An Invigorated Kerry Courts Ohio, and Some Swing Voters Are Taking a Harder Look
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
The New York Times
Published: October 4, 2004
nytimes.com
AUSTINTOWN, Ohio, Oct. 3 - Elvis Presley's "A Little Less Conversation" was pumping through the loudspeakers, aptly enough after a 75-minute political forum. And the candidate consigned to the empathetic Bill Clinton's shadow, having spent the better part of that time sharing the pain of 500 members of what he calls the squeezed middle class, was bathing in their embrace.
Off to the side of a high school gym, Katy Curtis, 39, was wiping her eyes.
"He's not Clinton, but he's close," Ms. Curtis said. "I didn't see that till today." She had watched intently on Sunday afternoon as Senator John Kerry listened to a newly divorced steelworker, locked out of his factory job for 11 months, haltingly describe how his daughter had told him not to worry - that her mother and grandmother had "taken care of" her first homecoming dress.
"I went to pieces," said Ms. Curtis, a swing voter who said that she supported President Bush after the Republican convention but switched to Mr. Kerry after seeing him up close.
Mr. Kerry's compassion for the man on stage, Ms. Curtis said, and his plans to reverse job losses and soaring health care and tuition costs, made her feel that he could address her own worries - a wellspring of emotion arising from her and her husband's inability to help their daughter pay for college, and their flirtation with bankruptcy.
If Ms. Curtis and a few other previously undecided Ohioans who came to Mr. Kerry's town-hall meeting here and some new polls are any indication, swing voters are giving Mr. Kerry a second look after his strong showing in the first presidential debate. And they are liking what they see.
"The compassionate conservative thing - that's what I picked up from him," said Debbie Donatelli, 51, a secretary who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000 but said that she would vote for Mr. Kerry after hearing him on Sunday. "I know he comes from a privileged background, but he's more in touch."
Ms. Curtis said she and her 19-year-old daughter had swung toward Mr. Bush in August, because "he seemed to really know what he was talking about" at his convention.
"Then we watched the debate," she said, and decided to show up when Mr. Kerry visited this heavily Democratic community near Youngstown.
"I just think he's got the pulse of the middle class," Ms. Curtis said afterward. "He needs to do this in so many places in the next 30 days. He's got to get out there and let them know that he's supporting us."
Mr. Kerry is telling people so at every stop. "I've got your back," he promised again here, connecting to voters in one of the only ways he knows - as a foxhole buddy.
He reeled off the ways he is trying to extend Mr. Clinton's legacy: with promises of balanced budgets and fiscal discipline, of help for people "who are playing by the rules," and with an attack on his opponent reminiscent of Mr. Clinton's on the elder George Bush, saying that he is out of touch with Americans' economic hardships.
Mr. Bush "has been here many times," Mr. Kerry said of the current president, who had rallied near Akron on Saturday. "I think he was here yesterday. But the question is, does he really see and know what is going on in the lives of middle-class Americans, people struggling to get in the middle class, people who are fighting for survival?"
Mr. Kerry had just talked with locked-out workers on a Niles, Ohio, picket line who were holding out for 20 cents more an hour, he said, even as health care, gas, college tuition, and prescription drug prices were rising. "Everything's going up in America except the wages of Americans under this administration," he said.
Since the debate, Mr. Kerry's aides have regained the spring in their step that they - those who were on the campaign then, at least - suddenly found back in early January, as he surged in the polls in Iowa. And his long question-and-answer session here - one of three tune-ups Mr. Kerry is holding this week for Friday's town-hall-style debate with Mr. Bush - was reminiscent of those marathon Iowa forums where he seemed to win over Democrats simply by listening carefully and sketching out his ideas specifically.
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