Even before the Iraq war began, Kerry became one of its first political casualties. Together with Lieberman, Gephardt, and another presidential contender, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards (who formally announced his presidential candidacy Tuesday), Kerry voted for the congressional resolution authorizing military action in Iraq.

But Kerry, whom many still remember as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, paid the highest price among Democratic activists. "If Kerry had opposed the war, he would have had the entire Democratic left behind him," said Jeff Faux, who recently retired as president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute. "With his war record and moderate style to appeal to the centrists, and a desire by the money people to unite early against Bush, he could have been closing in on the nomination by now."

Instead, Dean became the only leading contender to oppose the war. He soared, and Kerry sagged. But more than antiwar sentiment was at work. "The essence of the Dean message wasn't antiwar, it was anti-Bush," explained Robert Borosage, co-director of the liberal Campaign for America's Future. "It was that Dean was willing to speak out against Bush, and the others weren't. The Washington-based candidates, including Kerry, didn't understand how furious Democrats were with Bush and how much they wanted someone who would express fury at his policies, how he had stolen the election, and what he was doing to the country."

While Kerry was expected to be a peace candidate, populism has always been alien to him. From a patrician background and now a multimillionaire-by-marriage, Kerry doesn't bash big business, as Edwards does, or boast of devoting his career to the cause of working families, as Gephardt does.

Former advisors recall that he rejected populist appeals in his reelection campaign in 1996, even though polling showed that it would have been popular to berate profitable corporations for laying off employees. This year, too, his domestic policy positions are complex and nuanced. He calls for repealing Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy but not those, such as the children's tax credit and the elimination of the marriage penalty, that benefit the middle class. And he proposed expanding health insurance through a less costly and comprehensive program than those proposed by Gephardt and Dean.

While these positions have popular appeal, especially in the general election, they don't lend themselves to sound bites and bumper stickers. Kerry's campaign has had a hard time framing and focusing his message. In interviews with advisors, staffers and supporters, no two offered the same answer to the question: "Tell me Kerry's message in one or two sentences."

A leading advisor explains Kerry's appeal this way: "Bush has taken the country radically in the wrong direction. This is not just a series of policy mistakes but is driven by a vision that is fundamentally wrong -- a radical vision that is at odds with America's principles and 200 years of our history.

"This is a more fundamental and more basic critique of Bush than Dean has offered," the advisor continued. "Dean focuses on the Iraq war. Kerry's critique applies across the board to an economic policy that puts wealth in the hands of a few and a foreign policy that abandons alliances we have worked decades to build."

Meanwhile, Kerry's chief speechwriter, Andrei Cherny, rattles off a riff on Kerry's patriotic populism: "We now have a government that hasn't measured up to the American people's courage and sense of optimism about the future. John Kerry will bring that sense of courage and forward-looking optimism to the White House."

The complexity of Kerry's message, and the lack of agreement among his advisors and staff about what it is, reflect the feuding and factionalism within his campaign.

In the latest headline-making family quarrel, communications director Chris Lehane resigned, amid reports that his draft for a Dean-bashing announcement speech had been rejected by the candidate and his media advisor, Bob Shrum.

In fact, the quotable, combative Lehane, who issued a statement wishing Kerry well, may have been looking for a way out of the campaign, so that he could devote all his time to a lucrative consulting business whose clients include the effort against recalling California Gov. Gray Davis. Based in California, Lehane had worked without pay for Kerry and decided not to move to Washington, D.C, to take a full-time salaried job with the campaign. While Kerry and Shrum were the principle authors of Kerry's announcement speech, a longtime Boston political observer maintains that several of Lehane's lines did find their way into the text. Meanwhile, Lehane's business partner, Mark Fabiani, has been helping Clark launch his candidacy.

With Lehane's departure, Shrum is clearly calling the shots on Kerry's message. A former wordsmith for Massachusetts senior Sen. Edward Kennedy, Shrum has orchestrated hard-hitting campaigns for clients ranging from Kennedy and Kerry to former Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening, the late California Sen. Alan Cranston, and the late Pennsylvania Gov. Robert Casey. Shrum helped craft populist appeals for two of Kerry's current rivals -- Edwards in his 1998 campaign for senator and Gephardt in his 1988 run for the presidential nomination -- and counseled Al Gore to adopt a similar theme ("the people against the powerful") in the last lap of his presidential campaign in 2000.

Now Shrum seems to have synthesized a message that melds populism with Kerry's patriotism and the New Democrats' emphasis on the middle class. In the weeks ahead, the campaign will criticize Bush for failing to ask the wealthiest Americans to contribute to their country in a time of crisis, while differentiating Kerry from Dean and Gephardt, who want to eliminate recent tax cuts for the middle class as well as wipe out those for the wealthy.

This message began to emerge as Kerry's announcement address, delivered the day after Labor Day, retooled the stump speech he'd delivered for the past year. Unusually lengthy and substantive for an announcement address -- "denser and more intricate than it had to be," in the judgment of Boston political consultant Dan Payne -- Kerry's speech still had many memorable lines that he could use with great effect in TV spots, candidate debates and campaign appearances.

Attacking Bush's premature photo-op finale to the Iraq war, Kerry offered this surefire applause line: "Being flown to an aircraft carrier and saying, 'Mission accomplished,' doesn't end a war." Recalling that he served in and marched against an earlier war, he declared: "Protest is patriotic." Segueing to "patriotic patriotism," Kerry criticized Bush for glorifying "a creed of greed" that "comforts the comfortable at the expense of ordinary Americans" and "lets corporations do as they please."

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