Worried Democrats Urge Kerry to Begin Campaign

Worried Democrats Urge Kerry to Start Revving Up Campaign
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JODI WILGOREN

Published: September 5, 2004


resident Bush roared out of his New York convention last week, leaving many Democrats nervous about the state of the presidential race and pressing Senator John Kerry to torque up what they described as a wandering and low-energy campaign.

In interviews, leading Democrats - governors, senators, fund-raisers and veteran strategists - said they had urged Mr. Kerry's campaign aides to concentrate almost exclusively on challenging President Bush on domestic issues from here on out, saying he had spent too much of the summer on national security, Mr. Bush's strongest turf.

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As the Labor Day weekend began, Mr. Kerry appeared to be heeding the advice with an aggressive attack on Mr. Bush's economic leadership. But many supporters also said they wanted to see Mr. Kerry respond more forcefully to the sort of attacks they said had undercut his standing and to offer a broad and convincing case for his candidacy.

"He's got to become more engaged,'' said Harold Ickes, a former political lieutenant to President Bill Clinton who is now running an independent Democratic organization that has spent millions of dollars on advertisements attacking President Bush. "Kerry is by nature a cautious politician, but he's got to throw caution to the wind."

Senator Bob Graham of Florida, a former rival of Mr. Kerry for the Democratic nomination, said Mr. Kerry still had not settled on a defining theme to counter what Democrats called the compelling theme of security hammered into viewers of the Republican convention.

"The people are there, the candidate is there; it's the reason to vote for the candidate that's still a little out of focus," Mr. Graham said.

Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania said Mr. Kerry "has got to start smacking back."

And Senator Christopher J. Dodd, an influential Democrat from Connecticut, said his party's standard-bearer had "a very confused message in August, and the Republicans had a very clear and concise one."

Mr. Dodd was one of several Democrats who said they now thought Mr. Kerry had made a mistake at his convention in July by talking mainly about his history as a Vietnam War veteran and criticizing Mr. Bush's policies, without offering a vision of what a Kerry term would be like.

"We did not adequately lay out the contrast, compare and contrast what a Kerry administration would do and what the Bush administration has done," Mr. Dodd said of the Democrats' convention in Boston. "That was a mistake. Vietnam, in terms of John Kerry's service, that was a good point to make, but making it such a central point sort of invited the kind of response you've seen."

If nervous about the state of play going into Labor Day, Democrats were far from ready to concede defeat in a contest that typically does not engage until the start of September. They pointed to polls showing continued unhappiness with the direction of the country and Mr. Bush's mediocre job approval ratings.

And not incidentally, they invoked Mr. Kerry's history of getting more focused on a contest only when he was faced with the prospect of imminent defeat; that is what happened when he ran for re-election to the Senate from Massachusetts in 1996 and when he won the Iowa caucuses this year after many Democrats had dismissed his candidacy as finished.

"John Kerry had a great July and George Bush had a good August,'' said Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa, one of a handful of Democrats who said they were not concerned by the turn of events. "It doesn't mean a thing. This battle starts right now."

Still, Democrats said Mr. Bush's convention, combined with an aggressive advertising effort by former Vietnam veterans with ties to Mr. Bush's supporters to discredit Mr. Kerry's war record, had turned this contest away from a referendum on Mr. Bush's presidency and into a referendum on Mr. Kerry's character, war record and stand on Iraq.

Some Democrats described this as an ominous development that Mr. Kerry had to address.

"What they did is they lost control of the ball," said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, who was a senior political adviser in the Clinton White House. "They allowed the election to not be about George Bush but to be about themselves. They have to get back on their game."

And Mr. Graham said, "It's become a referendum on the challenger."

The remarks suggested something of a reassessment by many Democratic leaders who had, almost unanimously, praised Mr. Kerry's convention when he left Boston in July.