http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/po...rint&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.
I don't get it. I mean, why did they fuck with the formula? Where are the car songs? There's only one song about surfing and it's a downer!
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