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 It's my party (and I'll cry if I want to)
From John Mercurio
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- It was hard to miss the exasperation in John Kerry's voice. He had called the Grind to talk about his campaign's two-day, four-state kickoff, which gets underway at 9:50 a.m. EDT today in South Carolina. But the four-term senator and Vietnam War hero ended up explaining why he has fallen behind the short governor from the small state, and how he plans to make up ground this fall. "Look, we're just getting started," Kerry said yesterday. "He's had a fair amount of publicity, I haven't spent any money on TV, and so we need to begin to do that. The American people now are only beginning to focus on the race. We're going to make it very clear that I would be a better President of the United States." Kerry can be forgiven if he feels a little shreklekh on the eve of his kickoff jamboree. For months last winter and spring, the senator fought the "aw-shucks" battle, denying that he was the party's inevitable nominee. He had the money, the stature and the staff, and even snared key praise from Gerry McEntee, whose endorsement could cause major headaches for Dick Gephardt. But that was before Howard's Summer of Love upended the '04 Dem field and sent Kerry's poll numbers, in New Hampshire and nationwide, through the floor. Today, Kerry faces a much more serious battle, in New Hampshire and nationwide, to convince political lifers that he's still the best man to topple Dean and, oh yeah, President Bush. Polls show Kerry has some work to do. A new CNN/USA Today/Gallup national survey shows that Kerry has dropped from second to fourth place since July in the Democrats' nine-candidate field, while Dean has moved up from fourth to third ranking. Dean led Kerry in New Hampshire, 38 to 17 percent in a late-August Zogby poll. Kerry led Dean by three points as recently as July. Elmendorf: 'He was artificially high to begin with'For their part, other '04 Dems are only too happy to rain on Kerry's parade. "For seven months, they ignored us and laughed at us. Now they're either saying what we were saying or attacking us," Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi, told the Grind. "There's no doubt why they've changed course. They've been floundering and we've been moving." Steve Elmendorf, Gephardt's campaign chief of staff, said he's hardly surprised to be watching Kerry fall back to earth. "I thought he was artificially high to begin with," he said. "He's a weak third in Iowa, he's a very weak second in New Hampshire. There's no state I know of where he's ahead. Dean's beating him in fundraising. I would argue that he doesn't have anywhere to fall from. It all goes to show you that being perceived as the front-runner, you have nowhere to go but down." Elmendorf, whose candidate faces his own threat from Dean in his must-win state of Iowa, said Gephardt is better poised to deny Dean a victory there than Kerry is in New Hampshire. New Hampshire Dems are generally more left-of-center than their Iowa counterparts, said Elmendorf, and the nature of caucus elections puts a heavy premium on candidates' organization, which bodes well for Gephardt and his labor allies. In his interview with the Grind, Kerry left the door open to a post-announcement campaign shake-up. "I haven't made any judgments yet. We're going to sit down and take stock and make sure we have as effective a campaign as possible," he said. That might be a good idea, Trippi said. "I don't think it's Kerry, I think it's the campaign," he said. "They've been running a very careful, cautious campaign in a year when getting out front, saying what you think, even when it's not popular, is what you need to do. it's hard to be the careful, calculating political campaign when there are nine guys in the race." "No one has spent more time dishing dirt under the table on us than that campaign. Then, every once in a while, they realize that's not working, so they come out from under the table. A lot of their energy is spent trying to figure out the Dean campaign. They need to spend more time figuring out their own campaign." But then, maybe we're too cynical. After all, knowledgeable sources say John and Teresa (Heinz) Kerry were the picture of political bliss last night aboard the campaign plane to South Carolina. Two sources have confirmed that Teresa even served the press corps chocolate brownies (no nuts, too bad). While she acknowledged the brownies were from a mix, she said she had a secret ingredient that helped make them "extra moist." For his part, the 6-foot-6-inch senator was even seen reaching over three rows of seats to grab a couple of baked goods. Where's Tammy Wynette when you need her?
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