Kerry Turns Full Attention to Bush

John F. Kerry’s final rival for the Democratic presidential nomination is poised to drop out of the race today. His new rival, the president, phoned Tuesday night to wish Kerry well, perhaps the last cordial words the two will have for months to come.

George W. Bush “called to congratulate me,” Kerry told reporters before giving his victory speech at the Old Post Office Pavilion here. “I said I hope we have a great debate about the issues before the country.”

Less than 90 minutes later, Kerry was on national television, laying into the man with whom he’d just had “a very nice conversation.”

“Our opponents can’t campaign on jobs or healthcare or fiscal responsibility,” he said. “Instead, George Bush, who promised to become a uniter, has become the great divider.”

And, “just last week he proposed to amend the Constitution of the United States for political purposes.” And, “the Bush administration has run the most inept, reckless, arrogant and ideological foreign policy in modern history.”

Kerry’s comments, while not new, were pointed, and they offer a partial road map for the campaign ahead.

The Massachusetts senator and presumptive nominee for president mowed down his Democratic competitors largely by ignoring them. Running a general election campaign throughout the primary season, he hammered hard on the president and underscored his own record as war hero and seasoned legislator.

Said Kerry spokesman David Wade, reflecting on Kerry’s winning strategy to date: “I struggle to see the need for any dramatic shift.”

The immediate goals for the Democrat and his campaign, Wade said, are “to win the March 9 states and continue to build a national campaign, continue to raise money and continue to respond to George Bush’s attacks and present a clear alternative” to voters.

The first part is already underway. Kerry is to fly this morning to Orlando, Fla. He is scheduled to make another stop in Florida and visit Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi by Sunday, with a single day off in his hometown of Boston. The four states hold primaries next Tuesday.

Even with Edwards’ departure, Wade said, the schedule should hold.

The reason, said senior Kerry advisor Michael Meehan, is that the states in play next week will be important in the general election, so visiting them makes sense in the long term.

Kerry faces “the usual burdens of having to start fundraising in earnest,” Meehan said. The campaign raised $9 million from Jan. 1 to Feb. 20 -- $8.5 million of it since Kerry won the critical Iowa caucuses Jan 19. Since that turning point, the campaign said it raised $1 million every week for four weeks on the Internet alone -- compared with 2003, when it took the campaign the entire year to raise $1 million online.

That flow of cyber cash freed Kerry to spend time wooing voters instead of donors during the most important phase of the primary campaign, which had an effect on the candidate’s success.

“We were afforded January and nearly all of February with almost no fund-raising events,” Meehan said. “Only two in February did Kerry actually attend.... We’ve had a lot of small contributors coming in without a lot of John Kerry’s time.”

That will change now, and the campaign plans to have Kerry more involved in the money-raising effort. Although the campaign does not divulge how much cash it has on hand, as of the last reporting deadline at the end of January, Meehan said Kerry had $2 million.

But there have been a lot of elections and a lot of campaigning since then -- expensive propositions.

The campaign’s goal -- responding to increasing Republican attention and presenting a clear alternative to Bush -- will be a challenge.

In the view of political scientist Jeffrey Berry, Kerry “has one primary goal: to define himself to the American people before the Republicans do it for him. They’ve started.”

To the degree that Americans know the Massachusetts senator, it is probably as John Kerry, Vietnam war hero, Berry argued. Although that’s not bad, he said, it’s not enough.

Kerry “wants to sell himself as a thoughtful, cerebral, decisive leader,” said Berry, a professor of political science at Tufts University in Medford, Mass.

“I think Kerry’s comparative advantage over President Bush is that he can portray himself as experienced, battle-tested and highly intelligent, contrasting with an impulsive president who headed all too quickly off to war in Iraq.”

Kerry set about to do some of that Tuesday night, reminding the nation of his past as a veteran, underscoring his roots as an American leader and laying down the gauntlet -- slightly used from months of campaigning against North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri and the like.

Unlike the Bush administration’s politics of “fear and distortion,” the Democratic Party, he said, “will instead all across this nation throughout these next months keep trust with Lincoln’s ideal of America as the last, best hope of Earth.”

Reminding listeners that he came back from Vietnam and led veterans to the Capitol Mall to protest the very war he fought in, Kerry recalled the era as “a time of doubt and fear in this land.”

“It was a time when millions of Americans could not trust or believe what their leaders were telling them,” he declared. “And now today, Americans are once again wondering if they can trust or believe the leadership of our country.”