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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
On his first campaign swing since Bush opened up a post-convention lead, the Democrat was feisty. But his speeches still ramble and he hasn't decided how rough he wants to play.
Sep 7, 2004 | As a wet, gray evening descended on the banks of the Ohio River, former Sen. John Glenn slowly made his way to his car. The 83-year-old Ohio legend had just spent two days on a bus with John Kerry, appearing by his side at campaign rallies in Newark and Akron, shooting clay pigeons with him in Edinburg and greeting high school football players with him in Mansfield. Steubenville was the last stop on the bus tour, and John Glenn was going home.
He was halfway to his car when Dennis Kucinich caught up with him. The Ohio congressman had some campaign advice for Kerry, and he hoped Glenn would pass it along. "Can you tell John something for me?" he asked. "It's important."
A lot of people have something important to tell Kerry these days. The candidate Democrats chose because they thought he'd be "electable" is struggling as the presidential race enters the fall stretch. A Gallup poll released Monday shows Kerry trailing George W. Bush 52-45 among likely voters, the first time Bush has had a statistically significant lead over Kerry since the Iowa caucuses. Polls from Time and Newsweek suggest Bush's lead may be even larger, and everyone from Bill Clinton to Michael Moore is weighing in with advice for the Democratic candidate.
The Kerry campaign is trying to portray a picture of calm: Spokesman David Wade reminded reporters in Ohio over the weekend that the election will be decided by a handful of battleground states and not by "national public-opinion polls." But that won't stop the questioning. In a New York Times story Sunday, a half-dozen or so prominent Democrats worried aloud that the Kerry campaign had lost its focus in August and remains stalled now. A phone conversation between Clinton and Kerry on Sunday got big play, as did Clinton's reported advice: Abandon Vietnam as an issue and focus instead on the U.S. economy. Several former Clinton aides have joined the Kerry staff, prompting the media to crow that Clinton was taking over the campaign from his hospital bed.
Sources inside and outside the campaign say the moves have been Kerry's, and that they have been more gradual than the media reports have suggested. Former Clinton aides Joe Lockhart and Joel Johnson actually joined the Kerry campaign weeks ago. John Sasso, who was serving as the general manager of the Democratic National Committee and will now travel with Kerry as a top political advisor, has had the candidate's ear for some time. The New York Times reported Monday that former Clinton stategists James Carville, Paul Begala and Stanley Greenberg will play a "larger role" in the campaign, but it was not immediately clear that their internal roles would be substantial.
A bus tour with the Kerry campaign in Ohio this holiday weekend suggested that some fears about his campaign are unfounded or at least out-of-date. But it also revealed that the Kerry campaign has a long way to go before it becomes the sort of focused, disciplined operation that can beat back Republican attacks and win the White House in November.
Nowhere are the problems -- and in some ways, the opportunities -- more clear than they are when it comes to Iraq. The war in Iraq remains unpopular, and the deaths of seven Marines in Fallujah Monday will only make it more so. John Edwards has taken to calling the Iraq situation a "mess," and Kerry said in a statement Monday that the president's "wrongheaded, go-it-alone Iraq policy has created a quagmire, costing us $200 billion and counting." But in a presidential race that sometimes seems like a world turned upside down, Kerry has somehow managed to allow Iraq to become a bigger liability for him than it is for Bush: In the Gallup poll, Kerry trails the president by 13 points on the question of which man the voters trust more to handle Iraq.
How could that be? "It isn't Kerry's war, it's Bush's war," an incredulous Dennis Kucinich told Salon over the weekend. Kucinich wouldn't say what advice he had asked Glenn to give Kerry, but he did say what he thought Democrats had to do about Iraq. "This is George Bush's war, and we've got to make sure people know that. There were a number of people in the Senate who voted for the war, a lot of people in the House who voted for the war. But it's Bush's war, it's about accountability, and we've got to put that squarely on him."
