12 September 2004	Sunday	26 Rajab 1425

With 50 days left in his presidential campaign and nearly 10 points behind in the polls, John Kerry found himself this week in a familiar situation: surrounded by people willing him on, but who were having trouble understanding what he had to say. The venue was the cavernous semi-dome of Cincinnati's art deco railway terminal, now a stunning museum, but a problematic place to hold a rally. Senator Kerry's voice echoed like a forlorn platform announcement, and determined local supporters like John Figurel struggled to hear what he was saying.

"I want him to get tougher," Mr Figurel said, conceding that if Mr Kerry had been tougher in the speech, he had missed it.

That has been Mr Kerry's problem all along.

After all the months on the road, many Americans are unclear about what he stands for, partly thanks to the efforts of the White House, which spent much of last week's Republican convention in New York lampooning him as a "flip-flopper".

The charge has been hard to scrape off, because it contains a large fragment of truth.

The Massachusetts senator has altered course on key issues, most notably Iraq, and he has yet to convince people that changing your mind is better than making consistently bad decisions, as he insists the president has done.

A Washington Post and ABC poll published on Friday confirmed that George Bush had come out of his convention with a 52-43 percentage point lead nationwide.

The Kerry campaign, in its most difficult week, has consoled itself that the margin is significantly smaller in the swing states, where the election is really being fought, and among all registered voters, rather than just likely voters.

But the inescapable truth is that the Democrats' campaign has been blown off course; the president has succeeded in conveying his simple "me strong, him weak" tune.

The tension has been noticeable in the Kerry camp, where speeches are being rewritten hours before delivery, and new faces have begun to appear on the team.

Mr Kerry has brought on two distinct groups of reinforcements: political street-fighters from his Boston past, John Sasso and Michael Whouley; and famous faces from the Clinton White House, such as the former presidential spokesmen Joe Lockhart and Mike McCurry, and a prominent pollster, Stanley Greenberg.

Mr Lockhart has become the campaign's new front man on television, but on the road, Mr Sasso is the battlefield tactician, constantly at the senator's shoulder.

Mr Sasso is also supposed to help the campaign respond faster to attacks such as the claims by hostile veterans that Kerry had embellished his Vietnam war record.

The Kerry campaign will now hammer home its main charges against Mr Bush: that unemployment has risen by more than a million on his watch, that the number of Americans without medical insurance has risen by five million, and that Mr Bush has taken the US into a war from which there is no easy exit.

Many Democrats believe the president's lead in the polls reflects a fundamental failure in the Kerry campaign. New staff can help, but it is clear to a lot of Democrat supporters that much of the problem lies with the candidate himself.

His vote for the Iraq war in October 2002 has blurred the Democratic position on the central issue in the campaign. Some of his advisers have urged him to state simply that he, like a majority of Americans, was fooled by the president, and that the Senate vote was not a blank cheque.-Dawn/The Guardian News Service.