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Trench Warfare
'The Interregnum': After the primaries, Kerry was cranky and his campaign began to drift. The Bush war room wanted to 'define' him, and knew how to get under his skin
Newsweek
Nov. 15 issue - John Kerry was really ill. In November he had picked up a cold, the ubiquitous campaign grippe, and by February he had walking pneumonia. He had lost his voice. He looked even gaunter than usual; Lincolnesque, maybe, but he was losing weight and he couldn't sleep. A week after the New Hampshire primary, while campaigning in Kansas City, Mo., he went back to the holding room after an event and lay on the conference table. "I'm really sick," he said. He couldn't seem to get up, making his staff very nervous. "I just want to lie here for a few minutes," he croaked. But then he got up, as he always did. When Teresa was on the road with Kerry, she fussed over her husband, recommending various cures and soothing potions. "Sometimes my mom is very happy when John is sick because she gets to brood over him," said Teresa's son Chris Heinz. But Teresa did not like to campaign constantly with her husband, and she had her own duties running the multimillion-dollar Heinz Family Philanthropies.
Campaigning can energize a natural politician, like Bill Clinton, who feeds off crowds and sucks up adulation. For the more solitary, shy Kerry, campaigning—the day-in, day-out grind of meeting and greeting and staying "on"—was always a labor, sometimes an ordeal. Kerry's best friend from Yale, David Thorne, his former brother-in-law who had stayed close even after Kerry's divorce from Julia Thorne in 1988, worried about the toll on the candidate. The campaign was "depleting" Kerry, Thorne believed. His old friend was stoic and dogged, and Kerry rallied under pressure, but there was never enough time to truly recover.
Kerry could be cranky. He was not a petty tyrant, like some bosses. He could be generous to his staff, who stayed loyal to him. But "he will whine constantly," said one top aide, quoting Kerry's bouts of petulance: " 'I'm not getting enough exercise, I'm overscheduled, I didn't get the speech on time'—on and on, ad nauseam." Kerry's campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, didn't put up with much. "She cuts it off," said this aide. "She'll say, 'It wasn't anybody's fault,' or 'Whose fault was that?' " Kerry's personal aide, Marvin Nicholson, had to grin and bear it. Kerry had met Nicholson, 33, at a windsurfing shop in Cambridge, Mass., where Nicholson was working; he later caddied for Kerry at the Nantucket Golf Club. Now the 6-foot-8 University of Western Ontario grad was, in effect, his valet, serving his personal needs. The two men were close friends, but Nicholson was still the servant.
The morning after the Feb. 3 primaries, which vaulted Kerry into a virtual-ly insurmountable lead, the candidate was fuming over his missing hairbrush. He and his aides were riding in a van on the way to a Time magazine cover-photo shoot. Nicholson had left the hairbrush behind. "Sir, I don't have it," he said, after rummaging in the bags. "Marvin, f---!" Kerry said. The press secretary, David Wade, offered his brush. "I'm not using Wade's brush," the long-faced senator pouted. "Marvin, f---, it's my Time photo shoot."
Nicholson was having a bad day. Breakfast had been late and rushed and not quite right for the senator. In the van, Kerry was working his cell phone and heard the beep signaling that the phone was running out of juice. "Marvin, charger," he said without turning around. "Sorry, I don't have it," said Nicholson, who was sitting in the rear of the van. Now Kerry turned around. "I'm running this campaign myself," he said, looking at Nicholson and the other aides. "I get myself breakfast. I get myself hairbrushes. I get myself my cell-phone charger. It's pretty amazing." In silent frustration, Nicholson helplessly punched the car seat.
The headlines that winter were mostly good, as Kerry racked up one primary victory after another. But there were some bumps and one near miss. On Feb. 12 Matt Drudge, the Internet gossip columnist, reported that two major news organizations were working on a story that Kerry had an "intern problem" with a young female campaign worker. The story was bogus, but in the post-Monica Lewinsky era, the Kerry campaign feared it would break out of the cesspool of the lower tabloids and Drudge and make it into the mainstream press, cause a distracting flap and possibly open the door to a late Edwards challenge. Democratic members of Congress, whose staffs read Drudge like everyone else in the Washington journalist-politico world, were anxiously calling in to Kerry headquarters. Kerry's staff had to feverishly work the phones to newspaper reporters, imploring and bluffing and trying to play on what little shame the press had left. "No one else is doing it. You'd be the only one," the Kerry staffers would say to the reporters and pray that they were telling the truth. The New York Post came closest to running with the story but backed off. The damage was contained; it turned out to be the usual confection of false rumors, possibly stirred up by troublemaking staffers from rival camps.
On March 2 Kerry swept the last big slew of primaries, and Senator Edwards, who had been waging a spirited if futile race, finally conceded. On the campaign trail Kerry ran chronically late. He did not like to be "handled," and when advance men rushed him, he gave them a "back off" look and proceeded at his own deliberate pace. On the night of the Feb. 3 primaries, Kerry had taken so long to get to the cameras to declare victory that he had permitted Edwards to dominate the airwaves. His chief strategist, Bob Shrum, had ranted and raved that Kerry was going to miss the Eastern media markets altogether if he didn't get onstage any faster.
But with the race over, Kerry was suddenly thrust into the bubble of the Secret Service, which was charged with protecting the Democratic nominee. The Secret Service was usually able to make anyone, with the possible exception of Bill Clinton, run on time, in part because its agents could literally stop traffic. So on the night of March 2 it was a thrill and a relief for the family entourage to be able to roar downtown from Teresa's house in Georgetown to a victory celebration at the Old Post Office Pavilion on Pennsylvania Avenue in just seven minutes, sirens whooping, lights flashing. Whispering into their cuffs, the Secret Service agents rushed the presumptive nominee into the elevator and everyone piled in for the ascent to the main hall, one story up.
The elevator rose half a floor and abruptly stopped. The increasingly agitated agents and advance men began loudly whispering into their sleeves again. One agent fruitlessly tried to wedge the door open. The heat rose. Kerry's stepson Chris Heinz and his two daughters, Vanessa and Alexandra, tried to crack jokes. The candidate sat down on the floor, rested his forehead on his arms and went into a silent trance. Heinz looked down at his stepfather. "You OK down there?" he asked. The senator tersely replied, "Heat rises."
After 15 minutes of increasingly hot and claustrophobic waiting, a technician arrived, the door was pried open, an advance man climbed out and the elevator—lighter now—began to rise again. The doors opened. Kerry looked out at the waiting crowd. "Let's not take that elevator again," he said coolly. Everyone chuckled, nervously.
On the drive back to Georgetown, the motorcade raced south of the White House on Constitution Avenue. Vanessa Kerry could see the White House ablaze in light, the tantalizing prize—now, incredibly, within her father's reach. She and Alex felt moved, overwhelmed, but noticed that their father didn't. Within a couple of minutes of delivering his victory speech he had been back on his cell phone. "Dad," said Alex, who is close to her father and direct with him, "will you please appreciate this moment for 10 seconds?" He mumbled, yes, yes, he was happy, it was good, and then went back to working the cell phone, trying to find aides to line up fund-raising events. It occurred to Vanessa that the cliche was wrong; her father was not, as the scribes would say, a fourth-quarter player, he was a marathon man. Kerry liked to say that "every day is extra" after Vietnam, but actually every day was like the day before, a relentless march toward his goal.
The period between the last primary and the summer conventions is an odd time in presidential campaigns. In earlier campaigns it had been the political equivalent of the "phony war," the long, strange lull in fighting in World War II between the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the blitzkrieg through Europe in the spring of 1940. This time around, there would be no phony war. The polarized electorate, the constant chatter on talk radio and cable TV, the frenetic pace of campaigning by the candidates, gave the campaign a truly warlike feel in the spring of 2004. A better comparison was World War I: trench warfare, muddy and gassy, with neither side able to secure much ground and keep it.
The Kerry campaign was well aware of the importance of maintaining momentum, of not easing off after the primaries and allowing the Bush campaign to dominate. In 2000, the Gore campaign had been listless all spring while George W. Bush was convincing voters that he was really a "compassionate conservative." At least money would not be a problem this time around. Kerry had only about $2 million in cash on March 1 (versus more than $100 million in the Bush coffers), but raising money was proving to be easy, thanks partly to the intensity of anti-Bush feeling. By forcing Kerry to "bust the caps" and go outside the campaign-finance system, Howard Dean had done the Democrats a great favor. Al Gore had spent only about $9 million during the 2000 phony war; Kerry planned to spend more like $80 million. Kerry had genuine momentum coming out of the primaries. This was the time to capitalize on it and fix in the voters' minds the image of the Democratic candidate as a thoughtful war hero, a man who didn't just shoot from the hip but was strong enough to come from behind.
On March 8 top aides gathered for a strategy session in Bob Shrum's well-appointed, airy office overlooking the Potomac. Tad Devine, Shrum's partner and a key strategist, stressed, "We can't let down and relax." It was important, he said, for Kerry to recover from his chronic cold, but after a little rest he needed to be out on the trail. Devine called the period between the primaries and the convention "the interregnum," and proposed what he called an "ideas primary." Kerry would offer his solutions to the pressing problems of the day: getting the economy going again and restoring international faith in American foreign policy.
Kerry was soon out speaking about jobs and education, the environment and mending relations with the allies, but he wasn't connecting. Part of his problem was Iraq, which was veering out of control, with uprisings and bombings and kidnappings. Kerry was curiously mute on the crisis. He could urge greater international involvement, but with Iraq still in chaos, why would foreign countries send people who might just be taken hostage? So Kerry mostly talked about doing the responsible thing and staying the course, which was about what Bush was already doing.
The real problem was not the subject but the speaker. Kerry's friend Sen. Joe Biden, ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, was far more animated on the Sunday talk shows, comparing the Iraqi uprisings that spring to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968. There was something soporific about Kerry's style that made his speeches, no matter how considered and reasonable, seem forgettable.
Not surprisingly, the press seemed to pay more attention to Kerry's occasional testy outbursts. At the end of March he went skiing, an essential outlet for a man who uses vigorous, high-stress sports as a release. "Unbelievable—I didn't think about the campaign the whole time I was up there," he exulted after one particularly grueling day in the northern Rockies of Sun Valley, Idaho, where Teresa kept one of her five houses. Kerry was happy to be slogging up mountains and snowboarding down icy chutes, but he collided with a clumsy Secret Service man and told him off in crude language. A couple of reporters, from ABC and The Boston Globe, were skiing nearby and publicized the incident. Then on "Good Morning America" in early April, the candidate bridled when the normally genial host Charlie Gibson asked him about an old controversy, recently brought back to life by Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush surrogates, over whether Kerry had thrown away his medals (or just his ribbons) at an antiwar protest in 1971. Kerry was indignant about having his honor questioned, and at the end of the interview, with the camera still rolling, he snapped at Gibson, "Thanks for doing the work of the RNC [the Republican National Committee]."
Offstage, Kerry's handlers cringed. Putting him on first thing in the morning on an issue he cared about viscerally was a mistake, they realized. Kerry cannot deflect a question when he is wrapped up in the sureness of his position. (John Edwards, on the other hand, was able to deftly redirect the question back to Cheney's draft status during the Vietnam War. Questioned about Kerry's medals by talk-show host Don Imus, Edwards shot back with a laugh, "Five deferrals, and you're asking me about John Kerry?")
Kerry clearly needed help with his speaking skills, so in early spring he quietly appeared at the 17th Street offices of Michael Sheehan, a well-known Washington speech coach who has helped numerous Democratic politicians—and worked with some, like Gore, who seemed beyond help. The question was whether Kerry belonged in the latter category. Sheehan told Kerry that he had to learn to shift to a more conversational style, to vary the pace, to sound more casual in his speech. Otherwise, his speeches all sounded the same and gave the impression that what he was saying was calculated—that he was thinking about what he was saying rather than saying what he felt.
Kerry was not defensive with Sheehan. Indeed, he invited criticism, as he often did. Kerry may have been reserved and aloof, but he was a self-improver, and he wanted to do whatever it took to win. With aides he would sometimes say, "Tell me everything you think I'm doing wrong." He always appeared to be listening. But was he really? Were his shortcomings as a speaker somehow hard-wired? It was hard to know.
Kerry's backers never stopped searching for signs, for some signal that he would hear the music. In August 2003, when the campaign had been floundering and unable to raise any money, a group of Kerry's top fund-raisers met at his Beacon Hill town house. The moneymen were almost desperate. They implored him to be more aggressive, to really take on Dean. Kerry was defensive and prickly. He pushed back: Why hadn't the fund-raisers called this or that contributor? Why hadn't they reminded the contributor of all that Kerry had done for him? The fund-raisers became argumentative: why aren't you out there more? "I have been out there," Kerry snapped. As the meeting was deteriorating into recriminations, Teresa Heinz Kerry slipped into the room, apologizing for her tardiness. She immediately took the side of the fund-raisers, telling her husband, "No, John, you haven't been aggressive enough." Kerry sparred with her, calling her "love," but insisting that he was trying harder. His mood softened; he seemed less defensive. As Teresa led a discussion of "the things we need to do better," Kerry seemed to be listening.
When they trooped out of Kerry's mansion on that steamy August night, the moneymen had felt a sense of relief, even optimism. At least Teresa was serious about turning the campaign around. And indeed Kerry's campaigning did improve. But it took him two months to get going. And then, after he had won the nomination, he seemed to fall back into dull Senate speak.
It was almost taken for granted around the Bush-Cheney campaign that "going negative" against Kerry was the way to go. "It's a no-brainer, it's just sort of campaigning 101," said adman Mark McKinnon. Despite his string of primary wins, Kerry was still not well known to the American people. The BC04 team wanted to use a good chunk of their $150 million-plus war chest to "define" Kerry—that is, to paint him as a tax-hiking, flip-flopping liberal. On March 11, just a week after the Bush campaign had begun to build up the president with "positive" ads, including the so-called 9/11 spots, the team began buying ads in key swing states imagining Kerry's first 100 days in office. By plumbing—and twisting and exaggerating—his old Senate voting record, they were able to make him look like a profligate supporter of big government. In one ad titled "Wacky," McKinnon's ad team suggested that Kerry would raise gasoline taxes by 50 cents.
Negative advertising is only one brushstroke in the dark arts of modern campaigning. All major campaigns maintain "rapid response" units. The 24/7 media and the technology of the Internet demand it. A campaign can no longer spend the day working for that one good 90-second "visual" on the evening news. On cable TV the message of the day can lock in early, getting repeated every half hour or so unless it is successfully rebutted or trumped. The first state-of-the-art rapid-response unit was set up by Bill Clinton's top political operatives, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, back in 1992. Viewed today, the cult-film documentary from that campaign, "The War Room," with its clunky mobile phones and fax machines, might as well be a remnant from the silent-screen era. Technology has quickened the pace and provided new weapons for hitting back. Digital video-recording devices can "capture" an image of a candidate making a speech and immediately pass it around via e-mail and the Internet. Admen can cut a response ad overnight, if not sooner.
It takes a certain breed of sleepless media junkie with a jugular instinct to run a good war room. The director of rapid response for the Bush-Cheney campaign, Steve Schmidt, fit the part. Chunky, with a shiny bald head, he looked like an artillery shell. When he talked, his small blue eyes darted around the room at the flickering TV sets. As he spouted rapid-fire talking points, sometimes a hint of a crooked smile would creep across his lips, as if he pitied anyone on the receiving end of such a high-velocity, hard-hammering spin machine. Schmidt liked to refer to himself as Patton. His staff called him the General or the Colonel. He was known to stalk through the halls of the headquarters declaring, "Kill, kill, kill!" It was not clear how much he was kidding.
Smart campaigns, even ones with more than $100 million to spend on destroying an opponent, do not just use brute force. Clever operatives know how to practice jujitsu, to use their opponent's strength against him. Kerry was a deliberate and thoughtful man, but his need to constantly explain himself was a weakness, and not just because it bored people. Kerry was reactive. Properly baited, he could be led into a trap that was partly of his own creation.
The Bush-Cheney campaign knew about Kerry's vulnerability from the outset. "If the rabbit runs, he'll chase it," said campaign manager Ken Mehlman. Possibly, Mehlman thought, Kerry had overlearned the lesson of the 1988 campaign, when Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was sluggish about responding to the barbs and provocations of the Republican dirty tricksters. But Mehlman and the others didn't realize, at first, just how self-defeating Kerry's rational process could be. As a matter of routine, the Bush operatives tried to goad Kerry. And when he reacted, they were ready.
In the third week of March, the BC04 team learned, Kerry was headed to West Virginia to talk about national security. The Mountain State was a critical swing state, full of veterans who could go either way. (By summer Bush was spending so much time there, his advisers were joking that their unofficial slogan was "If it's Sunday, it's West Virginia!") On Monday, March 15, McKinnon repaired to his ad shop, Maverick Media, to crank out a spot that would air on the West Virginia airwaves just in time to greet Kerry. In the ad, a grave baritone voice intones, "Mr. Kerry?" calling on the senator to cast his vote for or against more funding for the troops in Iraq. Kerry appears to vote no again and again (in fact, it was a single vote). At 7 the next morning the ad was digitally whisked to West Virginia, where it began playing on local TV.
That noon, when Kerry addressed a veterans group in West Virginia, a heckler kept demanding to know why he had voted against more funding for the troops. In his considered but long-winded fashion, Kerry tried to explain that he had wanted to vote for the funding, but only if the Senate passed an amendment that would whittle down President Bush's earlier tax cut for the rich. Kerry voted for the amendment, but when it failed, he voted against the funding. The heckler pressed, and Kerry, losing patience, fell into senatorial procedural shorthand. "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it," he said.
At Bush-Cheney headquarters, Joe Kildae, a 25-year-old campaign intern who monitored the war room (and never seemed to sleep), was watching. In his cubicle he kept three televisions and a battery of TiVos and VCRs. As soon as he saw Kerry make his remark on Fox News, he stood up in his cubicle and caught the eye of his boss, Steve Schmidt. Schmidt had seen the clip, too. The two men nodded at each other. Kildae thought to himself: "We're going to be seeing this a lot." He immediately hit pause on his digital recorder, wound the clip back and copied it to tape. Using a program called TVEyes, he pulled up an instant rough transcript. He e-mailed the transcript of Kerry's "flip-flopping" to an "alert list" of top aides, who could then click on a link to see the video.
"You gotta see this," Kildae told campaign communications adviser Terry Holt. "Oh, my God," Holt replied. "You have to send that to me on my BlackBerry." The video of Kerry's shooting himself in the foot flew around Bush-Cheney headquarters and, very soon, into the hungry ether beyond.
McKinnon and his ad team wasted no time. "The second we saw it, we knew we had a new ad," McKinnon later recalled. "The greatest gifts in politics are the gifts the other side gives you." It was so simple. All they had to do was drop the footage of Kerry saying "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it" into the ad that was already running, chastising Kerry for cutting funding. McKinnon called the new ad "Troops-Fog." Much of its airing was free: news shows picked up the clip of the "flip-flop" and plastered it on screens like wallpaper.
It took a while for the Kerry campaign to even realize that its candidate had been badly wounded. Kerry himself realized he had made a mistake, but at his headquarters, most of the chatter was about the "weird heckler" who had asked him the question. The Kerry campaign would later insist that the Bush campaign had spent millions that spring to smear its candidate without much effect, but in fact Kerry's "negatives" climbed in some key swing states. Just as important, perhaps, he had missed an opportunity to define himself in a positive or memorable way. The Bush "Troops-Fog" act blew enough fog to unsettle voters, to make them wonder about Kerry's consistency and the depth of his conviction.
The Kerry campaign continued to drift, unable to break through. Kerry himself was flummoxed. Paging through a speech draft in early April, he wondered aloud, "What is our message?" Kerry's caution, his fondness for nuance and his essential sense of responsibility kept getting in the way. To the dismay of aides, he cut voter-pleasing preschool programs from his proposed domestic-spending plan because he didn't want to run up the deficit. He boned up on foreign-policy arcana for interviews—you never knew when Tim Russert might ask a question about, say, Cyprus. But he continued to say nothing remarkable about Iraq. On Capitol Hill, Democrats were panicking. Kerry's own family was hearing the bad buzz and anxiously trying to reassure themselves that "staying the course" was the way to go.
On a morning in early April, Bob Shrum seemed even edgier than usual, popping Nicorettes and spinning a conference-room chair next to him. Shrum was determined to "play our game and not the press's game," as he put it. Let the media squawk and the Republicans take the low road. The money was pouring in now—more than $50 million in the first quarter of 2004, about half of that from the Internet, the money machine discovered by Howard Dean. (In April, Kerry would outraise Bush.) There would be time to build up Kerry; in the meantime, let Bush self-destruct as his failed policies became more and more apparent.
Somehow, though, the long-awaited Bush collapse wasn't happening, at least not yet. Iraq seemed to be in flames. At a press conference in mid-April, Bush told a reporter that, try as he might, he just couldn't think of a mistake he had made since 9/11. The press and the chattering classes hooted in derision. But Bush actually went up in the polls. Most voters seemed to like the president's show of resolve. Kerry was baffled. He said with a sigh to one top staffer, "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot."
Chris Heinz, Kerry's stepson, was struck late one evening in April when he found the candidate sitting silently, alone, in a vast hotel suite in San Francisco. The room was a far cry from the spare and sometimes seedy motels of January. "When did all this happen?" Heinz asked, looking around. "I don't know," said Kerry. After a pause: "I think it was around Feb. 3. Definitely March 2, the hotel rooms started getting nicer. In mid-March they put a bike in my room."
"Wow. Cool," said Heinz.
"I know," Kerry said.
The exchange was typical enough between them; the two graduates of St. Paul's and Yale had forged a boasting, joshing preppy-jock bond centered on their mutual fondness for hockey, skiing and extreme sports. Speaking in crude, macho shorthand, they could sound, at times, like boarding-school roommates who had just returned from vacation.
Heinz, who is not shy, decided to try a little "reality check" to test Kerry's true spirits.
"You know what, John?" the stepson said. "Nov. 3 is going to be f---ed up. The whole thing is going to be f---ed up."
"What do you mean?" Kerry asked.
"Well, look," Heinz said. "John, if you win, you're the president of the United States. That's pretty f---ed up."
Kerry, smiling, nodded tentatively. "Yeah, all right."
"And if you lose," Heinz continued, "I'm not even going to tell you how f---ed up that is."
Kerry's cheeks, perched plump above a toothy grin, sank into an empty expression. "That's it," he said. "That's enough of that."
There were some places you didn't go with Kerry.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
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