The Democratic National Convention kicks off tomorrow in Boston, the heart of American political liberalism, to nominate two liberal soul mates — Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry for president and a younger, less-experienced running mate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.
The Democratic strategy behind the carefully orchestrated four-day convention will be to give the Kerry-Edwards ticket a sharper thematic message that senior party advisers say it lacks and to portray the candidates as political centrists to appeal to independent, swing voters who are uncomfortable with their leftist voting records on national security and domestic-spending issues.
The party gathering — which will cost an estimated $95 million and draw nearly 5,000 delegates and alternates, 15,000 elected officials and other VIPs and thousands of reporters to Boston’s FleetCenter — comes at a difficult time for the Democrats, who have been in political decline for the past decade, and when party advisers say Mr. Kerry remains a little-known political commodity, who has not made the case to the American people that he should replace President Bush in the White House.
The convention is being held under extraordinary security precautions in the face of heightened concerns about terrorist threats and anti-war protesters. Disputes between City Hall and police and fire unions have led workers to threaten picketing, although the police unions came to an agreement last week. As last-minute negotiations continued yesterday with the firefighters union, the picketing plans were not clear.
At least six state delegations have said they will avoid all picketed events at the convention.
That could lead to a potentially embarrassing situation, where Mr. Kerry could refuse to visit some delegations or convention events.
“I don’t cross picket lines. I never have,” he said last month when he refused to deliver a scheduled speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Boston because of picket lines around the conference hall.
Bashing Bush
Although the summer polls show the presidential race remains in a virtual dead heat, interviews with top Democratic officials and strategists say that the often-aloof Massachusetts senator still has some heavy lifting to do at the convention to turn himself into a warm, well-liked, competitive candidate that swing voters can trust to run the country. Many Democrats are advising Mr. Kerry to stop bashing Mr. Bush and start talking more about what he would do as president.
“Kerry has to give an extraordinarily good speech. A lot of what is propelling him is just anti-Bush sentiment but, in order to close the sale with the people, he needs to lay out where he wants to take the country,” said Democratic strategist Harold Ickes, who was a senior White House adviser to President Clinton. “The anti-Bush theme is not enough. It’s been a large part of his campaign. He’s been saying a lot of things, but it hasn’t come into a hard focus.
“There are a lot of uncommitted voters, but they don’t know nearly enough about Kerry for him to close the deal. He is not a national senator. He was not a national personage,” he said. “The bad news for the president is that traditional swing voters are open to an alternative. The good news for the president is that Kerry is not that well-known among people that they are prepared to say yes to him.”
Recent polls have underscored Mr. Kerry’s problem. The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 57 percent of the survey’s respondents said they knew a lot or a fair amount about the senator, but that was down significantly from the 68 percent who said that in March.
“I’d agree to the extent that he may not be as widely known to rank-and-file voters. But we’re confident that once the American electorate gets to know Kerry better than they do, they will be comfortable with him,” said T. J. Rooney, chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party — a pivotal battleground state where the two rivals are dead even.
“John Kerry needs a successful convention to reintroduce himself to the public,” added polling analyst Karlyn H. Bowman of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
This is why the bulk of this week’s convention will be devoted to telling Mr. Kerry’s story, with heavy emphasis on his wartime experiences in Vietnam to blunt the wave of Bush-Cheney TV ads in the past several months that have attempted to define him as weak on national defense issues and fighting the war on terrorism.
Mr. Kerry voted for the resolution that approved the war in Iraq, but then became one of the war’s severest critics during his primary battle against anti-war candidate Howard Dean. His sudden about-face on the Iraq conflict finally led him to vote against the $87 billion military supplemental bill that was needed to finance the military’s postwar security and reconstruction costs. He and Mr. Edwards were among the 12 senators to oppose the funding bill.
In an attempt to counter the Bush TV ad attacks on Mr. Kerry’s national-security posture, the convention’s overarching theme will be “Stronger at Home, Respected in the World.”
“The 2004 Democratic convention will tell the life stories of John Kerry and John Edwards to the nation — the story of their lifetime of service to the nation and fight for average Americans, and their vision for a stronger and more secure America,” said New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who will be the convention’s permanent chairman.
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The Clinton model
Kerry campaign strategists say they are modeling this convention after the 1992 convention that dramatically turned around Bill Clinton’s prospects and made him a more acceptable, centrist-leaning candidate to swing voters. Mr. Clinton emerged from that convention with a 16-point bounce in the polls and went on to defeat Mr. Bush’s father, who was seeking a second term.
“They are trying to keep the level of Bush-bashing down because basically that conveys the impression that the campaign’s about hate, as opposed to hope,” said Leon Panetta, who was Mr. Clinton’s White House chief of staff and remains a senior party adviser.
“They’ve got to get away from the Bush-bashing and keep the issues as close to the center as possible. The hope is that they can identify Kerry as closely as possible with his military background and as someone who can relate to people,” Mr. Panetta said. “Clearly, the convention model they want to replicate is what Clinton did in 1992 and the momentum that followed Bill Clinton’s convention speech.
“They’re hoping that following Thursday night’s acceptance speech, there will be a huge wave of support around the Democratic ticket and that will tell us a lot about whether they were able to push the same buttons as Bill Clinton did,” he said.
“On the other hand, if the polls don’t move very much, and there isn’t much of a bounce following the Thursday-night speech, then Kerry has one hell of a close race on his hands,” Mr. Panetta said.
Convention script
The four-day convention program is a tightly scripted, made-for-TV show that will use videos of Mr. Kerry’s life and Mr. Edwards’ career as a trial lawyer and a dramatic stage setting, where the party’s leading political stars will reintroduce Mr. Kerry to the nation, building toward his speech on Thursday. Many of the elected officials who will speak about Mr. Kerry’s candidacy have been chosen from battleground states, such as Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan.
Tomorrow night’s program, which will promote Mr. Kerry’s agenda, will feature speeches by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore, the party’s 2000 presidential nominee.
That will be followed by “values night” on Tuesday, when the lineup of speakers will include Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Mr. Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who will talk about the senator’s “strength, character and sense of duty and honor.”
Wednesday’s program will be devoted entirely to national security issues that will underscore one of the strategic themes of the convention — “A stronger, more secure America” — to shore up what campaign polls show is Mr. Kerry’s weakest issue: national security and the war on terrorism.
Mr. Richardson, who was U.N. ambassador under the Clinton administration, will be one of the speakers that night, among others who will address homeland security and supporting police, firefighters and other first responders.
Mr. Edwards, who will also address the convention Wednesday night, will be introduced by his wife, Elizabeth Edwards.
Mr. Kerry’s acceptance speech on Thursday night has been crafted to emphasize centrist values around which Mr. Clinton built his own 1992 acceptance address and will focus on “working hard and playing by the rules and strengthening faith, family and freedom throughout our nation,” convention officials said.
The senator will be introduced by former Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, a triple amputee who lost an arm and both legs in the Vietnam War. Mr. Cleland will talk about how Mr. Kerry “has been tested on the battlefield and can be trusted to lead America to safer and stronger times.”
Democratic obstacles
Insiders privately acknowledged last week that the party and Mr. Kerry face huge obstacles in the weeks to come — most notable among them is a weakened party apparatus that has been losing strength for the past decade.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the Democrats held muscular majorities in the House and Senate, the governorships and in state legislative chambers that formed the farm club for their future political leadership.
All of those majorities vanished during Mr. Clinton’s scandal-plagued presidency. Republicans not only control the House and Senate and 28 of the 50 governorships, they also run a majority of state House and Senate chambers.
Mr. Kerry’s biggest area of electoral weakness remains the South, a Republican-trending region that — with the exception of Florida — many Democratic advisers have already ceded to Mr. Bush.
“Florida is close. It’s very competitive, but the rest of the South will stay with Bush because Southerners support him on the Iraq war and trust him more on the economy,” said Merle Black, a veteran political scientist at Georgia’s Emory University who is an authority on the Republicans’ ascendency in the South.
Mr. Black describes the Democratic ticket as “two very liberal Democrats — a Massachusetts Democratic liberal at the top, balanced by a North Carolina Democrat, Sen. John Edwards, who, according to the National Journal, has a Ted Kennedy voting record.”
“Edwards is a much better campaigner and can help Kerry in a state like Florida. But I don’t think Edwards can change the dynamics in the other Southern states, because he is perceived as a liberal Democrat,” he said. “North Carolina will probably go with Bush.”
If Mr. Bush sweeps all of the Southern states, the Kerry-Edwards ticket will need to “take 70 percent of the remaining Electoral College vote. That’s hard to do, but it’s certainly possible,” Mr. Black said.
But some Democrats say it is more than possible and very likely that Mr. Kerry can lose most or all of the South but peel off one or two additional states elsewhere that Mr. Bush carried in 2000.
“He could lose the entire South but win New Hampshire and win the presidency,” said Philip Johnston, the Massachusetts Democratic Party chairman. Mr. Bush narrowly won New Hampshire last time, but right now the race for the state’s four electoral votes is in a dead heat.
Another drawback for the Kerry-Edwards ticket is the poor track record liberal Democrats have had over the years in presidential elections. Democrats have won the presidency only three times in the past nine elections and in each case they were centrist Southerners and former governors: Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Mr. Clinton in 1992 and 1996.
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