Posted on 09/15/2003 10:19:07 PM PDT by Utah Girl
It was all part of a master plan. The obligatory official declaration of a candidacy--carefully situated not at home in Massachussetts, or even next door in New Hampshire, where the candidate is a distant second in recent polls. Rather, a picture-perfect fresh start in front of an aircraft carrier in Patriots Point harbor in South Carolina. All constructed to telegraph a few important things:
First, that Sen. John Kerry is a national candidate. Second, that he is strong on national security. Third, that he is a tough veteran, a patriot with "courage." His Vietnam gunboat mates were even there to drive the point home.
And yet, there was a line in the speech that struck a strange chord. "We are seeing the peril in Iraq every day," Kerry intoned. Then came the discordant note: "I voted to threaten the use of force to make Saddam Hussein comply with the resolutions of the United Nations . . . ." Whoa. Threaten the use of force? Hardly. The congressional resolution--which Kerry supported and then elaborated on in a speech on the Senate floor--was a vote specifically to authorize the use of force, not simply threaten it. No reading of the text of the resolution suggests anything else.
Have we seen this before? A putative Democratic front-runner, struggling to find his true self on the stump, parsing words to win. Can this be the beginning of Al Gore redux? "It's this tacking to and fro again," moans one unaffiliated Democratic strategist. "Kerry needs to be seen as standing for some things, not equivocating." Sure, most of the Democratic contenders--except Howard Dean--underestimated the anger among Democratic stalwarts toward George W. Bush and the war. Those like Kerry who voted for the war in Iraq have had a difficult time explaining why to Democratic antiwar partisans. But cleverly explaining away the vote for war as something it wasn't does not work. "It's not as bad as Al Gore's awful `no controlling legal authority,' but it's getting there," says a Gore ally. "That's not good news."
There's an eerie similarity here. Here's another Washington establishment candidate, surrounded by the best-known and respected team, who still can't define himself, even on his home turf. Maybe that's why Kerry placed 21 points behind Dean in a recent New Hampshire poll. And what was Kerry's response to the Dean surge? He blamed it on his campaign. Then he promptly huddled with his campaign staff, emerging finally to announce his "complete confidence" in his minions who, sources say, have been disagreeing over how to handle Dean, attack Bush, and reintroduce Kerry to the American people.
All of which is more than a tad reminiscent of candidate Gore, who supervised a large, often feuding, series of staffs. "Whenever things got rocky, we changed the team," says Ron Klain, former Gore chief of staff, recalling the shake-up in the summer of 1999. "To do that is to learn the wrong lessons from the Gore campaign. Then your campaign becomes more about who has power internally, rather than what the candidate is about." Recall that when candidate George W. Bush lost New Hampshire to maverick John McCain, he stuck with his team--and Karl Rove is still sitting in the West Wing.
Strategy and timing. Then there's the question of what to do about Howard Dean. At last week's presidential debate, Kerry did not go on the attack. Within the Democratic campaign establishment, there's a feeling that "Kerry waited too long to attack Dean, and now if he attacks him, it looks desperate," says a Kerry ally. Gore, you may recall, refrained from attacking his only primary opponent, Bill Bradley, until Bradley started gaining real ground. So what's Kerry supposed to do? "Stop waiting for people to come to you because everyone in Washington thinks you're really good," says a former top Gore adviser.
It is, of course, very early. Kerry, like Gore, is not a natural on the campaign trail. Yet unlike Gore, he listens. "He doesn't always think that he knows more than anyone else in the room," says an adviser. That's a start. "Now all he has to do is try and build his own base," he adds. "Without looking too calculating." And without claiming he invented the Internet.
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