Kerry Won’t Delay Nomination

Facing sharp opposition from some Democratic Party elders and rank-and-file alike, Sen. John F. Kerry on Wednesday abandoned the idea of delaying his official nomination, a move that would have eliminated President Bush’s financial advantage in the final months of the general election campaign.

The Massachusetts senator announced that he would accept his party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention here in late July, though it will force him to stretch his federal financing for five weeks longer than his Republican opponent.

The proposal to postpone Kerry’s nomination drew dismay from some party leaders, including former President Clinton and the candidate’s fellow home-state senator, Edward M. Kennedy, and sparked frustration among Boston officials already working to soothe concerns about the disruptions the event will cause in the city.

Although some party activists had embraced the idea as a canny way to compete against Bush, others expressed fear that it would deflate the effect of the convention and give Republicans more ammunition to portray Kerry as a man who tries to manipulate the rules.

Meanwhile, national news organizations -- which invest substantial resources in covering the conventions -- and pundits in Washington were overwhelmingly critical of the strategy as politically crass.

Ultimately, the senator bowed to those concerns and his own sense that the strategy would backfire.

As he campaigned Wednesday in Seattle, the Democratic presidential hopeful said he had surveyed many people about whether to delay his nomination and, in the end, made “a very simple, personal kind of decision.”

“This decision was based on my gut feeling that it was important for us to do what I think completes this journey in the proper way,” Kerry told an NBC television affiliate in Boston via satellite.

Mindful of the protracted and controversial outcome of the 2000 election, he added, “I don’t want the election of the presidency to hinge, as George Bush’s did, on outside influences, on rules changes, courts and other things.”

Once Kerry and Bush become their parties’ nominees, they will be limited to spending $75 million in public financing for the rest of the race and can no longer raise private contributions. Because the president will not receive the GOP nomination until Sept. 2 in New York, Bush will have a shorter period in which to make the public money last.

Delaying the Democratic nomination by five weeks would have allowed Kerry to spend private donations into late August.

“He just said it didn’t feel right in his gut, [the idea of] playing the legal game on this stuff,” said a Kerry advisor, one of several sources who said that the proposal had been leaked out Friday before it had been seriously vetted by the campaign.

News that the convention would proceed as planned drew expressions of relief from many delegates.

“It’s certainly going to make it a lot more celebratory,” said Leonard Lenihan, a delegate and chairman of the Erie County Democratic Committee in New York. “This is going to allow us to celebrate in the traditional manner, in the historical route.”

By quickly ruling against the idea, Kerry ended a six-day period of furious speculation about the implications of such an unprecedented delay. Analysts said that the move might have prompted TV networks to scale back their coverage of the convention, and raised sticky legal questions on a variety of fronts.

Although the purpose of the delay was to maximize Kerry’s resources, some Republican election lawyers and campaign watchdogs questioned whether the candidate would have been legally entitled to the $15 million in public funding for the convention if he did not become the official nominee there.

If Kerry had lost that money, the decision would not have made financial sense.

Now, his campaign faces a different challenge: trying to overcome the edge that Bush will have because of the late date of the Republican National Convention.

“It’s the right decision. Otherwise we would have had a very passive convention, and we need an interesting, explosive convention,” said New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, chairman of the Democratic Convention.

“But nonetheless, there still has to be a way to level the playing field with the Republicans because they will now get a financial advantage.”

Several Democratic Party leaders are confident they can.

“We will gladly match George W. Bush’s five-week advantage against our broad, unified and energized base,” Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.

Democrats say they plan to ramp up fundraising through the DNC and state parties. Under new campaign finance rules, the DNC can raise unlimited funds for an independent expenditure campaign on Kerry’s behalf. And Kerry can hold fundraisers for state parties, which can use the money to expand field operations and other efforts.

But campaign finance rules largely prohibit Kerry from coordinating the spending of that money with the national and state parties.

Art Torres, chairman of the California Democratic Party, said that, during a conference call Wednesday before Kerry announced his decision, party leaders in nearly a dozen other states had said they were all prepared to pitch in.

“The mood was, ‘We’re ready to go,’ no matter what Kerry decided,” he said.

Delaying the nomination, Torres added, “would have appeared too clever and would have played into Republicans’ hands.”

A House Democratic leadership aide said Kerry had accelerated his decision about the matter -- which his campaign had said would not be resolved for weeks -- because “they were taking so much heat.”

Opponents of the move included Clinton, said the aide, who did not want to be named.

Tammy Sun, a spokeswoman for Clinton’s office, said his office was not aware if the former president had expressed an opinion on the subject.

Meanwhile, Kennedy, one of Kerry’s top surrogates, was reportedly angry that the proposal had leaked out before he was consulted, according to a report in Tuesday’s Boston Herald.

David Smith, a Kennedy spokesman, refused to comment on reports that the senator was opposed to a delayed nomination. “The senator would have supported whatever decision John Kerry made,” he said. “He’s obviously pleased it’s been settled.”

But Boston officials did not hide their relief that the convention would go on as originally planned, nomination and all.

“Thank God,” Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino recalled saying when Kerry called him with the news. “It takes one of the monkeys off my back.”

In the end, the brief furor over an idea that quickly died had a positive effect, some Democrats argued, noting that coverage of the tactic helped educate party activists.

“If Democrats weren’t aware that Bush had a five-week advantage” before, said Jano Cabrera, a spokesman for the Democratic Party, “they sure the heck are now.”

Gold reported from Boston and Hook from Washington. Times staff writers Nick Anderson, Mark Z. Barabak, Michael Finnegan and Lisa Getter also contributed to this report.