From ABC News Kerry campaign reporter Ed O'Keefe:
While growing crowds are not unusual late in a primary contest, Kerry's weekend showings were particularly strong and consistent: two overflow rooms at Dartmouth Friday night, nearly 2,000 New Hampshirites at a celebrity-laden hockey game Saturday afternoon, and a 1,500 person rally Sunday. Though the campaign and Senator Kerry routinely double these figures, in reality, they are impressive without exaggeration.
Crowd size itself has had little effect on event content, except that Kerry now stays longer and thus falls behind schedule earlier in the day. Evening crowds wait upwards of an hour and a half to see the Senator, surviving multiple local speakers and Billy Shaheen's best comedy routine.
The tighter schedule and larger crowds have also led to a historic occasion: on Sunday, the Senator gave his shortest scheduled stump speech to date, clocking in at six minutes, forty-five seconds. The improved time is a far cry from the days when Kerry rarely spoke less than twenty-five minutes and often averaged times in between thirty to forty.
And, for no apparent reason, it seems Springsteen's "No Surrender," the campaign's theme song in Iowa, has been displaced by U2's "Beautiful Day" and "The Rising," a later contribution from the Boss, in New Hampshire. This Kerry song shakeup could mean the campaign casualty list now includes one campaign manager, a communications director, several staffers, a political director, and a song.
ABC News' Jake Tapper on Kerry's Southern strategy — or lack thereof. Even if Kerry remains committed to campaigning and winning there, his comments sounded foul to some political observers.
"Saturday at Dartmouth, Kerry discounted notions that any Democratic candidate would have to appeal to Southern voters in order to win the presidency, calling such thinking a 'mistake' during a speech at Dartmouth College." LINK
"He noted that former Vice President Al Gore would be president if he'd won any number of other non-Southern states in 2000, including New Hampshire, West Virginia, and Ohio. 'Everybody always makes the mistake of looking South,' Kerry said, in response to a question about winning the region. 'Al Gore proved he could have been president of the United States without winning one Southern state, including his own.'"
"Dick Harpootlian, former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, told ABCNEWS in an exclusive interview. 'It's the wrong message to be saying at this point,' said Harpootlian, who noted Kerry was the only major Democratic candidate not running TV ads in his state." |
