Kerrey Campaigns to Change Minds

It is early in the morning when Bob Kerrey enters the American Legion Post just off Elm Street, but a goodly crowd is already seated on folding chairs spread around the scuffed linoleum floor.

“People are looking for a leader,” a supporter is telling me as Kerrey walks in. “A Churchill.”

But if people are looking for a Churchill among the men running for President, they better keep looking.

On the Republican side we have a known factor, George Bush, and on the Democratic side we have a group of major candidates with so little name recognition that they probably could not get a parking ticket fixed outside their home states.

But Bob Kerrey, 48, has a certain something going for him in this regard: Star quality. Potential star quality, anyway.

You hear the questions being asked in the crowds at the gatherings where the Democratic candidates parade before the public like beauty queens on a runway:

“Which is the guy with the one leg?”

“Who won the Medal of Honor in Vietnam?”

“Which is the one who dated Debra Winger?”

The answer to all three is Bob Kerrey.

A senator and former governor from Nebraska, a war hero who lost his lower right leg to a Viet Cong grenade, he has attracted not only early public attention, but some very sharp staff people from past presidential campaigns.

They stand here now, along the back wall, arms crossed over their suits. These are guys who can organize a state or a nominating convention or a national campaign. Unfortunately, none of them thought to organize a microphone for Bob Kerrey this morning.

So he must address the crowd through a bullhorn, giving his speech a certain “come-out-with-your-hands-up” quality.

He is shorter and much slimmer than one expects. Though once rugged enough to become a member of the Navy SEALs, an elite commando unit, he now looks almost frail. His head is big, however, and this helps him on TV. (Merv Griffin, the vastly successful TV producer, believes in hiring stars with big heads because they show up so much better on the screen. Vanna White and Pat Sajak have big heads.)

Reporters have been shadowing Kerrey for some time now and the reviews have been mixed. It seems Kerrey has not yet fully learned the trick of hiding his intelligence, which may be essential if he wishes to become President.

Americans want Presidents they consider smart or savvy, but not Presidents who are too brainy or intellectuals. George Bush never impressed anybody as being an intellectual. Ronald Reagan was never accused of being too brainy.

Kerrey goes out later the same day to the estate of a wealthy supporter outside Concord. Behind the main house, there is a riding stable and a hayloft. Up in the hayloft there are now about 50 people sitting on bales and sipping apple cider.

“I am motivated and animated by a different set of values,” Kerrey tells them. And then he talks about some of them, some of the stuff from his standard speech, mentioning Vietnam, raising two children and being a successful businessman.

And then he goes into the stuff almost nobody understands, admitting it is “difficult for people to hear.” It has something to do with “applying broadcast technology” to “interactive learning devices in the home” and apparently has something to do with fiber optics.

In the question period after, Kerrey sometimes gives answers in which there is something less than meets the eye: “We should approach education through our concern for children.”

And sometimes more: “We put a huge amount of energy to make sure a 24-year-old flier over Baghdad didn’t hit a mosque. We should use that same kind of energy to give each home a learning tool.”

Whatever you want to make of that last answer, there is a mind at work there that is not conventional. And that may be Kerrey’s hope or his doom.

After some mingling, Kerrey walks down the steep ladder to the stables. A horse is taken out of a stall and Kerrey poses with it amid a crowd of supporters.

“Here you have a horse’s head,” he says, pointing to the horse. Then he puts a hand on his own chest. “And here you have a horse’s. . .”

He does not finish the sentence and the crowd laughs. A photographer takes his picture.

Bob Kerrey knows that running for President is partly a game.

Now, we’re going to see if he knows how to win it.