Kerry campaign forced to regroup

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

Democrats yesterday said Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign is off track and blamed television ads by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, President Bush's bounce from the Republican convention, and themselves.

"Mistakes were made," James Carville, Democratic strategist, said of the campaign's August operations.

Mr. Kerry "is not satisfied with the state of his campaign" and will retool it this week, Mr. Carville told NBC's "Meet the Press."

"It's true," Kerry strategist Tad Devine told "Fox News Sunday." "Our message could not get through the way we wanted it to in August," because of the Swift Boat ads.

But the Bush team noted the scale of the task facing Mr. Kerry, who now trails in polls by double-digit margins.

Two polls show that Mr. Bush received a substantial boost from last week's Republican National Convention. Time magazine, in a poll released Friday, found Mr. Bush up 52 percent to 41 percent over Mr. Kerry. A Newsweek poll, out Saturday, had him up 54 percent to 43 percent. Both polls have a margin of error of four percentage points and were a statistical tie before the convention.

"There's never been a challenger that has come back after being down double digits after the convention, after their incumbent's convention. That's never happened," Bush strategist Matthew Dowd told "Fox News Sunday."

The Kerry campaign is banking on a new round of paid television advertisements to catch up to Mr. Bush.

"We're going to be able talk about issues like jobs and health care and the fact that John Kerry wants to take this nation in a new direction," Mr. Devine said. "And I think he's going to win the election because he's right on the issues and he has a very powerful message."

The new strategy includes a negative ad accusing Mr. Bush of being insincere on issues affecting senior citizens and raising Medicare premiums, and Kerry-Edwards campaign officials made the Sunday talk show rounds promoting a list of "143 lies and distortions" they say Mr. Bush has made.