To each his own approach

On Friday morning, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts quoted scripture to ministers at a Baptist church in Detroit. Two hours later, he hugged his ex-rival Dick Gephardt, who endorsed him for president in nearby Warren, Mich. After lunch, as he toured a community college in Flint, Kerry was buttonholed by a former “hard-core Republican” who has had it with the Bush administration’s policy toward small business.

In the early evening, the candidate flew in a jet decked out with “John Kerry” headrest covers to Nashville, where he’d booked one of the fanciest hotels in the city. His official day had lasted 12 hours.

On Saturday, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina drew an Elvis impersonator to a morning rally at the University of Memphis, where he gave his familiar speech on “two Americas,” one for the rich and one for everyone else. Edwards then flew to Milwaukee and gave the same speech to a boisterous crowd of union supporters and students at the University of Wisconsin.

Later, at an Internet cafe in Virginia, he kissed a baby -- 8-month-old Cassidy Collins, whose parents had positioned her in hopes of catching his eye. An hour after that, Edwards’ campaign converged with Kerry’s in Richmond at a fundraising dinner for nearly 2,000 Virginia Democrats. Edwards’ public day had lasted about 13 hours. He was spotted later, near midnight, in a Richmond hotel pool with his two youngest children. Their late-night swims have become something of a family ritual on the trail.

To spend 24 hours with the two United States senators vying for the Democratic presidential nomination is, in some sense, an act of high-class masochism. For the media, the tedium of long bus rides and the repetition of barely varying stump speeches is offset by flights in well-appointed jets and pampering by ultra-efficient advance staffs. Yet a day with each candidate provides an excellent vantage point to observe the disparate styles of two men who may eventually occupy the first and second positions on a Democratic presidential ticket.

On the stump, Kerry famously embodies the quality of gravitas, his serious demeanor often cited by Democratic voters looking for “electability” in their nominee. Edwards, on the other hand, embodies the irrepressible optimism of the American personality. Kerry, it might be said, appeals to the head, and Edwards to the heart.

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Compelling stories

Both candidates are attractive, with compelling back stories. Kerry, 60, a son of privilege and decorated Vietnam veteran, is married to the wealthy widow of Republican Sen. John Heinz. Edwards, 50, the son of a mill worker, was the first in his family to attend college and became a millionaire as a personal-injury lawyer. After their teenage son died in a car crash, the Edwardses had two late-in-life babies with the help of fertility technology.

(The sum of their parts evokes inevitable comparisons to a time many Americans view with nostalgia. One athletic, patrician Massachusetts Democrat plus one charming, handsome father of young children equals Camelot redux.)

Both men have honed attacks on President Bush. Kerry, by far the more biting, likes to make fun of Bush’s appearance on an aircraft carrier in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner and taunts him to “bring it on.” Edwards accuses Bush of being out of touch with real Americans. Both have mostly steered clear of inflicting wounds on their Democratic rivals.

But their styles on the stump are markedly different. Every Edwards speech is a closing argument to a jury of voters; he feeds off the energy of a crowd, comfortably drawing his listeners into his populist embrace, emphasizing what “we” need to do to make the world right. At the University of Wisconsin, wearing a business suit and waffle-soled black snow boots, he stood in the middle of the room, his youthful faced bathed in the glow of footlights that some smart advance person had thought to install.

“We’re going to say no forever to any American working full time and living in poverty,” Edwards said. “Not in our America. Not in the America you and I are going to build together. You and I can do something about this.”

Kerry, who stands ramrod straight and is easy to find in a crowd because, at 6 feet, 4 inches, he is usually the tallest person in the room, is less warm and fuzzy. Despite his decades of public life, he has trouble gracefully setting up a joke, especially one about Bush that uses a reference to the Patriots’ recent Super Bowl win. (“I predicted that Adam Vinatieri was gonna kick a field goal and win it in the last moments, so I am emboldened to make another prediction that I will now make to you: Like father, like son, one term and you’re done.”)

Kerry’s privileged background seeps into his speeches even when he is trying to connect with the downtrodden.

In Detroit, he told a mostly black audience that his high school mentor taught him about “the apartheid of our own nation.” That mentor “was the first African American teacher at my school, the Rev. John Thomas Walker, who later became the bishop of National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.” (They met at St. Paul’s, an Episcopal boarding school in New Hampshire.)

Edwards, on the other hand, was born in South Carolina and always prefaces his appeal to end racial inequality by saying: “This is something I have lived with my whole life.... I grew up in the South and from the time I was very young, I saw the ugly face of discrimination and segregation.”

Kerry campaigns with his Vietnam comrades and has used them in TV ads and appearances to bolster his image as “the real deal.”

Edwards does not have a personal contingent to speak of. In fact, to bring home the disgrace of poverty in America, he has actually invented a child: “Tonight, somewhere in America,” he will say, “a 10-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry. She’ll be hoping that tomorrow is not as cold as today because she doesn’t have clothes to keep her warm. She’ll be hoping she doesn’t get sick like she did last year because she knows what that means: hour after hour after hour sitting in the emergency room hoping and praying that someone buys her the medicine she so desperately needs. She’ll go to bed worrying because her father’s not been able to find steady work since he lost his job when the factory closed.”

In an age where politicians routinely pluck real folks from a crowd and elevate them to iconic status in speeches, it’s slightly jarring to hear Edwards invoke a fiction, yet crowds respond enthusiastically to his kicker: “She’s like millions of Americans all over this country living in poverty every day, unnoticed and unheard. Well here’s what you and I can do about that. In the country you and I are gonna build together, we’re gonna say to this little girl, ‘We see you, we hear you, we embrace you. You are part of our American family and we are going to lift you out of poverty.’ ”

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Retail politicking

The candidates zip from city to city hoping to garner free time on local TV newscasts, but there is also, ahead of the “Super Tuesday” primaries March 2, still a remnant of the retail politicking that found candidates like Kerry asking Iowans for their names and phone numbers, promising that his staff would get on their problems, pronto.

In places like Wisconsin and Virginia and Tennessee last weekend, people were still showing up to take measure of the candidates in the flesh. And the candidates tried to be accommodating.

At Mott Community College in Flint, where Kerry toured a machine room Friday, he listened patiently and sympathetically to Laurie Moncrief, 42, a director of the school’s technology center and small-business owner whose tool-and-die company is teetering on the edge of insolvency. She is the “hard-core Republican” who is considering voting Democratic for the first time. Although Kerry supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, he had spent much of the day promising to bring jobs back to Michigan, which in the last several years has lost 100,000 manufacturing jobs, a figure repeated by various politicans often during the day. “I am hoping,” Moncrief said later, “that he walks his talk.”

The next day in Milwaukee, 20-year-old University of Wisconsin students Eric Halleman and Jim Morrow waded into the post-speech maelstrom of fans, cameramen and political operatives to get Edwards’ autograph. Halleman said he thought Edwards -- whose line “The south is not George Bush’s backyard, it is my backyard and I will beat George Bush in my backyard” is something of a mantra in the campaign -- sounded “less Southern” on Saturday.

“In South Carolina,” Halleman said, referring to the only primary that Edwards has decisively won, “he sounded like he turned up the accent.”

The students, who said they recognized Edwards’ standard stump speech from C-SPAN and the newspaper, added that they liked what they saw, but both were leaning toward Kerry.

It’s possible they’ll be able to vote for both men in November. At Saturday’s Democratic dinner in Richmond, Virginia Lt. Gov. Timothy Kaine announced: “We’re proud to have the next president of the United States here tonight, and I have a feeling that we have the next vice president in this room tonight too.”