Text 1777, 220 rader
Skriven 2004-09-05 00:43:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: More bounce ?
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/politics/campaign/05campaign.html?ei=5
006&en=9105c6c3ef9ca4f0&ex=1094961600&partner=ALTAVISTA1&pagewanted=prin
t&position=

September 5, 2004
DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIES 
Democrats Urge Kerry to Turn Up Intensity of Campaign
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JODI WILGOREN
 
resident Bush roared out of his New York convention last week, leaving 
many Democrats nervous about the state of the presidential race and 
pressing Senator John Kerry to torque up what they described as a 
wandering and low-energy campaign.

In interviews, leading Democrats - governors, senators, fund-raisers and 
veteran strategists - said they had urged Mr. Kerry's campaign aides to 
concentrate almost exclusively on challenging President Bush on domestic 
issues from here on out, saying he had spent too much of the summer on 
national security, Mr. Bush's strongest turf. 

As the Labor Day weekend began, Mr. Kerry appeared to be heeding the 
advice with an aggressive attack on Mr. Bush's economic leadership. But 
many supporters also said they wanted to see Mr. Kerry respond more 
forcefully to the sort of attacks they said had undercut his standing 
and to offer a broad and convincing case for his candidacy.

"He's got to become more engaged,'' said Harold Ickes, a former 
political lieutenant to President Bill Clinton who is now running an 
independent Democratic organization that has spent millions of dollars 
on advertisements attacking President Bush. "Kerry is by nature a 
cautious politician, but he's got to throw caution to the wind."

Senator Bob Graham of Florida, a former rival of Mr. Kerry for the 
Democratic nomination, said Mr. Kerry still had not settled on a 
defining theme to counter what Democrats called the compelling theme of 
security hammered into viewers of the Republican convention.

"The people are there, the candidate is there; it's the reason to vote 
for the candidate that's still a little out of focus," Mr. Graham said.

Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania said Mr. Kerry "has got to start 
smacking back."

And Senator Christopher J. Dodd, an influential Democrat from 
Connecticut, said his party's standard-bearer had "a very confused 
message in August, and the Republicans had a very clear and concise 
one." 

Mr. Dodd was one of several Democrats who said they now thought Mr. 
Kerry had made a mistake at his convention in July by talking mainly 
about his history as a Vietnam War veteran and criticizing Mr. Bush's 
policies, without offering a vision of what a Kerry term would be like.

"We did not adequately lay out the contrast, compare and contrast what a 
Kerry administration would do and what the Bush administration has 
done," Mr. Dodd said of the Democrats' convention in Boston. "That was a 
mistake. Vietnam, in terms of John Kerry's service, that was a good 
point to make, but making it such a central point sort of invited the 
kind of response you've seen."

If nervous about the state of play going into Labor Day, Democrats were 
far from ready to concede defeat in a contest that typically does not 
engage until the start of September. They pointed to polls showing 
continued unhappiness with the direction of the country and Mr. Bush's 
mediocre job approval ratings. 

And not incidentally, they invoked Mr. Kerry's history of getting more 
focused on a contest only when he was faced with the prospect of 
imminent defeat; that is what happened when he ran for re-election to 
the Senate from Massachusetts in 1996 and when he won the Iowa caucuses 
this year after many Democrats had dismissed his candidacy as finished.

"John Kerry had a great July and George Bush had a good August,'' said 
Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa, one of a handful of Democrats who said they 
were not concerned by the turn of events. "It doesn't mean a thing. This 
battle starts right now."

Still, Democrats said Mr. Bush's convention, combined with an aggressive 
advertising effort by former Vietnam veterans with ties to Mr. Bush's 
supporters to discredit Mr. Kerry's war record, had turned this contest 
away from a referendum on Mr. Bush's presidency and into a referendum on 
Mr. Kerry's character, war record and stand on Iraq.

Some Democrats described this as an ominous development that Mr. Kerry 
had to address. 

"What they did is they lost control of the ball," said Representative 
Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, who was a senior political adviser in the 
Clinton White House. "They allowed the election to not be about George 
Bush but to be about themselves. They have to get back on their game."

And Mr. Graham said, "It's become a referendum on the challenger."

The remarks suggested something of a reassessment by many Democratic 
leaders who had, almost unanimously, praised Mr. Kerry's convention when 
he left Boston in July. 

Their concern has mounted as Mr. Kerry has fended off an attack on his 
Vietnam record, and seem to have come to a head after a convention in 
New York where the Republicans systematically sought to take advantage 
of what they saw as lapses in Mr. Kerry's own convention. Those included 
the decision by Mr. Kerry and his aides to focus almost entirely on 
promoting his biography, for the most part avoiding the kind of sharp 
attacks on his opponent that were a dominant theme of Mr. Bush's 
convention.

"If you give me a hundred dollars, I couldn't tell you a single policy 
thing they talked about,'' Ed Gillespie, the national Republican 
chairman, said. "They gave us a huge opening, and we jumped on it.''

Mr. Kerry's situation is complicated by the fact that because the 
Republicans scheduled their convention so late, there is relatively 
little time to turn things around. 

The questions about Mr. Kerry's campaign came as the candidate has 
beefed up his staff, bringing in some longtime party veterans, and shown 
signs of what aides said would be a new aggressiveness on the stump and 
on television. In a break from tradition, Mr. Kerry held a rally at 
midnight soon after Mr. Bush accepted his nomination to lash into Mr. 
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for questioning his combat record, 
noting that both Republicans had not served in Vietnam.

"You're seeing a different John Kerry," Mr. Vilsack said. "He was up at 
12 o'clock at night. He was saying, 'I am ready to rock and roll.' "

Kerry is taking today off at his wife's farm in Fox Chapel, Pa., to 
celebrate the 31st birthday of his eldest daughter, Alexandra. Some of 
the criticism of Mr. Kerry's campaign was cosmetic. Several Democrats 
said they were not happy to see news photographs of Mr. Kerry 
windsurfing in the Atlantic waters off Nantucket during the convention, 
suggesting that it underlined the very image of Mr. Kerry - as a 
wealthy, culturally out-of-touch liberal - that the Republicans were 
trying to convey. 

"I might have gone windsurfing - you certainly have a right to clear 
your head,'' said Mr. Rendell, a former head of the Democratic National 
Committee. "But I'm not sure I would have taken the press with me."

Mr. Kerry's aides defended their strategy, saying the campaign would 
change, as planned, in tone and substance now that the Republicans were 
finished.

"There are stages in this race and the fall has always been about 
painting stark difference between the two candidates," said Stephanie 
Cutter, Mr. Kerry's communications director. "You're just going to see 
an aggressive campaign that will go right at the real issues in this 
race."

And while taking questions in Ohio on Saturday, Mr. Kerry said he was 
not worried about how the campaign was going.

"We're doing good," he said. "They are going to get a bounce out of the 
convention. But we'll be coming back."

And Democrats said all of this would be forgotten at what was shaping up 
as the next critical moment of the campaign: the two or three 
presidential debates, starting at the end of September. Aides to both 
sides said the encounters could be decisive, suggesting that many more 
undecided voters would watch them than had seen Mr. Kerry or Mr. Bush at 
their conventions.

In questioning the Kerry campaign, some Democrats offered challenges to 
some of its most fundamental strategic decisions.

Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana said Mr. Kerry had spent too much time 
talking about national security, including his own views on the Iraq 
war, and overplayed Mr. Kerry's Vietnam war experience, inviting the 
attacks that have dominated debate in recent weeks. 

The focus on security was calculated to erase Mr. Bush's advantage on 
the issue. But Democratic leaders said the Kerry campaign had become 
ensnared in a debate that played to Mr. Bush's strength, and diverted 
him from challenging Mr. Bush on his domestic record.

"He needs to define this election," Mr. Bayh said of Mr. Kerry. "So much 
of the convention was focused on national security - if that's where the 
election is, I don't think he can win."

Most of all, Democrats were perturbed with what they described as the 
Kerry campaign's unsteady response to the Vietnam veterans groups making 
unsubstantiated charges about the combat medals Mr. Kerry won while in 
Vietnam. 

They expressed sympathy with the political dilemma Mr. Kerry confronted 
in trying to determine whether to respond to such charges would serve 
only to draw attention to them, but said they were astonished to see him 
struggling with what was supposed to be his strength.

"All of a sudden Kerry is on the defensive about his service and Bush is 
on the offensive about his service," Senator John B. Breaux of Louisiana 
said. "It's absolutely amazing."

Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm of Michigan said: "I think it is very critical 
that you don't answer a tuba with a piccolo. If he's hit, and he will 
be, he needs to stand up and fight."

Mr. Rendell said the mood of Democrats had swung sharply since Mr. 
Kerry's nominating convention.

"I think there is real concern," he said. But he added, "Everybody has a 
level of optimism that it can turn around and will turn around."

Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont who lost the Democratic 
nomination to Mr. Kerry, said Democrats were overreacting, noting Mr. 
Kerry's come-from-behind victories against William Weld in the 1996 race 
for Senate in Massachusetts and Mr. Kerry's decisive defeat of Dr. Dean 
in Iowa.

"They've been very aggressive and they've really turned withering fire 
on John Kerry and clearly we have to respond to that," Dr. Dean said. "I 
tell you, I'm the one person in America other than Bill Weld that knows 
John Kerry can respond."


Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting from Washington for this 
article.


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