August 1, 2004

Michael Kranish, Brian C. Mooney and Nina J. Easton write about John F. Kerry’s battle for the presidency

As Kerry returned to the stump in early 2003, President Bush escalated the pressure on Iraq and full-scale war seemed imminent. That helped Howard Dean build more support from the vociferous antiwar wing of the Democratic Party.

Over opposition led by France at the United Nations, the United States, Britain, and Spain on March 7 said they would give Hussein ten days to surrender banned weapons. As that deadline passed, Bush issued an ultimatum: If Saddam Hussein and his sons didn’t flee within forty-eight hours, the United States would invade. The defiant dictator said Iraq was girding for the “last battle”, which began on March 20 with air strikes, followed by 60,000 US and British troops crossing into the desert of southern Iraq from their positions in Kuwait.

The American public was transfixed by around-the-clock, and often spectacular, televized coverage of the invasion’s progress. The onset of war widened the fissure among Democrats — and among the candidates campaigning for the presidential nomination. For Kerry, the rapid success of the American invasion, contrasted with continued public fears about its aftermath and a newly energized antiwar wing of Democrats, produced a zig-zagging of his position that lasted for months.

Before the invasion, Kerry had criticized President Bush for his failure to assemble a larger international alliance against Iraq. Two days after the shooting began, Kerry said: “I am completely supportive of our troops over there, and I am not going to make critical comment about the war in any way. The country needs to be united with respect to our troops.” It was an echo of his stance during the 1991 Gulf war.

Dean, however, remained an outspoken opponent, and in a March 27 speech in Iowa, he hammered Kerry’s war posture. “To this day I don’t know what John Kerry’s position is,” Dean said. “If you agree with the war, then say so. If you don’t agree with the war, then say so, but don’t try to wobble around in between.”

Backpedalling less than a week later, Kerry abandoned his pledge to tone down the anti-Bush rhetoric — with words that would dog his candidacy for weeks. “What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States,” he told a gathering in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Kerry’s comment, which appeared calculated to appeal to the antiwar voters whom Dean had galvanized, lit up radio talk-show switchboards and drew stern rebukes from Republicans. With US troops closing in on Baghdad, Kerry’s patriotism and judgment were questioned by critics. They accused him of equating Bush with Hussein. For nearly a month, Kerry was forced to defend his call for a “regime change” in Washington. At one point, he acknowledged, his remark may have been “too harsh”. At another, he said the comment was “a quip”, made in the context of the political campaign, not the war.

On April 9, a crowd of cheering Iraqis, helped by American Marines, tore down the statue of Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square. The dictator’s regime had fled. On May 1, President Bush landed in a Navy S-3B Viking jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier near San Diego and, standing on the flight deck, declared that the end of major combat was a “turning of the tide” in the war on terror. A large banner, saying “Mission Accomplished”, hung across the tower of the carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Meanwhile, Kerry was still losing points for his “regime change” comment, and he suffered a setback when John Edwards, a lesser known first-term senator from North Carolina, raised more money — $7.4 million to Kerry’s $7 million — during the first quarter of the year. As usual, Kerry’s aides put a positive spin on the numbers, noting that their candidate had more cash on hand than Edwards.

The ability to raise money, and the perceptions it created, would radically alter the race in a field that had grown to nine. Fund-raising figures for the second quarter were a shocker:

Dean, with a $7.6-million infusion, led the field by a wide margin. Kerry was second with $5.8 million. It was Dean who was fast becoming a media darling; his campaign’s clever innovations and gimmicks made news, day after day.

From the outset of the Kerry campaign, producing an aura of inevitability had been a cornerstone of the strategy: Raise big money, grab establishment endorsements, and the nomination would follow. But by the middle of 2003, the money and attention were starting to flow the way of the little-known former governor of Vermont.

Worse, Kerry’s campaign was undergoing an identity crisis. The basis of his candidacy was his biography — the Vietnam hero who came home and led the antiwar effort. Kerry looked and sounded presidential. He had foreign policy experience, an asset in a time of war.

But his message was faint. In a field where the Iraq war became a defining characteristic of each candidate early in the contest, other policy differences among the leading Democrats were reduced to nuance. They all had health care plans, the details of which were incomprehensible to the average voter. They all favoured civil rights and legal abortion. Each offered something to improve the environment. Every candidate had fallen in behind Gephardt’s call for fair trade agreements to protect American jobs. Each of the candidates even had agriculture plans appealing to Iowa farmers, who would be voting in the nation’s first contest for the Democratic nomination.

John Kerry had his bio and a slogan: “The courage to do what’s right.” The problem was, it wasn’t clear to voters what exactly Kerry thought was right. Dean, meanwhile, was drawing support by ratcheting up the antiwar rhetoric against Bush. Dean’s clear stance against the US invasion of Iraq “made him the anti-Bush”, said Steve Murphy, Gephardt’s campaign manager. “It came to symbolize opposition to Bush across the board.”

Indeed, the combative Vermonter went after the president hard on a range of issues. He blasted away on the Patriot Act, which Kerry had supported, accusing the administration of trampling civil rights. He was an early and vocal critic of No Child Left Behind, another Bush priority that Kerry had supported. The education initiative required annual testing for students in grades 3-8 and sanctions for schools that did not make annual progress in their results. But the funding fell short of what the act allowed and educators were complaining about one-size-fits-all standards.

Dean’s campaign, much like that of Republican John McCain’s four years earlier, was being marketed as the straight-talk express; the media signed on to this refreshing departure from the usual canned speech making. But, like McCain, Dean was already displaying a lack of campaign discipline that would lead to his undoing. (At the height of Dean’s popularity, McCain predicted to Boston Globe reporters that Dean’s bursts of anger, like his own, would hurt his candidacy.)

At the same time, Kerry’s campaign was hamstrung by a top-heavy decision-making structure, with two pollsters and two media consultants. His campaign manager, Jim Jordan, had put in place many of the organizational and political pieces Kerry needed to win

In early July, Kerry summoned top aides — twenty-one of them — to his Nantucket home to discuss strategy. The advisers were split. Should he start attacking Dean (Jordan’s advice) or hold his fire (Shrum’s view)? Kerry sided with Shrum. Dean then launched an early TV ad campaign in both Iowa and New Hampshire that paid quick dividends. (Kerry’s famously blunt-speaking wife, Teresa, would later tell reporters that the failure to immediately counter Dean’s ads was one of the campaign’s early blunders.)

A Des Moines Register poll, conducted in late July, showed Dean inching ahead of Gephardt, 23 to 21, in the Hawkeye State. Gephardt, who had won the Iowa caucuses in 1988 but pulled out of the nomination process two months later, had been the presumptive favourite in this must-win state that bordered his home in Missouri. New Hampshire, bordering Massachusetts, held similar significance for Kerry, and a mid-August poll “by the American Research Group showed Dean — who had recently been featured on the covers of Time and Newsweek — leading Kerry there by 28 to 21.

By summer’s end, Kerry’s campaign had decided to move its ceremonial campaign kickoff from Boston to South Carolina, a critical southern state with a primary just one week after New Hampshire. The campaign, which appeared to have two of everything, also had two announcement speeches. Jordan, the campaign manager, and Chris Lehane, the campaign’s communications director, were working on one speech. But Kerry had also asked his media consultant Shrum to write an alternate version. The candidate chose Shrum’s, a decision that crystallized the campaign’s internal schism: Jordan and Lehane wanted Kerry to sharpen the contrast to the insurgent Dean; Shrum believed Kerry should ignore Dean, sound more presidential, and focus on the ultimate target — Bush.

On September 2, with the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown as a backdrop in Charleston, Kerry tried to give his sagging candidacy a fresh start by assailing Bush’s “radical new vision of government”. With casualties mounting in Iraq in the months following the invasion, Kerry also chided the president for appearing on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier months earlier and declaring the end of major combat in Iraq. “Being flown to an aircraft carrier and saying ‘Mission accomplished’ doesn’t end a war,” Kerry said.

But the candidate drowned out the day’s hoopla with an acknowledgment later in Iowa that a shake-up of his campaign team was possible. And on the stump, Kerry continued to stumble. On a good day, his remarks tended toward windy senator-speak. His justification for his war vote at times was unintelligible, never more so than in this explanation during the Democratic debate in Baltimore on September 9: “If we hadn’t voted the way we voted, we would not have been able to have a chance of going to the United Nations and stopping the president, in effect, who already had the votes and who was obviously asking serious questions about whether or not the Congress was going to be there to enforce the effort to create a threat.”

Excerpted with permission from

John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography by the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best

By Michael Kranish, Brian C. Mooney and Nina J. Easton

PublicAffairs, New York Available with Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi. Tel: 021-5683026 Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk Website: www.libertybooks.com

ISBN 1-58648-273-4

449pp. Rs675

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