The failures of the Kerry candidacy, Part II.
Edwards had mounted a vigorous campaign to secure the number two slot. No sooner had he quit the presidential race than he hit the trail for Kerry. And on March 11, when Edwards invited his fund-raisers to Washington to thank them for their support, he took the unusual step of inviting Kerry. Meeting at The St. Regis hotel, Edwards appealed to his donors to support the presumptive nominee.
By mid-June, Kerry was close to choosing Edwards. Kerry telephoned the charter company that was providing his campaign plane. He ordered three sets of decals: Kerry-Edwards, Kerry-Gephardt, and Kerry-Vilsack, but the latter two were decoys. On July 6, Kerry announced his running mate and his plane rolled out of a hangar at Pittsburgh International Airport decked out in "Kerry-Edwards" logos.
The announcement generated a flurry of excited coverage, featuring Edwards's photogenic family.
In the end, though, Edwards's help to the ticket was questionable. He fell off the major media radar screen, instead currying local coverage in battleground states such as Iowa, Minnesota, and Ohio. And he did fail to deliver his home state, despite campaigning there more than a half-dozen times. And when Kerry's Vietnam foes began their August assault, Kerry had to turn to other surrogates, those with military credentials, to come to his defense.
Convention strategy
Every week through the early summer, senior advisers would gather in the fishbowl conference room of Kerry's Washington headquarters to plan their candidate's big national debut, the Democratic National Convention in Boston. As the group grew to as many as 18 people, some advisers worried that the sessions lacked focus.
Still, a consensus began to emerge that the convention should be used to build up Kerry's commander in chief credentials, not tear down Bush's. The reason was mostly practical: Independent groups on the left, dubbed "527s" after their position in the tax code, were already churning out millions of dollars in negative ads against Bush. Why duplicate this vigorous, and well-funded, Bush-bashing effort?
Moreover, the president was suffering from high unfavorable ratings in the polls. Bush-haters didn't need to be convinced of their animus for the president. Selling Kerry as a viable alternative was the task at hand.
His strategists believed that highlighting Kerry's combat record was a no-brainer: Vietnam had always helped him in Massachusetts. "We wanted to give people hope and assure them that Kerry had the strength and guts to stand up to enemies and defeat terrorism. Everything at the convention was calculated to make that point," said Billy Shaheen, his New Hampshire campaign chairman.
In the planning, proposed segments about Kerry's Senate record -- on the environment, on small business, on foreign policy -- were scrapped or scaled back. And aides sought to ensure that both prime time and afternoon speeches were short, on message, and positive about Kerry without being overly harsh on Bush.
Those goals, meant to appeal to swing voters, were out-of-synch with a staunchly antiwar audience; a Globe poll indicated that about 90 percent of the delegates inside the FleetCenter opposed the war, which Kerry had voted to authorize. And anger at Bush was so fierce that delegates broke into raucous cheers at even the most gentle denunciations of his administration.
The convention hall was festooned with photos of Kerry in combat. His band of brothers stood on stage. Jim Rassmann, then a registered Republican, retold the story of how Kerry had saved his life while under fire in Vietnam.
On Thursday, July 29, the last night of the convention, the man whose fame was launched by denunciations of a war stepped onto the podium and gave a military salute. "I'm John Kerry," the candidate told the cheering delegates, "and I'm reporting for duty."
The line was the brainstorm of former US senator Max Cleland of Georgia. A close friend and Vietnam veteran who had lost both legs and his right arm in combat, Cleland had planned to use a version of the line in introducing Kerry. "John saw that in a draft of my speech, he liked it, and he took it for his own," Cleland recalled.
Kerry had drafted his own speech in longhand on a legal pad with input from advisers. Once finished, he practiced delivering it during sessions inside his
Nantucket garage.
The speech was designed to introduce Kerry as a strong commander. Kerry said he would "never hesitate to use force" and "never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security." He spoke of knowing "what kids go through when they are carrying an M-16 in a dangerous place," about how the American flag "flew from the gun turret right behind my head." He promised to wage the war in Iraq "with the lessons I learned in war."
When the night, and the convention, closed, Democrats declared a roaring success. The polls were less enthusiastic.
Historically, presidential candidates emerge from their political conventions with as much as a 10-point bounce in the polls.
While Kerry's standing on national security issues improved after the convention, his big national debut from Boston didn't add more than a point or two to his support.
Some Democrats felt the Kerry team had squandered its best chance to build an aggressive case for why Bush should be removed from office. As for selling Kerry as a viable alternative: Only six lines of his acceptance speech were devoted to his 20 years in the Senate, a fact that his GOP foes loudly broadcast. The omission was, said one senior adviser, "a fair criticism."
Later, others worried that the focus on Vietnam left an opening for Kerry's swift boat foes to attack. "Was there too much Vietnam?" one top strategist pondered after the election. "Probably, in hindsight. But the swift boat group would have attacked regardless."
Vietnam as the centerpiece
John Kerry is not a man who indulges in emotional highs and lows. When he is angry, he is a master of the cold eyes, the stony mien, the slow burn, which are often delivered as he places his hands on your shoulder or moves his face up close to yours and expresses some measure of disapproval. Aides went to great lengths to avoid those moments.
"You know immediately when he's pissed at you," said Shaheen. "He gives you a look that goes through you. He sets his jaw. If you try to talk, it seems like he's not listening to you. But he never gets heated; he's the coolest cat in politics."
By Aug. 14, Kerry was mad -- and aides could feel it.
Ten days earlier, an inflammatory book by his Nixon-era foe, O'Neill, had topped a national best-seller list. "Unfit for Command" used mostly unsupported allegations to label Kerry a liar who didn't deserve some or all of his combat medals.
At the same time, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth began airing ads, mostly in swing states, quoting men who said Kerry "has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam," "lied" to get his medals, "is no war hero," and "betrayed all his shipmates."
Kerry wanted to fight back right away, but Shrum and other media advisers cautioned against it, concerned about fanning the flames. "We watched as the story jumped from the Internet, to Fox News, to the other cable networks," said Cahill. "Our concern was we didn't want to help it along by our reaction."
The campaign hoped that the episode would blow over with minimal damage, as it had the previous spring. But this time, there was no prison scandal, or anything else, to swallow the swift boat veterans' crusade. "The August echo chamber was a difficult environment because nothing else was going on," said Thorne.
"The campaign collectively underestimated the effect of the swift boats. It was a collective mistake," recalled Michael Whouley, a longtime Kerry operative. "I think the candidate was probably the most concerned about it. It pissed him off, people attacking his Vietnam service."
Kerry wanted to know what impact the ads were having. Shrum recalled that for days the polls indicated nothing. Then the damage began to show. "As soon as we saw it, we moved," Shrum said.
By then, the damage had been done. A Time magazine poll suggested that Kerry's favorability rating had dropped from 53 percent in early August to 44 percent by late that month. A remarkable 77 percent said they had seen or heard about the ads, with one-third contending that there was some truth to the allegations.
An angry Kerry summoned longtime friend Thomas J. Vallely, a Bostonian and Silver Star recipient, and told him to "find me Billy Rood." William B. Rood had been present during the action that garnered Kerry the Silver Star the swift boat foes were now calling into question. Rood, an editor at the Chicago Tribune, had refused to speak publicly about the action. He took Kerry's call, though he didn't tell the senator what he planned to do.
On Aug. 22, an article by Rood appeared in the Tribune condemning the swift boat veterans and backing Kerry's version of the event leading to his Silver Star. The story spread, adding to a growing consensus that the campaign against Kerry was based on exaggerated or unproven claims.
Still, the swift boat veterans had damaged Kerry's standing and left some Democratic strategists asking whether the candidate's focus on Vietnam had created an opening for his political opponents.
One of Kerry's closest friends, Bobby Muller, a fellow Vietnam antiwar leader, went to a September lunch at Washington's Equinox restaurant with Thorne and Vallely. "The failure to respond is inexcusable," Muller said.
The question of whether the campaign should have made Vietnam "such a centerpiece could be second-guessed forever," said Thorne. " And I think the answer is it served us well in distinguishing John's unique biography and also helped put forth an image of a strong commander in chief, an antidote to the very allegation that Bush was making -- that he is weak, can't lead the country."
But the swift boat campaign, he added, was like aikido, the martial art in which you "use the other person's energy in your own defense. They used the energy that we had created about Vietnam to turn it against us."
Veteran campaign advisers
Since May, Begala and other former Clinton advisers had been raising alarms about the direction of the campaign, arguing that Kerry needed to make a clearer, more direct assault on Bush. As one senior adviser, looking back on the entire campaign, described the situation: "Our idea of a 'negative frame' is to say, 'Bush is taking us in the wrong direction.' Their idea of a negative frame is to say, 'Kerry is a coward, liar, and not fit to be president of the United States.' They're hitting us with a baseball bat and we're spitting on them."
By August, Kerry was ready to expand his circle of strategists with veterans of Democratic presidential politics who, unlike Shrum and Cahill, had worked closely with a winner. Kerry and Cahill reached out to Clinton's combat-tested lieutenants: former spokesmen Joe Lockhart and Mike McCurry, senior advisers Joel Johnson and Doug Sosnik, and pollster Stanley B. Greenberg.
"Not to bring the Clinton people in by summer was a terrible failing," said a senior campaign adviser who spoke regularly with Kerry. "A presidential campaign always has to be an expanding pie. You must always say, who can I bring in?"
Lockhart, McCurry, and Johnson were particularly adept at "winning the news cycle" by spinning the day's events against Bush. Those in and around the campaign saw a tougher, more disciplined message emerge.
Kerry also began speaking with the former president more frequently. Sometimes Lockhart arranged the conversations; sometimes Kerry would just call Clinton himself. Among their phone calls, which numbered one to two a week, the most important one occurred on the night of Sept. 4, a Saturday, as Clinton was in a New York City hospital preparing for heart surgery that Monday.
In the 90-minute conversation, aides say, Clinton counseled Kerry never to let another assault go personally unchallenged for so long. He also advised the candidate to make more sustained criticisms of Bush and to focus on core issues in battleground states -- job losses in Ohio, the toll of Iraq on military families throughout the Midwest.
The next day, in a move that would also prove crucial to Kerry's rebound, the nominee elevated Massachusetts strategist John Sasso, who had served as his general election manager at the Democratic National Committee, to be his traveling campaign manager. Both Kerry and Sasso believed the campaign needed a more disciplined message and a greater day-to-focus, and that Kerry was too often distracted by small-bore problems better left to aides.
Preparations pay off
Nothing helped Kerry think more clearly than an afternoon of windsurfing the Atlantic behind his wife's $9 million Nantucket beach house. On Monday afternoon, Aug. 30, as Republican delegates began trekking from their city hotels to opening night at Madison Square Garden, Kerry sat on the beach toying with a new sail, eager to test it out.
A salty breeze and white-capped surf beckoned. So Kerry slipped his board into the sea, stood upright holding the neon pink-striped sheet, and began sailing back and forth, back and forth, zigzagging among the small boats in the harbor.
Windsurfing was not a hobby likely to resonate with laid-off Ohio steelworkers or other swing voters. And Republicans gleefully seized upon the footage of the Nantucket scene in an ad suggesting Kerry's positions moved "whichever way the wind blows."
But what the Bush campaign didn't see was the danger lurking for their candidate inside the beach compound. The flaky windsurfing image masked the serious business at hand during that island weekend: As the Republican convention proceeded, Kerry and his advisers were already hard at work prepping for the first debate, still four weeks away.
The preparations had begun in June, when a team including former vice presidential aide Ronald A. Klain, Kerry adviser Jonathan Winer, former White House special counsel Gregory B. Craig, Clinton friend Vernon Jordan, and Shrum began compiling material. By August, the team was meeting with Kerry once a week.
"Kerry wanted to do this differently than either Clinton or Gore; he wanted to do a lot of work early," said Klain. "Both Clinton and Gore liked to cram. Kerry really wanted to absorb and needed to get stuff done early. . . . He was much more methodical [than Clinton or Gore]. He's a much more avid reader than either. His reading wasn't the prelude to learning; his reading was the learning. He was extremely disciplined about it."
The sessions that began in earnest in Nantucket and continued as mock debates in Spring Green, Wis., had one goal: Kerry wouldn't hear a single word from Bush that he hadn't heard before.
In the White House, meanwhile, Bush resisted practice sessions. His debate preparations were marred by irritation and distraction, advisers said. Bush engaged in at least two miserable sessions with his sparring partner, Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. Aides did not even force Bush to watch the sessions that went badly, because "everybody knew" they had not gone well, one adviser said. Finally, frustrated by the intrusions at the White House, senior aide Karen Hughes moved the practice to Bush's ranch at Crawford, Texas.
Still, by the time the first presidential debate opened in Miami on Sept. 30, Bush advisers thought they had already one-upped the Democrat by insisting on a buzzer to enforce time limits.
If Bush aides thought this strategy would show the Democrat as a pompous windbag, they were wrong. Instead, the time limits forced a steely and determined Kerry to make a crisp prosecutor's case against his opponent.
Kerry brought skills honed over summer practice sessions, as well as renewed energy from two effective foreign policy speeches he had delivered the previous week. Kerry was finding his voice on Iraq. Whereas before he talked of a "wrong direction" in the war on terror, he now hammered Bush for "colossal failures in judgment."
Faith, values in focus
"John is a prosecutor; John is a fighter. He needs to fight," said Thorne. "He needed to prosecute the war in Iraq, [saying] 'This is what has gone wrong.' "
Thorne, who was by Kerry's side during his 1971 antiwar leadership, said he now saw a "glimmer" of the passion Kerry had expressed 23 years earlier. "He began to speak from a place of conviction and passion. He felt at home."
Kerry's newfound confidence was on display during the first debate with Bush; as Kerry grew in stature, Bush seemed to shrink, repeating stock phrases and smirking as his opponent spoke. The aides standing backstage broke into smiles. "We knew we had the president of the United States on the run," said Klain.
But only for a while. A majority of voters thought Kerry had won the debate, but he was still neck-and-neck with Bush.
Kerry's staff knew one of their biggest challenges was to turn a man known as an aloof Boston Brahmin, married to one of the nation's wealthiest women, into a man who could appeal to average Americans. For months, aides would propose that Kerry go hunting or that he talk more about his Catholic faith and experience as an altar boy.
But other aides would intervene, saying it would look gimmicky. Although Kerry did go on a hunting trip near the end of the race, "there were people who sat on it and made sure it didn't happen" earlier, said one campaign insider.
One of Kerry's biggest fears was that he would be denied Holy Communion because of his position on abortion. "The notion was sort of crushing to him," one of Kerry's aides said. Kerry's Catholicism should have been one of his strongest assets; an estimated one of every four voters in a presidential campaign are Catholics, and the margin is even higher in some battlegrounds states.
But the White House wasn't about to let Kerry use faith to his advantage, and portrayed him as out of step with the Catholic Church on issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion, both of which are against church orthodoxy.
Kerry made high-profile visits to churches and gave speeches on faith and values every week leading up to Election Day. But by then, the Bush campaign had already culled the membership lists of thousands of churches and sent out fliers attacking Kerry's record on issues of special interest to Catholics and other religious Christians.
And many of those church members were already casting ballots for Bush in states that allowed early voting.
Hopes and a dream fade
The Kerry team neared Election Day with high hopes. True, there had been some setbacks since Kerry's stellar debate performance. In the third and final debate, Kerry touched off a firestorm of criticism when he answered a question about gay marriage by naming Vice President Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter to show "we're all God's children." Kerry later told an aide he wished he hadn't made the comment.
On the campaign trail, it still could be difficult to combat Kerry's occasional political-tone deafness. During an Oct. 29 speech in Orlando, the candidate tried an unscripted plea, "Wake up, America!" Aides cringed -- was Kerry suggesting that Americans were asleep? -- and told him to drop the line.
Later that day, a new videotape of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden emerged. Kerry wanted to react in a statesmanlike way, but some aides -- seeing a rare opening to hit Bush on a core vulnerability -- toyed with releasing a statement with a different tone. "It would say something like: 'You see that guy up there on the screen looking fat and happy in his robes? Well, he would not be there if George Bush had captured him,' " said one senior adviser. Fearful of elevating the terrorist's influence, Kerry and his aides quashed the idea.
With the election just days away, no one wanted to rock the boat. Greenberg's daily tracking numbers indicated that Kerry was nudging ahead in mid-to-late October and ahead in a majority of battlegrounds, though aides worried that few other polls suggested the same.
Kerry had heard about early exit returns on Election Day, and he believed he would win. But as day turned to night in Boston, Kerry began to get dispiriting reports when he telephoned Cahill for updates.
After dinner with his family and the departure of his aides around 10 p.m., he began fidgeting: Pacing up and down stairs in his Beacon Hill town house, sorting through papers, starting conversations and then growing silent.
Once again, as in 2000, the election appeared to hinge on one state. Four years ago it was Florida. Now it was Ohio, where Bush appeared to be winning by about 136,000 votes, but some 155,000 "provisional" ballots, which still required verification, had not been counted. Without Ohio, Kerry would lose both the Electoral College and the popular vote. If he won the state, even by a single vote, the Electoral College would name him president.
After midnight, Kerry and Cahill decided that he should not make a planned visit to the crowd at Copley Square, instead sending Edwards to tell the crowd to wait one more night.
But by Wednesday morning, Kerry knew there was no chance he would gain enough votes in Ohio to become president. Agonizingly, he realized that his campaign had met its turnout goal in Ohio voters but that the Bush campaign had turned out many more rural voters than anticipated, including many apparently driven by cultural and leadership issues.
After the obligatory telephone call to Bush, Kerry delivered an emotional concession speech at Faneuil Hall in which he said he wished he could "embrace each and every one of you." Kerry then asked some of his longtime friends to come back to his Louisburg Square home for private reflection. Some had known Kerry for more than four decades and had always believed he would be president. A day earlier, they had been convinced of it.
Now the dream was over.
Kerry sat in the kitchen, sipping a bowl of soup, and shook his head as he turned to a friend and said simply, "We worked so hard." There were tears and hugs.
As Kerry sat, he started to analyze the race. Many voters, he concluded, cast their ballots on single issues, such as abortion or gay rights. Kerry had tried to walk a fine line on both issues, saying life began at conception while supporting abortion rights, and opposing same-sex marriage but also rejecting a constitutional amendment to ban it. From the start, it had been difficult for a Bostonian to appeal to the conservative South and some Midwest states. Kerry felt he had done it.
But through it all, the rivers of war -- Iraq and Vietnam -- ran through the campaign.
As the friends and family gathered around him, Kerry's daughter Vanessa comforted her father.
"I'm so proud my name is Kerry," she said. |
