Text 4991, 353 rader
Skriven 2004-11-14 14:50:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: Kerry Campaign cont.
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Didn't stay on message
"Kerry said, 'We need to get more focused,' " Begala recalled, "and I 
remember telling him the campaign was all over the map, no coherent 
rationale for him and [for] rejecting Bush. He agreed and said, 'I 
really need you to come aboard.' "

Begala, knowing the senator was a former prosecutor, asked the candidate 
to present his case to voters to hire Kerry and fire Bush. Kerry 
responded by naming six issues, according to Begala's notes of the 
conversation: Jobs, taxes, fiscal policy, healthcare, energy, and 
education.

This was a list, not a "case," Begala fretted.

Eager to help but reluctant to drop his TV career to join the campaign, 
Begala in May gave a private briefing to Kerry's campaign staff members 
about their failings. He took out a whiteboard and, according to notes 
provided to the Globe, listed 12 ways to define and defeat Bush:

"Over his head/incompetent," he wrote. "For the rich/special interests.

"Ideological/stubborn/rigid. Out of touch. Ignores problems. Can only to 
do one thing at a time. Liar/broken promises. Wrong Priorities. No plan 
for the future. Divider. You're on your own. Ignores middle class."

Pick one, Begala urged Kerry's staff, and then hammer it until Election 
Day.

But as June dragged on, Begala saw no change. His friends, including 
longtime associate James Carville, pressured him to quit CNN and take up 
Kerry's offer. Carville also talked to Kerry, and believed the senator 
had committed to giving Begala a key position. Begala now convinced 
himself; he had to join the Kerry campaign for the good of the party.

So in mid-June, Begala met with campaign manager Cahill at Kerry's 
campaign headquarters in Washington and said he had changed his mind; he 
would quit CNN and join Kerry.

The reaction was not what he anticipated. What are you talking about? 
Cahill asked, according to Begala.

"It seems obvious you don't have a message or strategy-driven campaign," 
Begala said he replied.

Again, Cahill asked what Begala was talking about. Begala remembers that 
she looked "like I was going to perform open-heart surgery on her. She 
said: 'I need to think about this. Give me a couple of days to set that 
up.' From that day to now, I never heard another word from her. And you 
know, I was pretty angry. I'm still pretty angry."

Cahill says she regrets leaving Begala up in the air. " I made a mistake 
by not calling him back," Cahill said, adding that she was already in 
discussions about the message with numerous outside advisers.

His secret deliberations
As a politician, Kerry tends to be cautious and deliberate. He is also 
adept at keeping secrets, even from his staff.

So when it came time to choose a running mate, Kerry set up a search 
operation headed by James A. Johnson, a friend and financier known for 
his discretion. But it was Kerry alone who settled on a choice and then 
kept the news under wraps, even from Johnson.

Kerry's frenetic use of his cellphone was never more apparent than 
during the vice presidential search in May and June, as he called scores 
of friends for advice. His first choice was Senator John McCain of 
Arizona. But by late spring it was clear McCain preferred to hug fellow 
Republican George Bush on the GOP campaign trail than join the 
Democrats.

To bolster his national security credentials, Kerry's supporters urged 
him to turn to retired General Wesley K. Clark or Richard A. Gephardt, a 
former House minority leader. But Clark was relatively untested, and 
Gephardt carried a different risk -- the odor of political failure.

According to aides, Kerry believed Gephardt was the politician most 
qualified to step into the president's shoes. He had been in the US 
House since 1977 and was Democratic leader for seven years. He couldn't 
be pegged as soft on defense; Gephardt had stood alongside Bush in the 
Rose Garden after helping craft the resolution authorizing the use of 
force against Iraq.

But Kerry and aides worried that after two failed presidential runs and 
his longtime inability to recapture the House for Democrats, Gephardt 
would be considered past his prime. And with the campaign still 
struggling to find its footing, Kerry believed he couldn't risk a 
disappointing vice presidential choice, aides recalled.

Playing it safe also meant ruling out Governor Thomas J. Vilsack of 
Iowa, who was untested in national politics.

Over and over, Kerry kept circling back to the man who clearly wanted it 
most: Senator John Edwards of North Carolina. During the primaries, 
Kerry had held the junior senator in low regard: At one point, a Globe 
reporter overheard Kerry chortling over the idea that the former trial 
attorney was running for president before he'd even finished one term in 
the Senate: "And people call me ambitious!" he exclaimed. On another 
occasion, Kerry speculated that Edwards could not even carry his home 
state for him in November.

But polls indicated that he was the runaway favorite among Democratic 
voters. He had been tested in an arduous primary contest and had shown 
surprising political skills as the last major rival to Kerry. And 
Edwards, with his son-of-a-millworker biography and passionate rhetoric 
about an economic divide creating "two Americas," offered an appeal to 
the middle class that the Brahmin-bred Kerry lacked.

Edwards had mounted a vigorous campaign to secure the number two slot. 
No sooner had he quit the presidential race than he hit the trail for 
Kerry. And on March 11, when Edwards invited his fund-raisers to 
Washington to thank them for their support, he took the unusual step of 
inviting Kerry. Meeting at The St. Regis hotel, Edwards appealed to his 
donors to support the presumptive nominee.

By mid-June, Kerry was close to choosing Edwards. Kerry telephoned the 
charter company that was providing his campaign plane. He ordered three 
sets of decals: Kerry-Edwards, Kerry-Gephardt, and Kerry-Vilsack, but 
the latter two were decoys. On July 6, Kerry announced his running mate 
and his plane rolled out of a hangar at Pittsburgh International Airport 
decked out in "Kerry-Edwards" logos. The announcement generated a flurry 
of excited coverage, featuring Edwards's photogenic family.

In the end, though, Edwards's help to the ticket was questionable. He 
fell off the major media radar screen, instead currying local coverage 
in battleground states such as Iowa, Minnesota, and Ohio. And he did 
fail to deliver his home state, despite campaigning there more than a 
half-dozen times. And when Kerry's Vietnam foes began their August 
assault, Kerry had to turn to other surrogates, those with military 
credentials, to come to his defense.

Convention strategy
Every week through the early summer, senior advisers would gather in the 
fishbowl conference room of Kerry's Washington headquarters to plan 
their candidate's big national debut, the Democratic National Convention 
in Boston. As the group grew to as many as 18 people, some advisers 
worried that the sessions lacked focus.

Still, a consensus began to emerge that the convention should be used to 
build up Kerry's commander in chief credentials, not tear down Bush's. 
The reason was mostly practical: Independent groups on the left, dubbed 
"527s" after their position in the tax code, were already churning out 
millions of dollars in negative ads against Bush. Why duplicate this 
vigorous, and well-funded, Bush-bashing effort?

Moreover, the president was suffering from high unfavorable ratings in 
the polls. Bush-haters didn't need to be convinced of their animus for 
the president. Selling Kerry as a viable alternative was the task at 
hand.

His strategists believed that highlighting Kerry's combat record was a 
no-brainer: Vietnam had always helped him in Massachusetts. "We wanted 
to give people hope and assure them that Kerry had the strength and guts 
to stand up to enemies and defeat terrorism. Everything at the 
convention was calculated to make that point," said Billy Shaheen, his 
New Hampshire campaign chairman.

In the planning, proposed segments about Kerry's Senate record -- on the 
environment, on small business, on foreign policy -- were scrapped or 
scaled back. And aides sought to ensure that both prime time and 
afternoon speeches were short, on message, and positive about Kerry 
without being overly harsh on Bush.

Those goals, meant to appeal to swing voters, were out-of-synch with a 
staunchly antiwar audience; a Globe poll indicated that about 90 percent 
of the delegates inside the FleetCenter opposed the war, which Kerry had 
voted to authorize. And anger at Bush was so fierce that delegates broke 
into raucous cheers at even the most gentle denunciations of his 
administration.

The convention hall was festooned with photos of Kerry in combat. His 
band of brothers stood on stage. Jim Rassmann, then a registered 
Republican, retold the story of how Kerry had saved his life while under 
fire in Vietnam.

On Thursday, July 29, the last night of the convention, the man whose 
fame was launched by denunciations of a war stepped onto the podium and 
gave a military salute. "I'm John Kerry," the candidate told the 
cheering delegates, "and I'm reporting for duty."

The line was the brainstorm of former US senator Max Cleland of Georgia. 
A close friend and Vietnam veteran who had lost both legs and his right 
arm in combat, Cleland had planned to use a version of the line in 
introducing Kerry. "John saw that in a draft of my speech, he liked it, 
and he took it for his own," Cleland recalled.

Kerry had drafted his own speech in longhand on a legal pad with input 
from advisers. Once finished, he practiced delivering it during sessions 
inside his Nantucket garage.

The speech was designed to introduce Kerry as a strong commander. Kerry 
said he would "never hesitate to use force" and "never give any nation 
or international institution a veto over our national security." He 
spoke of knowing "what kids go through when they are carrying an M-16 in 
a dangerous place," about how the American flag "flew from the gun 
turret right behind my head." He promised to wage the war in Iraq "with 
the lessons I learned in war."

When the night, and the convention, closed, Democrats declared a roaring 
success. The polls were less enthusiastic.

Historically, presidential candidates emerge from their political 
conventions with as much as a 10-point bounce in the polls.

While Kerry's standing on national security issues improved after the 
convention, his big national debut from Boston didn't add more than a 
point or two to his support.

Some Democrats felt the Kerry team had squandered its best chance to 
build an aggressive case for why Bush should be removed from office. As 
for selling Kerry as a viable alternative: Only six lines of his 
acceptance speech were devoted to his 20 years in the Senate, a fact 
that his GOP foes loudly broadcast. The omission was, said one senior 
adviser, "a fair criticism."

Later, others worried that the focus on Vietnam left an opening for 
Kerry's swift boat foes to attack. "Was there too much Vietnam?" one top 
strategist pondered after the election. "Probably, in hindsight. But the 
swift boat group would have attacked regardless."

Vietnam as the centerpiece
John Kerry is not a man who indulges in emotional highs and lows. When 
he is angry, he is a master of the cold eyes, the stony mien, the slow 
burn, which are often delivered as he places his hands on your shoulder 
or moves his face up close to yours and expresses some measure of 
disapproval. Aides went to great lengths to avoid those moments.

"You know immediately when he's pissed at you," said Shaheen. "He gives 
you a look that goes through you. He sets his jaw. If you try to talk, 
it seems like he's not listening to you. But he never gets heated; he's 
the coolest cat in politics."

By Aug. 14, Kerry was mad -- and aides could feel it.

Ten days earlier, an inflammatory book by his Nixon-era foe, O'Neill, 
had topped a national best-seller list. "Unfit for Command" used mostly 
unsupported allegations to label Kerry a liar who didn't deserve some or 
all of his combat medals.

At the same time, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth began airing ads, mostly 
in swing states, quoting men who said Kerry "has not been honest about 
what happened in Vietnam," "lied" to get his medals, "is no war hero," 
and "betrayed all his shipmates."

Kerry wanted to fight back right away, but Shrum and other media 
advisers cautioned against it, concerned about fanning the flames. "We 
watched as the story jumped from the Internet, to Fox News, to the other 
cable networks," said Cahill. "Our concern was we didn't want to help it 
along by our reaction."

The campaign hoped that the episode would blow over with minimal damage, 
as it had the previous spring. But this time, there was no prison 
scandal, or anything else, to swallow the swift boat veterans' crusade. 
"The August echo chamber was a difficult environment because nothing 
else was going on," said Thorne.

"The campaign collectively underestimated the effect of the swift boats. 
It was a collective mistake," recalled Michael Whouley, a longtime Kerry 
operative. "I think the candidate was probably the most concerned about 
it. It pissed him off, people attacking his Vietnam service."

Kerry wanted to know what impact the ads were having. Shrum recalled 
that for days the polls indicated nothing. Then the damage began to 
show. "As soon as we saw it, we moved," Shrum said.

By then, the damage had been done. A Time magazine poll suggested that 
Kerry's favorability rating had dropped from 53 percent in early August 
to 44 percent by late that month. A remarkable 77 percent said they had 
seen or heard about the ads, with one-third contending that there was 
some truth to the allegations.

An angry Kerry summoned longtime friend Thomas J. Vallely, a Bostonian 
and Silver Star recipient, and told him to "find me Billy Rood." William 
B. Rood had been present during the action that garnered Kerry the 
Silver Star the swift boat foes were now calling into question. Rood, an 
editor at the Chicago Tribune, had refused to speak publicly about the 
action. He took Kerry's call, though he didn't tell the senator what he 
planned to do.

On Aug. 22, an article by Rood appeared in the Tribune condemning the 
swift boat veterans and backing Kerry's version of the event leading to 
his Silver Star. The story spread, adding to a growing consensus that 
the campaign against Kerry was based on exaggerated or unproven claims.

Still, the swift boat veterans had damaged Kerry's standing and left 
some Democratic strategists asking whether the candidate's focus on 
Vietnam had created an opening for his political opponents.

One of Kerry's closest friends, Bobby Muller, a fellow Vietnam antiwar 
leader, went to a September lunch at Washington's Equinox restaurant 
with Thorne and Vallely. "The failure to respond is inexcusable," Muller 
said.

The question of whether the campaign should have made Vietnam "such a 
centerpiece could be second-guessed forever," said Thorne. " And I think 
the answer is it served us well in distinguishing John's unique 
biography and also helped put forth an image of a strong commander in 
chief, an antidote to the very allegation that Bush was making -- that 
he is weak, can't lead the country."

But the swift boat campaign, he added, was like aikido, the martial art 
in which you "use the other person's energy in your own defense. They 
used the energy that we had created about Vietnam to turn it against 
us."

Veteran campaign advisers
Since May, Begala and other former Clinton advisers had been raising 
alarms about the direction of the campaign, arguing that Kerry needed to 
make a clearer, more direct assault on Bush. As one senior adviser, 
looking back on the entire campaign, described the situation: "Our idea 
of a 'negative frame' is to say, 'Bush is taking us in the wrong 
direction.' Their idea of a negative frame is to say, 'Kerry is a 
coward, liar, and not fit to be president of the United States.' They're 
hitting us with a baseball bat and we're spitting on them."

By August, Kerry was ready to expand his circle of strategists with 
veterans of Democratic presidential politics who, unlike Shrum and 
Cahill, had worked closely with a winner. Kerry and Cahill reached out 
to Clinton's combat-tested lieutenants: former spokesmen Joe Lockhart 
and Mike McCurry, senior advisers Joel Johnson and Doug Sosnik, and 
pollster Stanley B. Greenberg.

"Not to bring the Clinton people in by summer was a terrible failing," 
said a senior campaign adviser who spoke regularly with Kerry. "A 
presidential campaign always has to be an expanding pie. You must always 
say, who can I bring in?"

Lockhart, McCurry, and Johnson were particularly adept at "winning the 
news cycle" by spinning the day's events against Bush. Those in and 
around the campaign saw a tougher, more disciplined message emerge.

Kerry also began speaking with the former president more frequently. 
Sometimes Lockhart arranged the conversations; sometimes Kerry would 
just call Clinton himself. Among their phone calls, which numbered one 
to two a week, the most important one occurred on the night of Sept. 4, 
a Saturday, as Clinton was in a New York City hospital preparing for 
heart surgery that Monday.

In the 90-minute conversation, aides say, Clinton counseled Kerry never 
to let another assault go personally unchallenged for so long. He also 
advised the candidate to make more sustained criticisms of Bush and to 
focus on core issues in battleground states -- job losses in Ohio, the 
toll of Iraq on military families throughout the Midwest.

The next day, in a move that would also prove crucial to Kerry's 
rebound, the nominee elevated Massachusetts strategist John Sasso, who 
had served as his general election manager at the Democratic National 
Committee, to be his traveling campaign manager. Both Kerry and Sasso 
believed the campaign needed a more disciplined message and a greater 
day-to-focus, and that Kerry was too often distracted by small-bore 
problems better left to aides.

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