Kerry Fires Campaign Manager

In a major staff shake-up, Sen. John F. Kerry announced Monday that he fired the manager of his Democratic presidential campaign and hired a veteran of liberal causes and Capitol Hill to bring control to his flagging and divided organization.

Kerry hired Mary Beth Cahill, the chief of staff for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who had earlier worked for President Clinton, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and for EMILY’s List, a proficient, liberal fund-raising organization dedicated to electing women. Outgoing campaign manager Jim Jordan was offered a job as senior strategist.

Kerry, from Massachusetts, has been struggling to establish himself in neighboring New Hampshire, which 11 weeks from today holds the first primary election of the 2004 campaign. Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, another neighbor, has built a strong organization there and a double-digit lead in the polls.

“This has been brewing for a long time. You want a presidential campaign that can move on a dime, and this one was turning around like an ocean liner,” said a Democratic strategist familiar with the campaign, adding that Jordan couldn’t forge consensus among the different power centers within the Kerry organization.

A senior Kerry aide presented the shift in campaign leadership as one driven by the need to harmonize its troika-like structure. The Kerry team is built around Jordan’s staff in the Washington headquarters, longtime Kerry loyalists in Boston, including veteran Democratic strategist John Sasso and the candidate’s brother Cameron F. Kerry, and a group of prominent outside consultants led by Democratic media guru Bob Shrum.

These distinct power centers have led to divisions, which have slowed decision-making. The result has been delay and deadlock in setting a strategy, according to those close to the campaign. Earlier this fall, internal tensions led to the departure of Chris Lehane, the campaign’s communications director, who is now advising retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark.

Jordan’s replacement by Cahill is intended to overcome the animosity that had built up in the rival camps and to put the campaign structure under new management that “everybody will talk to,” the senior Kerry campaign aide said.

Beyond the structural repairs, however, Cahill’s appointment carries an equally important symbolic message, the Kerry aide said: The candidate needed to respond to concerns that his campaign was stalling.

As part of his new aggressiveness, the campaign said it would air a new television ad in Iowa and New Hampshire beginning today that presents Kerry as a candidate in the best position to “take on George Bush.”

The commercial implicitly raises questions about the administration’s handling of Iraq by showing footage of President Bush dressed in a flight jacket on the carrier Abraham Lincoln declaring an end to major combat on May 1. The ad touts Kerry’s experience as a combat veteran and legislator with expertise in national security and foreign relations issues.

The firing of a campaign manager is not necessarily the hallmark of an organization in its death throes. Ronald Reagan overhauled the top management of his campaign in 1980 even as New Hampshire Republicans were at the polls choosing him as their candidate in a landslide over George H.W. Bush; four years ago, Democrat Al Gore shook up the top management of his campaign. In both cases, the candidates went on to capture the party’s nomination.

But Kerry’s move comes amid clear signs of difficulty and discord. “What it does mean is they’re not where they think they should be,” said Linda Fowler, a Dartmouth College professor and longtime observer of the New Hampshire primary.

The personnel change comes at the start of a week when Dean is expected to get a boost from two labor unions.

The biggest union in the AFL-CIO, the 1.6-million-member Service Employees International Union, and the 1.4-million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees are expected to announce on Wednesday that they are jointly endorsing Dean. The joint endorsement means that the two unions’ politically savvy leaders -- Andrew L. Stern of the service workers and Gerald McEntee of AFSCME -- believe Dean has the best chance of success.

It was that perception, the senior Kerry aide said, that the senator wanted to challenge.

“When you can’t sell to people that you can win this thing, you have to make a change,” the aide said. “And a lot of times the change is the campaign manager.”

Ironically, Jordan had recently won one of the biggest fights within the Kerry organization, helping to persuade the candidate to counter Dean’s surge and to challenge him more directly.

One Democrat who has worked with Cahill said she is more of a manager than a strategist and that the greatest asset she brings to the campaign is that she is “very plugged in with all the traditional Democratic constituencies -- African Americans, gays and lesbians, labor.”

Jeanne Shaheen, the former governor of New Hampshire who is a national chairwoman of the Kerry campaign, said on CNN’s “Inside Politics” on Monday that Cahill “knows Massachusetts, she knows the Washington scene. And we think she will bring skill and understanding that will be very important in the campaign.”

Cahill has served as Kennedy’s chief of staff since May 2001. Before that, she was Clinton’s director of public liaison for two years. She was executive director of EMILY’s List from 1993 to 1998, one of the nation’s largest political action committees.

Jordan has not decided whether to accept the senior strategist post, the campaign said.