Sen. John Kerry will spend the days leading up to next week’s Democratic National Convention traveling to places he believes important to American history and to his own life story, beginning with his birthplace of Aurora, Colo., on Friday.
He and running mate Sen. John Edwards will stop in a series of battleground states, including Iowa, Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. He also will stop in Virginia, visiting Norfolk, where he will tout his service in the Navy.
The convention runs Monday through July 29 in Boston, the city Mr. Kerry now calls home.
“It’s the birthplace of the country. It’s John Kerry’s hometown, and the city where he began his campaign and where he will accept his party’s nomination and kick off the general election campaign,” said Jeanne Shaheen, former governor of New Hampshire and a co-chairwoman of Mr. Kerry’s campaign.
Mr. Kerry plans to arrive in Boston for the July 29 events. Mr. Edwards will arrive separately the night of July 27, in time to give his own acceptance speech the next day.
Polls have shown that despite a blitz of ads during the primaries and in the months since, Mr. Kerry and his positions still are not known by a substantial portion of voters. The events leading up to the convention will focus on the candidates’ families, their “optimism” message and their plans to revamp the U.S. military.
Even as he is educating Americans about himself, it turns out Mr. Kerry will be teaching his family a thing or two.
Though she said the trip will highlight places that “are incredibly important” to her father, Mr. Kerry’s daughter Alexandra said she never has been to Aurora, “so I’m excited to explore that.”
When she was asked why her father was born there and how long her father’s family was there, Miss Kerry said she didn’t know.
“This is going to be the embarrassing responsibility of the daughter who doesn’t know these details,” she said, before asking campaign staffers on the call for help. One staffer said Mr. Kerry’s father was stationed in Colorado in 1943. Richard Kerry served as an Army pilot during World War II.
The campaign continued to play down expectations for the convention.
“We don’t expect to get a big bounce out of the convention, we didn’t expect to get a big bounce out of selection of the vice president,” Mrs. Shaheen said. She said those two events usually serve to unify a party’s base behind its candidate, but Democrats had unified behind the goal of ousting Mr. Bush well before Mr. Edwards’ selection two weeks ago.
Though she said this year can’t compare with past years in those polls, she did use past polls to defend the campaign’s standing to date. She said President Carter led Ronald Reagan by seven percentage points in the polls at this point in 1980, and in 1992 President George Bush had a 16-point lead over Bill Clinton.
“We’re doing better than any other challenger at this point in recent history,” she said.
But Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said to “anticipate a bounce,” and said historically it has been an eight-point jump for the challenger and a seven-point drop for the incumbent.
“I’m not sure, given how closely divided the country is today, that they can get a full 15-point swing and match the 30-year average. But they will get a bounce. It will be a significant bounce coming out of there,” he said.
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