Posted on 02/07/2004 6:04:13 AM PST by RJCogburn
As Labor Day opened the final stretch in John Kerry's 1996 re-election campaign, polls showed that little more than a third of Massachusetts voters believed he deserved a third term in the Senate.
That summer's headlines had widened what one Kerry adviser called the "charm gap" between the senator and his challenger, William F. Weld, the affable aristocrat who had won his second term as governor two years earlier with 71 percent of the vote.
When Mr. Weld punctuated a news conference by diving fully clothed into the Charles River, Mr. Kerry seemed stiffer than ever by comparison. When Mr. Weld challenged the Republican National Convention to let him speak in favor of abortion rights, he looked like the kind of Republican a largely Democratic state could happily have represent it in Washington.
Eight lurching weeks later, Mr. Kerry won the race by eight percentage points and was being asked when he would run for president.
How John Kerry bounced back from being declared dead in 1996 provides valuable insights into him as a campaigner, his combative instincts and how he deals with adversity. People on either side of the 1996 race say these same qualities propelled the come-from-behind victory over Howard Dean in Iowa that set him on the path to winning seven of the nine Democratic contests so far.
And his supporters say the 1996 race also put on display the political prowess Mr. Kerry would show as the candidate trying to topple an incumbent president.
Aides say that it took Mr. Kerry's seeing his career flash before his eyes in the 1996 race for him to focus and fight. He showed he was not above ruthlessness, abandoning a promise to limit spending to buy extra advertising time in the final weeks.
After fiercely resisting a series of debates, he used them to fend off charges that he was soft on crime and taxes and that he was a clone of Michael S. Dukakis, the governor under whom he served as lieutenant governor. They were the kind of charges his campaign expects to face this year.
He brought in Democrats with star power to help him. And he made the most of his service in Vietnam.
To some Weld advisers, Mr. Kerry did not so much win the race as he avoided losing it. They argue he won on the coattails of President Clinton, who easily beat Bob Dole.
Others say that such arguments underestimate Mr. Kerry — again.
"Everyone smells blood in the water or a weakness when they go up against John Kerry," said Thomas P. O'Neill, Jr., son of the former House speaker, like Mr. Kerry a former lieutenant governor and now a public relations strategist here. "What people do not get is that nobody answers the later rounds better than John Kerry. All of a sudden he sees that people are underestimating and taking him for granted and he will spring on you. He's going to be so unrelenting that you're not going to know what hit you."
Mr. Weld agreed, in somewhat less effusive terms.
"When John was flat on his back and reporters were calling me from Iowa and New Hampshire to throw the last handful of dust on his grave, I said, `Wait a minute, I was five points up in September and I ended up losing by eight points,' " the former governor recalled in an interview. "This is a guy who can take a punch and who can overcome being behind, and those are important qualities."
The race was dubbed the Battle of the Brahmins: tall, rich, Yale-educated former prosecutor (Kerry) versus tall, rich, Harvard-educated former prosecutor (Weld), and it began with an air of gentility.
The two candidates personally negotiated a $5 million spending cap on advertising in Mr. Kerry's townhouse in pedigreed Louisburg Square. They agreed to seven debates (an eighth was added later) that included free-wheeling exchanges modeled on the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
The September polls, however, had the Kerry campaign worried. His job performance ratings had fallen over the summer. In a Boston Globe poll, those who thought he should be reelected had dropped to 35 percent from 49 percent a year earlier. Just 31 percent of voters found Mr. Kerry likable, compared with 45 percent for Mr. Weld.
The Weld campaign's television ads were mocking Mr. Kerry's record, saying he had done little more in Washington than raise taxes, that he voted against mandatory sentences for criminals who sold drugs to children and that he tried to preserve welfare payments to drug addicts and alcoholics.
The battle quickly became the Brahmin Brawl.
Mr. Kerry planted himself in Massachusetts and pushed aside his longtime media adviser — much as last year he fired his campaign manager. He brought in Bob Shrum, a Democratic consultant known for sharp ads and who is now playing a major role in Kerry's presidential campaign.
Mr. Kerry began hammering the theme that would let him leap over the charm gap: that a vote for Weld was a vote for a Republican Senate and for Newt Gingrich's Republican revolution.
Kerry ads reminded voters that Mr. Weld had once deemed Mr. Gingrich — "Newtie," the governor had called him — his "ideological soulmate." They blended photos of Mr. Weld with those of Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond. At a debate, Mr. Kerry held up a Dole for President button in front of Mr. Weld.
Mr. Weld insisted there were "only two names on the ballot: Weld and Kerry." On its face, it seemed ridiculous to lump a Grateful Dead-loving, gay rights-supporting governor with Southern conservatives.
But even Weld advisers say it worked. "We thought, `Everyone knows Bill Weld, no one will believe this guy is Newt Gingrich, this is dumb strategy,' " said Raymond P. Howell, a senior Weld adviser. "It was brilliant strategy."
In the final debate, the week before Election Day, Mr. Kerry challenged Mr. Weld to declare whether he would support Mr. Helms's continued tenure as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "That was a tough question," Mr. Weld said recently. "I ducked."
Mr. Kerry had resisted the debates, but in the end, strategists say, they helped him. Before the final debate, for instance, a Globe poll showed that 38 percent of the voters thought Mr. Kerry deserved re-election. After, 51 percent did.
In what many considered the debates' most dramatic moment, Mr. Kerry showed he could avoid the kind of mistake that had tripped up Mr. Dukakis in his 1988 presidential campaign when he gave a legalistic answer to a hypothetical question about how he would react if his wife were raped and murdered.
In historic Faneuil Hall, Mr. Weld challenged Mr. Kerry to defend his opposition to the death penalty, demanding that he look the mother of a slain police officer in the eye and tell her why the life of her son's killer was worth more than her son's.
Mr. Kerry denounced the killer but defended his position: "I know something about killing," he said, in an allusion to his service in Vietnam, as the hall fell to a hush. "I don't like killing. I don't think a state honors life by turning around and sanctioning killing."
At another debate, Mr. Kerry, usually considered aloof, was revealing. When the panelists asked the candidates for their most agonizing personal decision, Mr. Kerry said that apart from choices he faced in Vietnam, it was his decision to divorce his first wife, and his worries about how it would affect his daughters. Mr. Weld, by contrast, said he could not think of one.
Mr. Kerry, the senator who was known for something of a Hamlet streak, was suddenly radiating decisiveness and energy.
"What impressed me most about his '96 campaign was how, when he faced the real possibility of losing to an exceptional candidate, he didn't panic," said Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska Senator who was chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee that year. "He calmly and rationally assessed the situation, chose an alternative course to the one he was on, and then led his campaign down that road."
This was a pattern longtime advisers had come to expect.
"He's a guy who actually, in a weird way, finds stuff in him when his back is against the wall," said Charles A. Baker, a Democratic operative.
Still, polls showed either man could win.
Mr. Kerry called in President Clinton to a concert in September. The weekend before the election, the president and Senator Kennedy appeared alongside Mr. Kerry at a mobbed rally in Springfield, near the steps where John F. Kennedy had delivered a speech the day before he was elected.
Mr. Kerry also decided to go above the spending cap, putting $1.7 million of his personal money into advertising in those final weeks, much like he chose in this campaign to take a $6.4 million loan against his house and pour it into the primaries.
Kerry officials argued that the original agreement with Mr. Weld had been based on the premise that 15 percent of the money would go to commissions for media consultants. The Weld campaign, they said, had violated the agreement first by negotiating lower commissions.
Weld advisers even now scoff at such reasoning and say Mr. Kerry never intended to honor the agreement.
"Senator Kerry was planning on spending as much money as it took to get reelected," said Peter Berlandi, who ran Mr. Weld's campaigns for governor, and remains close to him. "He did not want to lose that race."
Rob Gray, Mr. Weld's campaign spokesman, is even tougher. "The real parallel here is that John Kerry will abandon his principles to win," he said. "Weld would have won if Kerry hadn't spent the money over the cap."
But Mr. Kerry's aides maintain that the advertisements did not make the difference. The contest, they argue, was decided in what John Marttila, a senior adviser, called "man-to-man combat"— the debates that were watched by millions.
"Television is a character x-ray machine," Mr. Marttila said. "Over time, and this will happen in the presidential campaign, people watch these individuals and they begin to make very deep judgments about the kind of individuals they are. I think John won on substance and he also won based on the assessment of his character, and I say that with a lot of affection and good will toward Bill Weld."
It is still worth remembering that Weld's errors were (1)he was trying to be nice, (2)he did allow a lot of stuff from Kerry's mouth go unchallenged.
William F. Weld, the affable aristocrat who had won his second term as governor two years earlier with 71 percent of the vote.
Could be some graveyard whistling going on.
But Weld did not attack him either.
That choice of words can't be an accident. Ha!
Perhaps their plan was to get it all out of the way early on so they could use the old, oh, it's old news excuse.
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