Two Visions, Two Styles in One Race to the Finish

There is so little time, and Sen. John F. Kerry still has so many speeches left in him. As he hurtles across the country by charter jet and bus caravan in the waning days of his campaign for the presidency, he says the first thing, and sometimes anything, that comes to mind.

Dusk was lowering over central Florida one night last week when he took the stage before 5,000 giddy partisans chanting, “Ker-ry! Ker-ry!” in an Orlando park. He was midway through his stem-winder, savaging the Bush administration’s handling of the chaos in Iraq, when a tropical gust whisked away a page of notes from his outstretched hands.

The sheet fluttered in the air for a second, then disappeared behind a row of Haitian immigrants pressed together at the edge of the stage. Someone retrieved the page, and the crowd began passing it back.

“Don’t worry, let it fly away,” Kerry said, waving them off. “I don’t need it.”

For better and sometimes for worse, the Massachusetts senator keeps straying from script as he tries to energize Democrats, win over uncommitted voters and edge out President Bush in battleground states.

The inner perfectionist in Kerry seems compelled to fill in every empty minute and blank spot on a page. Then he crams in more minutes and more pages. The speechmaking prowess that led him into public life three decades ago remains the most daunting weapon in his personal arsenal.

Yet with everything on the line, Kerry, the celebrated strong finisher, has turned out to be an elusive and inconsistent word master in the final stretch -- sometimes seeming incandescent and lyrical, at other moments baffling and uninspiring.

On a hectic campaign swing that took him from a Las Vegas casino to heartland stretches of Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio and down through Florida, Kerry was at his best when he seized the moment, firing up Democratic loyalists and connecting intimately with his roused audiences.

Ad-libbing to hundreds of seniors from a West Palm Beach retirement community who endured an unforgiving sun for him, Kerry dropped his rhetorical mask for a moment, as if echoing their own doubts.

“I know you’re looking at me, you’re trying to look right through me, right to my heart, asking, ‘Can we trust this fella?’ ” he said. “Well I’m here to tell you: You can.”

When he is off his game, Kerry tumbles into word thickets, clotting his delivery with numbing swatches of policy points, garbled syntax and a repertoire of rhetorical tics and cliches that have become habit over his 20-year Senate career.

He doused his own barn-burner one night at a rally in Wakefield, Ohio, where a crowd of several thousand farm families and factory workers had waited for hours, shivering in a fallow cornfield. With the ominous words “Let me tell you a few facts,” Kerry launched into a meandering pastiche of figures that droned on more than five minutes before reaching an applause line.

His appearances came at a grueling pace, as many as four a day, spanning time zones and crucial states. While Bush stuck with a disciplined routine of relentless assaults, slashing at Kerry and whipping up the GOP faithful, Kerry alternated his own fiery get-out-the-vote exhortations with a spate of policy addresses aimed at wooing the undecided.

Each day, Kerry seemed to bog down in the policy addresses, then hit his stride in the faster-paced campaign rallies, town hall sessions and photo opportunities that followed. Inside his boisterous crowds, it was not easy to tell the difference. Whether Kerry was riveting or numbing, his events were always awash in ginned-up excitement -- from the din of rock anthems to the prodding cheers of strategically positioned volunteers.

Issue speeches are not the norm in the final rush of a presidential race. But the campaign’s polls had found that unaligned voters wanted detailed solutions to middle-class woes.

Kerry and his brain trust of Boston pros and former aides to President Bill Clinton believed they could capitalize on that opening by drawing up a series of addresses on healthcare, Social Security, job protection and other domestic concerns. They were gambling that the time lost inspiring their base would pay off with a late surge of new voters.

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Closing Argument

“This is the closing argument,” said Mike McCurry, the former Clinton spokesman who signed on with Kerry for one more campaign. “We’re talking directly to middle-class families who feel squeezed.”

Kerry was already broaching the same topics in his vote-drive rallies, but in less detail. His rally speeches were more fluid, tuned to the crowd’s passion and the day’s news. When he bounded onstage in Orlando last week, for example, he had already added fresh lines about the Bush administration’s handling of the chaos in Iraq and the flu vaccine shortage.

Stoked by a cascade of cheers and whoops from a rapt crowd of college kids, Caribbean emigres and campaign volunteers, Kerry dipped in and out of his stump speech, pausing to admire a huge American flag billowing in the wind.

He bantered with the excited Haitians at the edge of the stage. His promise in French that he would help their ravaged island (“Je vais aider les Hatiens!”) ignored the risk of sneers from Gallophobic Republicans. And when the Rev. Jesse Jackson vaulted onstage as a surprise guest, Kerry wrapped him in a bear hug.

Near the finish, an adoring woman trilled, “We love you, John Kerry!” His taut, creased face cracked open in a delighted grin. It was genuine, an improvement over the obligatory undertaker’s smile he sometimes flashes.

“You do your job in Florida,” he purred, “and I’m going to love ya a whole lot back.”

The Orlando rally made up for Kerry’s dismal performance three hours earlier during a policy speech in Tampa. Kerry set off a frenzied ovation when he strode up to the dais inside the cavernous Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, then proceeded to suction the energy out of the room.

Reporters reading along with a prepared text of Kerry’s policy address on healthcare started buzzing in the back of the auditorium as Kerry replaced sharp, declarative sentences with serpentine dead ends.

He layered on a senator’s boilerplate salutations. “Friends,” and “My fellow Americans,” oddly echoed Lyndon Johnson, the 1960s war president Kerry once scorned. Kerry channeled his old idol, John F. Kennedy, too, his well-modulated radio announcer’s voice abruptly morphing into JFK’s high-Boston accent, turning “ideas” into “idears.”

Citing former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki’s 2003 warning about low troop levels in Iraq, Kerry stumblingly described how the military commander spoke “to Congress and the American people through the Congress.” Then, after he larded an extended passage on his healthcare proposals with long, tortured minutes of eye-glazing figures, Kerry arrived at a climactic applause line.

In his prepared text, Kerry was supposed to snipe at the president’s stance on healthcare by mocking his advice to Americans: “Don’t get sick.”

Instead, he blurted out: “And don’t get sick, just pray, stand up and hope -- wait -- whatever. We are all left wondering and hoping -- that’s it.”

Only the instant prompting of campaign staffers, clapping furiously around the room, sparked enough applause to rescue the candidate from dead air.

Kerry’s aides were well aware of his tendency to noodle at the last minute. But the candidate was set in his ways, and his people were leery of tampering with his approach so late in the game. His highs, they insisted, were worth the lows.

“Sure, he adds things,” said political strategist John Sasso, who was the early manager of Michael S. Dukakis’ failed 1988 presidential run and was brought into the fold in September along with McCurry and other party veterans to raise the campaign’s pulse.

“He’s very much his own person when it comes to communicating his ideas,” said Sasso, now the senior aide in Kerry’s traveling staff. “Look, he’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s been at this two years. You don’t want to mess with it now.”

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Letting Kerry Be Kerry

They were letting Kerry be Kerry when he took the stage to offer up his “Fresh Start for America” at a national meeting of the AARP, formerly known as the American Assn. of Retired Persons at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas. It was the morning after his third debate with Bush, and 9,000 conventioneers rewarded him with a standing ovation.

At first, Kerry’s delivery seemed spare and honed, as if he had just walked off the Arizona debate set. He reeled off a string of mild one-liners, cracking that he hoped his performance “covered the Vegas odds.” He ridiculed the president’s response to the flu shot shortage, circling an index finger around his ear as if questioning Bush’s sanity.

“Jiminy Christmas, you tell ‘em, John!” Dee Martinez shouted from the audience as Kerry took a swipe at Bush’s Treasury secretary, John W. Snow, for dismissing as “myths” Democrat complaints about the loss of 1.6 million private-sector jobs during Bush’s term.

But when he drifted into an extended explanation of his plans for middle-class tax relief and Social Security, he began losing his crowd. Martinez, 51, a retired teacher, fidgeted, twirling a bracelet. Nearby, a row of elderly ladies in Hawaiian shirts fell into gossip about bridge games and lounge singers, glancing up only when peals of applause drifted into their hearing range.

“Whew, that was a mouthful,” Martinez said as Kerry finally exited with a stentorian “God bless the United States of America,” trailed by a blast of Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation.”

As the campaign moved on to the Midwest battlegrounds of Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio, autumnal landscapes and shuttered factories seemed to sharpen Kerry’s focus. His policy speeches still dragged, but at night, in the frigid heartland air, his lines tightened, his pacing began to snap.

A long swing through the working-class Appalachian hills of southern Ohio was dominated by picture-perfect campaign stops. At a roadside pumpkin patch in Jeffersonville, Kerry solidified his rural bona-fides, showing up in an outdoorsman’s mustard-colored canvas barn coat he has worn in farm country since primary season.

At the next stop, a village grocery in Buchanan, Kerry bought a hunting license for $140 -- a small price to pay for blunting attacks by the National Rifle Assn. on his support for gun controls.

Then, in Wakefield, his supporters presented him with a Mossberg 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, which he later used to bag a goose, a photo opportunity dead-aimed at raising his dismal standing among gun enthusiasts.

The pivot was brazenly transparent, but the chance of winning converts made the stops worth it.

“That man will never take my guns away,” growled Ronald Beekman, 47, a long-distance trucker with a ZZ Top-style black beard, as Kerry wandered nearby, picking over a table piled with pumpkins and gourds at the roadside stand.

But a minute later, Beekman was hoisting up his son, Eric, 3, so Kerry could tousle his hair. “Look, man,” a chagrined Beekman smiled weakly. “This is history.”

Kerry seemed to notice that too, one night at a rally in Sheboygan, Wis. When a brief blackout extinguished every light in a downtown park, Kerry paused, listening to his audience murmur. Then he spoke in a hush.

“You know,” he said, “every four years, we’re the luckiest people on the planet.”