Coolness Under Fire
Kerry insists he will prevail, but
will a sharper message be enough?
By MICHAEL DUFFY AND KAREN TUMULTY
CNN.com
Sometimes a politician has to put his head
down and just say it ain't so.
That's how it went with Senator John Kerry last week. While the rest
of the political world obsessed about the dive his campaign has taken
in the past month, the growing doubts inside his party about his performance
on the stump and a campaign clock that seems to be ticking faster now
that Labor Day has come and gone, the Democratic nominee tried to present
a picture of unworried resolve when he sat down in his campaign plane
for a half-hour interview with TIME last Friday afternoon.
The table in front of him clear except for a half-eaten piece of blackberry
pie, the well-worn home plate from Iowa's Field of Dreams baseball
diamond in the aisle next to his seat, Kerry talked about the race,
his opponent, his record and his plans but not about his doubts, if
he has any.
"I think we are doing extraordinarily well," he told TIME. "I
think this is a close race, and it's going to be a close race. I
feel very confident in where we are and confident about the direction
of this race."
But with only seven weeks until the election, the vector of Kerry's
campaign is, if anything, entirely uphill. A new TIME survey of 857
likely voters reveals that President Bush has retained the solid 11-point
lead he earned during the New York City convention earlier this month.
Kerry's support has eroded across almost every demographic group but
most notably among women. In a departure from recent patterns, among
registered voters, women now favor Bush over Kerry by 45% to 44%, and
men are breaking for the President by a lopsided 56% to 34%.
And for Kerry, that's not the worst of it. The landscape of the race
has changed, and the new ground tends to favor Republicans. Terrorism
has replaced the economy as the most important issue in the race, and
on those topics and nearly every other issue, voters give higher marks
to Bush than to Kerry sometimes by dramatic 20-point margins.
Bush's job-approval rating has returned to a safe cruising altitude
of 56%, close to where Bill Clinton stood at this point in 1996, while
Kerry's unfavorable ratings have mushroomed from 29% a month ago to
42% today.
That's dangerous territory for any politician,
but if Kerry is worried about those numbers, he tried hard not to
show it. Asked about Bush's recent surge, Kerry said, "I don't know
what you are talking about in terms of the Bush bounce."
Instead, Kerry insisted, the race is just getting
under way, and voters are "beginning to listen, and listen carefully" to
the debate.
"When we get into those cold days of October and people's juices begin
to flow and they measure us one to one, who's going to be stronger
for America, I'm confident that my record of fighting for this country
since I was a young man is going to eclipse the choices that have been
disastrous that have been made by George Bush," Kerry said.
In fact, many voters have been listening closely for months, and that
partly explains why Kerry has slipped in the polls. Democrats and Republicans
agree that the Kerry campaign focused its convention so tightly on
the theme of the candidate's military service chiefly to blunt the
public's doubts about his qualifications to be Commander in Chief
that it came out of Boston without a clearly defined domestic agenda
for the nation.
Kerry hardly lacks a platform at home; his health-care and fiscal
policies are far more detailed, if less numerous, than Bush's. But
the campaign didn't pivot from the past to the future after Boston
and then hammer home Kerry's ideas.
That left Bush a huge opening and he reached for
it in New York City. "They
made a big bet on his Vietnam service," said Mark Penn, Bill Clinton's
longtime pollster. "It was a good backdrop, but it was just that. He
didn't really have an agenda coupled with that service."
More damaging was Kerry's nonresponse to the Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth, who over the summer accused Kerry of misrepresenting his military
record in a series of television ads. The Swifties' initial charges
were reckless and unfair, but the Kerry camp's political instincts
were almost worse. The campaign did ... nothing.
Incredibly, it felt the need to conduct focus groups to decide whether
to respond to the veterans and, more incredibly, concluded that the
public would be turned off if it did. So Kerry tried to ignore the
whole thing, making two costly errors at once: he allowed a political
attack to go unanswered, and he signaled to Americans that he wouldn't
lift a finger to defend himself.
In an election year that at bottom is about who can best defend the
homeland, Kerry's refusal to strike back hard and fast when his own
hide was on the line was a startling misreading of what voters are
looking for in a leader after 9/11.
Realizing the gravity of their error, Kerry's aides
eventually leaked word that the candidate was unhappy with his campaign's
handling of the Swifties. In public, though, Kerry sees no misstep. "I think we
did absolutely fine," he told TIME.
But nothing has dragged down Kerry like his kaleidoscopic positions
on the war in Iraq, which have long been difficult to follow, are based
in arcane, tactical considerations about Senate voting procedures and
are subject to endless refinement.
Almost everyone knows that Kerry voted for the
war in 2002 and then against the $87 billion in reconstruction funds
last fall when his campaign began to lose ground to antiwar candidate
Howard Dean. That bit of political expediency would have been survivable
had Kerry not turned up, exhausted, in Huntington, W.Va., a few months
later confessing that "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before
I voted against it."
Karl Rove called that comment the most damaging 11 seconds in American
politics and the Bush campaign made the remark the center of a multimillion-dollar
ad blitz in the months that followed. But in trying to clarify things
since, Kerry has often made things murkier and has added footnotes
to his position that have boomeranged on him later.
For example, in July Kerry delivered a popular
line at the convention about how the U.S. "never goes to war because we want to; we only go
to war because we have to." When Bush's advisers heard that, they saw
an opening. In August Bush all but dared Kerry to say whether, knowing
then what he knows now, he would have given the President the "authority" to
go into Iraq, as he did in late 2002.
It was a taunt Kerry should have ignored, for any response held some
dangers. But perhaps because of the confusion raised by his March comment
in Huntington, Kerry took the dare and stuck by his initial vote for
the war, arguing once more that the problem was not his vote but the
way Bush had misused his authority once Congress granted it to him.
It sounded consistent, but Bush now had what he
wanted and could afford to wait for the right moment to play the
card. When Kerry sharpened his rhetoric on the war once more and
began just last week to call it "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," Bush
and Vice President Dick Cheney jumped on him, reminding voters that
even Kerry had said he would vote for the war all over again if he
had the chance.
The point was no longer whether the war was right or wrong; it was
whether you could take anything Kerry ever said to the bank. In the
course of about a month, Bush had found a way to level the playing
field on the one issue on which he was most vulnerable.
And Kerry helped him at every step.
Perhaps what's most frustrating for Kerry's supporters is that his
position is not that complicated and is intellectually defensible.
He voted for the war to strengthen Bush's diplomatic leverage with
allies and against the reconstruction money as a vote of no confidence
on the handling of the aftermath, and he insists he would have conducted
both the diplomacy before the invasion and the cleanup afterward very
differently.
As he explained it to TIME, "The contrast could
not be clearer. They spent a lot of money trying to confuse people,
but I have been consistent. I would not have taken the country into
war the way he did. I would not have put young Americans in harm's
way without a plan to win the peace. I would not have interrupted
as abruptly the effort to build alliances with other countries. I
would not have turned my back on the international community. And
Americans are paying a $200 billion cost today because this President
rushed to war."
A top Kerry aide predicted that by "turning Iraq into a domestic issue," the
nominee would soon turn the race around. But it is far from certain
that this latest tack will hold for very long because other advisers
believe Kerry must get away from the Iraq tar baby once and for all.
All that suggests a deeper problem in the campaign: Kerryland appears
to be arranged not for speed but for consultation.
The Kerry campaign at times resembles a floating five-ring circus
of longtime Democratic operatives who have all sorts of views, allegiances
and ambitions. That worked fine when it was up against Howard Dean's
homespun Vermont militia. Against Bush-Cheney '04, a disciplined hierarchy
run by Karl Rove and manned by fervent Bush loyalists who take no prisoners,
it could be a recipe for a landslide.
Second-guessing is taboo under Rove, chiefly because Bush trusts him
completely. But it's more like a privilege of membership at Kerry HQ,
with the candidate himself often joining the debate.
"Their candidate knows what he thinks," said a Democratic Party elder. "Ours
feels no compunction to talk about all sides of an issue."
Hoping to halt that habit, John Sasso, a hard-nosed party veteran,
has taken up residence on Kerry's campaign plane. Sasso's job is to
help target Kerry's wandering message and keep him from going wobbly.
Sasso, who oversaw the beginning and the end of Michael Dukakis' ill-fated
1988 campaign, was sent aloft, as one ally put it, because the campaign
lacked a Kerry peer who could tell the candidate when and where to
get back in line.
Although his odds are longer now, Kerry has plenty of time to turn
it around, and he can take some small courage from the fact that a
man named Al Gore was ahead four years ago next month by 11 points
and still lost. And as a campaigner, Kerry has a habit of looking into
the abyss before he turns things around.
But he's not in Massachusetts anymore, and as it looks elsewhere,
his operation is quietly cutting its losses. A $50 million television
advertising campaign, begun earlier this month and once envisioned
for 20 states, is playing in only 10.
Dropped for now from the ad buy are such states as Colorado, Arkansas,
North Carolina, Virginia and Missouri, all once thought to be competitive
for Kerry but now widely regarded as out of reach. Kerry senior strategist
Tad Devine disputed the Electoral College triage in a chat with TIME,
noting that Kerry had been in North Carolina and Louisiana as recently
as last week.
Republicans dismissed those visits as track covering. One claimed
that perhaps no more than six or seven states were up for grabs now
a third of the number in early August and a reversal of fortune from
just a few weeks ago.
