Students Give Kerry Mixed Grades

Sen. John F. Kerry kicked off his college campus tour last week with a clunker.

Standing on a stage in a cavernous stadium at the University of New Hampshire on Monday, Kerry quipped: “I promise one of the first things that I will do as president of the United States is issue an executive order pardoning you for anything you did on spring break.”

The crowd of about 500 students, who barely filled a corner of the huge arena, responded with weak laughter.

It was a hit-and-miss week for the putative Democratic presidential nominee as he tried to shore up support among young voters.

As he stumped through campuses in the Northeast, Kerry seemed to be connecting with his audience. He offered heartfelt appeals about the need for more civic involvement and reminisced about the influence President Kennedy had on his generation. On Friday, he drew an estimated 10,000 people to a rally at the University of Pittsburgh.

But most audiences numbered in the hundreds. Kerry often reverted to his usual campaign speech and all but skipped over his tailored pitch about his plan to make college more affordable, seemingly oblivious of whom he was addressing.

While his campaign touted a new Harvard University poll showing that the Massachusetts senator has a strong edge over President Bush among college students, the candidate’s uneven outreach to young voters last week reflects the challenge he faces in rousing the fervor among that age group that former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean did in the primaries.

At his peak, Dean effortlessly drew thousands to campus rallies, where many said they felt empowered by his message that they could have an effect on politics. More than 1,000 Generation Dean groups, boasting 23,000 members, formed around the country to organize college-age students to work for his election.

Kerry spokesman David Wade said the campaign is building a similar organization, and already has chapters of Students for Kerry in every state. He noted that the senator actually won the college vote in the Iowa caucuses.

Wade disputed the notion that Kerry has difficulty connecting with young voters, saying the candidate draws from his experience on college campuses as an antiwar activist.

“He has a very sincere, idealistic belief in what students can achieve,” he said.

More broadly, however, Kerry’s inconsistent performance last week underscored the difficulties he has connecting with his audiences at times.

While he is deft at fielding audience questions with thoughtful and detailed responses, his stump speech -- a long catalog of his policy positions -- often sounds rambling and unfocused.

After his appearance Wednesday at the City College of New York in Harlem, junior Trevor Houser said Kerry’s visit was unlikely to inspire much enthusiasm on campus, where, he said, “Lyndon LaRouche supporters are out in more force than the Kerry supporters.”

“His performance is totally predictable,” said Houser, a Democrat who said he’s going to support the party nominee. “It’s sort of a canned stump speech. I think he just needs to break out of that a little bit more.”

But Kerry also demonstrated last week that he is capable of rhetorical high notes, as well as an ability to empathize with his audience.

“I know people don’t believe that politics solves problems,” he told students at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. “I know that people are disaffected. I know a lot of your friends laughed at you probably because you go to a rally.” But, he added, “change begins with you.”

In Providence, R.I., the next day, he offered a blunt assessment of the source of youthful cynicism.

“Let’s go out and get the job done, instead of squabbling back and forth and having a complete absence of leadership, which the younger generation looks at and scratches their head and says, ‘What are these turkeys doing? “ he said at the University of Rhode Island.

“They don’t get it and I don’t blame them.”

On Friday, Kerry closed his “Change Starts With U” tour with a raucous rally featuring rock singer Jon Bon Jovi at the University of Pittsburgh.

Pointing to a massive American flag draped behind the crowd, the senator lambasted Vice President Dick Cheney and Bush’s senior political advisor, Karl Rove, for receiving draft deferrals rather than serving in the Vietnam War.

He referred to them as “people at the White House” who “don’t think twice about trying to pretend to America that I somehow don’t care about defense of our nation.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something: the political bombs may be bursting in air today around us as they try to distort the truth, but when I look up, that flag is still there,” Kerry said. “And it belongs to all of Americans.”

Sophomore Leigh Ash, seated on a metal guardrail, beamed and applauded enthusiastically.

“I usually don’t take a lot of what they say seriously, but honestly, while he was talking, by the end of it, I was like, ‘I think I can really believe in this guy, at least more than George Bush,’ ” said Ash, a 20-year-old sociology major. “I just thought that it was actually inspiring.”

In other moments last week, the candidate was less successful at connecting with his audience.

In New Hampshire, he bemoaned the outsourcing of jobs overseas, asking his youthful audience members if they knew that they, as taxpayers, were subsidizing corporations that get tax breaks to move their operations abroad.

In Pittsburgh, he took note of the massive crowd that turned out, saying that it rivaled the one that celebrated the Pittsburgh Steelers’ division title victory in 1972 -- a decade before most of those in the audience were born.

And at Howard University in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Kerry used a dated music reference as he criticized President Bush.

“Remember that song, ‘The Great Pretender?” he asked, referring to a 1956 song by The Platters. The 150 students assembled in a small meeting hall stared at him blankly.

“No, you’ve never heard of it,” he said quickly, correcting himself. “Nobody ever heard of it. It’s before your time.”

Outside the hall where he was speaking, students jostled by on their way to class, startled by the Secret Service agents guarding the doors. Several said Dean’s visit to the campus last year stirred a lot more excitement among the student body.

Some weren’t sure exactly who the visitor causing all the commotion was.

“Who’s John Kerry?” asked Kristin Ward, 20.

“You know -- he’s running for president,” admonished her friend Tina Tucker, a junior psychology major.

” Oh yeah,” Ward responded. “Isn’t he the one who says that everything that Bush is doing, he’d do the opposite?”