Instead of running laps around Bush, Kerry is neck and neck with him in the national polls and still trying to define himself while defending against Republican attacks. "George Bush has had three of the worst months of his presidency, but they are stuck and they've got to move past this moment," Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore's presidential campaign, told the Times.

Democratic analysts and strategists told Salon, however, that they think concerns about Kerry's progress are overstated. "The Democrats are overeager," says Ann Richards, the former Texas governor who branded Bush the elder as a spoiled rich kid and then lost a re-election bid to Bush the son. "They're anxious for this contest to gel, and it's too early for that."

Richards said Democrats are unaccustomed to having a presumptive nominee so early; at this point in the Clinton-Bush race, Clinton was still fending off former California Gov. Jerry Brown. "They are extremely impatient, and when that's expressed to me privately by well-intentioned individuals, I tell them to focus their attention on what they can do, not what the nominee should be doing."

Still, it's clear that the presumptive nominee could be doing more. While the Bush-Cheney campaign has implemented the sort of hyper-organized plan in Ohio that might have served the United States well in postwar Iraq, Kerry has virtually no campaign structure at all in that critical swing state. The Los Angeles Times reports that Kerry also lacks offices in mega-critical Florida, and that he lacks either staff or offices in New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona, the latter a "red" state where the latest polling shows Bush with a surprisingly small three-point lead. The campaign said it initially lacked the money to open offices everywhere, but recent record-breaking fundraising means that the Kerry campaign will be on the ground in a lot more places in the weeks ahead.

But Kerry needs more than offices and staff; he needs high-profile help to help him fend off Bush-Cheney attacks. While Bush has a hatchet man for a vice president and a cadre of Republican senators happy to lead the smear du jour against Kerry, it is frequently Kerry alone who must answer. While Kerry has relied in recent months on help from Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and former Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., they have faded from the scene of late -- perhaps the press simply no longer considers them news -- and no one has taken their place. The Democrats' would-be surrogate in chief, Bill Clinton, has been holed away in Chappaqua finishing his long-awaited memoirs amid speculation that instead of boosting Kerry's profile this summer, he might actually steal the limelight.

With no one backing him up, Kerry is too often seen scrambling back and forth to rebut Bush-Cheney charges, looking for all the world like an overmatched tennis player racing from one end of the court to the other in a desperate attempt to return all the drives. It's a trap that the Bush-Cheney campaign has laid for Kerry, and he has fallen into it. "The Republicans are very good at lobbing spit wads to see what sticks," said Richards, no stranger herself to smears from Bush and Karl Rove. "Kerry has got to answer every single one of them, because if you don't then the media will claim that he isn't answering the attacks. And then when he does answer all of them, the media will say that he has no message."

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