Kerry Doesn’t Hesitate to Woo Those Who Do

Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry was in full throttle, telling the mother of a developmentally disabled boy that in his administration the government would actually foot the bill for the special care the youth required.

He strode the stage, jabbed a bony finger in the air, paused to take a breath, paused to take another question, saw his aide approach the stage from the corner of his eye and heard the dreaded exhortation: “Senator, you have five more minutes.”

Oh, really?

“There are too many undecideds here,” Kerry declared to an audience in the packed Des Moines Playhouse this week, having seen a show of hands at the beginning of the town hall meeting. “I’m going to stay until the sun rises. How many undecideds are there now? Not too many, I hope.”

The hands went up -- fewer this time -- and he was off.

This is what it’s like when you’re a candidate on the move, when your crowds are growing and your poll numbers are rising -- in Iowa at least. When, all of a sudden, after months as the Guy Who Squandered an Early National Lead, the end is in sight and the critical first contest of campaign 2004 is up for grabs.

What do you do? You talk to everybody. Really. Everybody. Or at least you try.

That’s why the senator from Massachusetts -- surging in the polls and playing to bigger crowds in Iowa -- took a score of questions from undecided voters at the playhouse and didn’t end the official program until everyone else started to trickle home. He stayed behind in the emptying auditorium to close as many deals as he could with anyone who would stay and talk. Dozens did.

That’s why he took to the air Thursday in the giddily named “Kerry-copter” to squeeze two more appearances into an already packed day. And why he arrived Friday on four hours’ sleep to an early-morning town hall meeting in tiny Waverly to talk about the intersection of trustworthiness and experience.

“There’s nothing made up here. This is real. This is me,” he said to reporters Friday, explaining what’s finally clicking, why he’s connecting with voters at long last. “It’s up to the American people to decide whether they want that or not. But I’ve been consistent about my programs, consistent about my vision for the country.”

Kerry landed in Iowa on Jan. 9 insisting that “this campaign does have energy,” and has spent the ensuing days running hard to give it some. He has been battling a cold, popping zinc and swilling a concoction made of lemon, honey, ginger and his wife’s “secret ingredient ... a hot toddy without the toddy.”

He shakes nearly every hand that’s been stretched his way. He regularly gives half a dozen speeches daily and often as many interviews. He starts his days before 6 a.m., and ends most of them after midnight. He talks less between events to save his voice. He’s getting a little ragged around the rhetorical edges.

By Wednesday, one poll showed him tied for second place in Iowa. By Thursday the same poll showed him as the leader of the pack. By Friday he was still hanging tough.

The rising poll numbers gave the candidate an attack of ambivalence. First he took pains to play down their import.

“I am always wary of polls, whether I am up, whether I am down,” he told reporters while squirting batter on a hot griddle at a pancake breakfast in Council Bluffs.

Five hours later at a Sioux City rally -- after taking the controls of the four-seat Twin-Star helicopter for a 47-minute flight between events -- Kerry was more willing to talk about the polls.

“Do you like the surge? Are you ready for more surge?” he called out to the late-afternoon audience. “And are you ready to make more and more surge a surprise on Monday? Sounds to me like you’re ready for action.”

Some of Kerry’s events drag on, as he struggles to answer as many questions as possible without throwing off the entire day. “I could stay here all night, but you know what?” he asked in Mason City on Thursday. “I’d probably lose about 300 votes at the next place.”

But effort is one thing, results quite another.

At the Des Moines Playhouse Wednesday night, his success was a little spotty. Virginia Dress, 43, a biotechnology patent agent, walked in undecided -- and exited in the same frame of mind. “I like him,” she said. “I respect him. But from a lot of the candidates, it all sounds pretty similar.”

Kerry fared a little better with Sally Catron, 33 and one seat over -- although you wouldn’t have known it by the look on her face after she listened to him speak. “I’m more confused than when I came in,” moaned the Altoona resident, who was split between Kerry and North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. “I was hoping to eliminate Kerry.”

She couldn’t.

Larry Dellinger, a veteran and an alpaca rancher, ventured into the cold Friday for a 7:30 a.m. Kerry stop at Waverly City Hall. An undecided voter, he’d been torn by the embarrassment of electoral riches: “Too many good candidates,” he said.

Kerry “was my first choice overall until I got confused,” Dellinger said. “So I came to hear him one more time ... As of right now, I think I’ll vote for him.”

Kerry, of course, hopes for more converts. He insists he isn’t analyzing, strategizing, looking ahead to the contests that will follow. What he’s doing, he says, is simply talking to the people.

“I got three days left to talk to the people of Iowa and the people of the country to the degree they’re listening as we begin a new phase of this campaign,” he told reporters Friday. “I’m just going to keep talking.”