Kerry whispered, even as Gore roared. Inside the Democrats' war room as they seek to exploit Bush's rough patch
Nick Danziger / Contact for Newsweek
Power forward: John Kerry tosses a basketball on his campaign plane last week
By Howard Fineman and Susannah Meadows
Newsweek
June 7 issue - In Seattle they want their coffee strong and their salmon straight from the river, a yen for flavor that may explain why the air was buzzless in McCaw Hall when Sen. John Kerry unveiled his plan for bolstering American "security and strength for a new world." But wowing locals wasn't the goal; outmaneuvering George W. Bush was. Despite rising sentiment in the Democratic Party against the war in Iraq (given voice last week by Al Gore's roar), "Kerry is not going hard left on the war," declared a top adviser. Not if he wants to win swing votes in Red States.
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So in a painstakingly balanced speech—crafted by a coalition of Democratic centrists—Kerry took dead aim at the mainstream, calculating that voters may want to change leaders more than philosophy. The president, Kerry declared, was an inept, simplistic, go-it-alone cowboy incapable of carrying on America's tradition of global alliance-building. Even so, Kerry agreed that creating a new Iraq was necessary for American security, and he proclaimed himself just as tough—and as willing to use military force, even pre-emptively—as the man he wants to replace.
In McCaw Hall, there was some evidence that Kerry's modulated sales effort might succeed. Iraq is "an absolute mess," said David Haldeman, 25. "Kerry did not address Iraq as clearly as I would have liked. But my dislike of George Bush overrides everything at this point. You can put a sock puppet next to Bush and I would vote for it."
At Kerry headquarters in Washington, no one's calling it the "sock puppet" theory, but it's pretty much the one they are operating on. The election, in their view, doesn't turn on Kerry's legislative victories (in 20 years in the Senate, they are few) or on his grand new ideas (his foreign policy, judging from his advisers, would be a Clinton Restoration). Rather, his handlers think, the race is about being a minimally acceptable alternative and in the right position to capitalize on the president's weakness.
Indeed, Kerry last week inched ahead in the battleground states—less because of his own "bio" spot (though Republicans admit it's pretty good) than because of six weeks of bleak news from Iraq. "I don't hear very much passion in Kerry's campaign," says Joe Trippi, who managed Dr. Howard Dean out of obscurity. "But Kerry won the primaries by benefiting from the other guy's collapse, and he may do it again."
That assumes the president is a stationary target. He's not. He may be a cowboy, but this month he won't be a lonesome one. Bush will meet this week with the leaders of Italy and France. He then will give a "Greatest Generation" speech at Normandy, and host leaders of major industrial nations at a G8 getaway on Sea Island, Ga. He caps the month with a trip to Istanbul for a NATO meeting. The substantive aim of these trips is modest enough—to win European forbearance, if not support, for the new Iraq government. But the political aim is crucial: to show American voters that he can be an internationalist, too, though (proudly) not one who can speak French.
Kerry's challenge, meanwhile, is to portray himself as something more than the sum of calculations and course corrections. He continues to have trouble doing so. He said he would not rule out nominating pro-life judges—but after the pro-choice crowd squawked, he hurriedly explained that he had meant the lower courts, not the Supremes. He considered the idea of not accepting the Democratic nomination at the party's convention, a principled way, his aides said, to level the financial playing field. But he caved when Tom Brokaw and the mayor of Boston complained.
If Kerry wants tips on how to be calculating and convincing at the same time, he will need to read Bill Clinton's 957-page autobiography, due out at the end of June. But then Kerry will have to express an opinion about the controversial ex-president—and that will require a whole new set of calculations.
