Posted on 09/26/2004 7:20:17 PM PDT by Former Military Chick
WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 — For 15 minutes in Milwaukee the other day, Senator John Kerry pummeled his staff with questions about an attack on President Bush, planned for later that morning, that accused the White House of hiding a huge Medicare premium increase.
Talking into a speakerphone in his hotel suite, sitting at a table scattered with the morning newspapers, Mr. Kerry instructed aides in Washington to track down the information he said he needed before he could appear on camera. What could have slowed down the premium increase? How much of it was caused by the addition of a prescription drug benefit? What would the increase cost the average Medicare recipient?
Mr. Kerry got the answers after aides said they spent the morning on the telephone and the Internet, but few of those facts found their way into his blistering attack.
The morning Medicare call was typical of the way Mr. Kerry, a four-term senator with comparatively little management experience, has run his campaign. And, his associates say, it offered a glimpse of an executive style he would almost surely bring to the White House.
Mr. Kerry is a meticulous, deliberative decision maker, always demanding more information, calling around for advice, reading another document — acting, in short, as if he were still the Massachusetts prosecutor boning up for a case.
He stayed up late last Sunday night with aides at his home in Beacon Hill, rewriting — and rearguing — major passages of his latest Iraq speech, a ritual that aides say occurs even with routine remarks.
"He attacks the material, he questions things, he tries to get it right," said Richard C. Holbrooke, the former United Nations ambassador and an adviser to Mr. Kerry. During a recent conversation about Iraq, he recounted, Mr. Kerry "interrupts me and he says, `Have you read Peter Galbraith's article in The New York Review of Books? You've got to read that, it's very important."'
In interviews, associates repeatedly described Mr. Kerry as uncommonly bright, informed and curious.
But the downside to his deliberative executive style, they said, is a campaign that has often moved slowly against a swift opponent, and a candidate who has struggled to synthesize the information he sweeps up into a clear, concise case against Mr. Bush.
Even his aides concede that Mr. Kerry can be slow in taking action, bogged down in the very details he is so intent on collecting, as suggested by the fact that he never even used the Medicare information he sent his staff chasing.
His attention to detail can serve him well on big projects, as it did when he sent aides scurrying across the country to find long-lost fellow Vietnam veterans who could vouch for his war record. But sometimes, his aides say, it is a distraction, as it was in early 2003, when they say he spent four weeks mulling the design of his campaign logo, consulting associates about what font it should use and whether it should include an American flag. (It does.)
His habit of soliciting one more point of view prompted one close adviser to say he had learned to wait until the last minute before weighing in: Mr. Kerry, he said, is apt to be most influenced by the last person who has his ear. His aides rejoiced earlier this year when Mr. Kerry yielded his cellphone to an aide, a move they hoped would limit his distractions in seeking out contrary opinions.
"He considers options, synthesis, antithesis — he's a thinker," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who traveled with Mr. Kerry last week, and whose own presidential campaigns were known for their disorganization.
Still, Mr. Jackson added: "A boxer needs a manager and needs a cut manager in the corner and needs someone to handle the towels. But once the bell rings, a boxer needs his instincts."
Unlike Mr. Bush, who was a governor and a business executive before he ran for president, Mr. Kerry — who has spent the past 20 years as a legislator, with a staff of perhaps 60 — has little experience in managing any kind of large operation. Several Democrats suggested that this presidential campaign was in many ways a learning experience for him.
Mr. Kerry was described by his associates as more interested in the finer points of public policy than the mechanics of politics. Scott Maddox, the chairman of the Florida Democratic Party, said he could not recall getting a call from Mr. Kerry checking in with what was going on in that critical state.
Mr. Kerry reads briefing books and newspapers in the morning (often grousing about stories critical of him), watches television interview shows like Charlie Rose's late at night (sometimes leaving phone messages for his friends who appear as guests, offering critiques of their performances) and dials senators and old friends at all hours.
At meetings, Mr. Kerry poses contrarian questions in an often wandering quest for data and conflicting opinions, a style that his aides, sometimes with a roll of the eyes, call Socratic.
Mr. Kerry, in an interview, said, "I ask the people delegated and responsible what their take is on a particular event, and then I'll have a series of things on my agenda I want to talk about."
In his quest for information, he is always consulting an ever-widening circle, rarely comfortable with relying on one person or giving anyone too much power. There is no Karl Rove in Mr. Kerry's orbit.
Mr. Kerry has also, in this campaign and earlier ones, repeatedly upended his staff, edging longtime advisers aside or dismissing aides outright when things threatened to run off the tracks. As a result, while some stalwarts from Mr. Kerry's first campaign have stuck with him since 1972, the senior staff of his campaign includes few people who call themselves his friends or are personally loyal to him.
This month — as Mr. Kerry made staff changes, as he was shaken into focusing on his campaign's problems, as he reached out yet again to friends and advisers — he displayed a signature management style that could hardly be more different from Mr. Bush's.
For better and for worse, Mr. Bush takes his counsel from a small, unchanging group of strategists. His senior campaign staff has not changed in 18 months. Mr. Bush's hunger for information and conflicting opinions is limited. His management style is crisp and insular, and it does not change between easy days and tough ones.
Mr. Kerry's circle is as wide and changing as Mr. Bush's is constricted and consistent. He is always calling one more friend, and the campaign lineup has shifted so often that rumors of staff changes have become part of the daily gallows humor at Kerry headquarters on McPherson Square in downtown Washington.
Instead of delegating authority to a single adviser, Mr. Kerry relies on different people for different advice. And, he made a point of saying in the interview, none of them have too much authority. "I am always in charge," he said.
Mr. Kerry's willingness to upend his staff has brought him some come-from-behind political triumphs, and was invoked by several associates in describing him as a decisive executive ready to make difficult decisions under fire.
"John believes that you have to be willing to take on talent even if it is provided by people you don't know," said Dan Payne, a Boston political consultant, who was pushed off Mr. Kerry's 1996 campaign for senator in favor of the strategist Bob Shrum when things were looking bad.
But that management style has come at a cost. Mr. Kerry's top aides in this campaign are, with a few exceptions, longtime political professionals who have little history with the man they are working for. One result, aides say, is that Mr. Kerry's campaign has been afflicted this year with infighting and newspaper articles have detailed the dissension, a constant source of irritation to the candidate.
Mr. Kerry has less of an interest in the processes of politics than the president does. If Mr. Bush likes to talk about party registration breakdowns in southern Ohio, Mr. Kerry drifts off when the subject turns to the demographic details of campaign polling. While Mr. Bush screens new television advertisements in the White House family quarters, Mr. Kerry is often satisfied with viewing a rough cut, or skimming a script. He is also apt to exhibit a blank face when he runs into a Democratic leader he should remember, one aide said.
Representative Ted Strickland of Ohio said that during a recent bus trip through the small towns of the Appalachian region that make up his district, Mr. Kerry peppered him with questions about the way the reduction of import tariffs had affected the pottery industry — not about the voting patterns in a state he is struggling to win back from the Republicans.
"He's not involved in the details," said John Marttila, who has been working with Mr. Kerry since his failed bid for Congress in 1972.
That does not mean he is detached from running his campaign. Aides say he takes interest in matters large and small, but typically only after he senses his candidacy is in peril.
It was Mr. Kerry's idea, an aide said, to attack Mr. Bush on gun control with the expiration of the assault weapons ban. Mr. Kerry said he also was the one who thought it best to go after Vice President Dick Cheney a few days later on his ties to Halliburton.
Mr. Kerry delegates most of the operational management to Mary Beth Cahill, his campaign manager, with whom he speaks a dozen times a day, usually starting before breakfast. It was Ms. Cahill, not the candidate, who extended recent job offers to two veterans of the Clinton administration, Michael D. McCurry and Joe Lockhart.
David McKean, Mr. Kerry's chief of staff in the Senate, said he often arrived on Monday mornings full of ideas from things he had read over the weekend and called aides in to ask for memorandums ranging from two to five pages, which he would later return with comments in the margins.
In his daily round of telephone conversation, he frequently presses for information and conflicting opinions. "It's `this is what I think, what do you think?"' said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who frequently talks to Mr. Kerry about foreign policy.
Aides were eager to attest that Mr. Kerry is not a micromanager. Still, he took such a close interest in planning the tour on which he announced his candidacy that the campaign had to keep delaying release of the logistical details until Mr. Kerry finally signed off.
Aides began discussing last October whether the campaign should opt out of the public financing system for the primaries, freeing them to raise and spend as they wished in any state. Howard Dean, Mr. Kerry's chief rival for the nomination, announced he would do so on Nov. 8; it took Mr. Kerry a month to follow suit.
Several politicians who have traveled with Mr. Kerry say he is on the phone much more than other presidential candidates they have accompanied, making calls from the front cabin of his Boeing 757, on the bumpy bus rides through Ohio, even while waiting on a Nantucket beach for the wind to pick up so he could go kite-surfing.
"Some of his staff think his cellphone is a negative for him, because it reduces the orderliness of the campaign," Mr. Holbrooke said. "Others think it is an asset because it keeps him in touch. But whether you think it is good or bad, it is John F. Kerry."
For all his eagerness to seek advice, Mr. Kerry does not always take it.
After he delivered a 35-minute speech at the University of Pittsburgh last spring, Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania gently tried to reinforce a message Mr. Kerry's aides had been struggling to impart.
"I said I thought it was a little long for an outdoor speech," Mr. Rendell recalled. "My rule of thumb for an outdoor speech is 15 to 20 minutes."
That night at the Philadelphia Convention Center, Mr. Rendell prepped Mr. Kerry by saying the crowd was full of party veterans and urging him to keep his speech short. He talked for 32 minutes.
When Mr. Kerry arrived in Allentown early this month for a rally at the fairgrounds, Mr. Rendell did not even mention his 20-minute outdoor rule. "I've given up," Mr. Rendell said. "He listens sometimes, and he doesn't listen sometimes."
Mr. Kerry spoke for 38 minutes.
Kerry Ad Hits Back
By The New York Times
WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 — The Kerry campaign retaliated on Saturday against a television advertisement by a Republican advocacy group that questioned Mr. Kerry's credentials on national security, running a commercial that accused President Bush of "playing politics with the war on terror."
The advertisement was a response to a spot run by the Progress for America Voter Fund, a so-called 527 committee that has spent tens of millions to support Mr. Bush. The Republican advertisement included images of terrorist attacks in the United States and overseas, with an announcer asking, "Would you trust Kerry up against these fanatic killers?"
I think it's called "damning with faint praise."
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