an homage to Camelot. “It’s not a Kennedy festival,” says one aide. “It’s a Kerry festival.” Whatever that is.
