Shifting Gears

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Not so long ago, everyone--even John Kerry's rivals--assumed that after Labor Day the lanky Massachusetts Senator would be cruising at the front of the Democratic pack. He had the war-hero bio and plenty of foreign policy credibility (perfect for post-9/11 politics), plus prodigious fund-raising abilities, a personal fortune and the best presidential hair since J.F.K. But as Kerry officially announces for President this week--a symbolic political rite that glosses over the fact that he has been running flat-out for a year--the question being asked most is the one a man put to him at a backyard gathering last Thursday night in Derry, N.H.: "How do you distinguish yourself from Governor Dean?"

As the Democratic race begins in earnest, it is the question not only for Kerry but for all the other candidates as well. Ever since Howard Dean started setting the pace this summer, Kerry and the other candidates began retrofitting their strategies so they might emerge as the ex-Vermont Governor's principal rival. The internal question now for all the other campaigns is, Howard and who else?

But none of the eight other candidates has been so jolted by Dean's rise as the man who was once presumed to be the front runner. A Zogby International poll last week showed Kerry running 21 points behind Dean in New Hampshire, the neighboring state for both men and one in which a loss could be devastating for either. Kerry's forces say their private numbers don't look quite so grim, but they acknowledge a double-digit gap in a state where their man was leading slightly more than a month ago.

Kerry insists that he is not surprised by any of it (has a politician ever admitted being surprised by a rival?) and that he's actually doing better at this point than he expected. "There was always going to be some other candidate," he said in an interview, adding that expectations about him were "smoke and mirrors. People looked on paper and said, 'Well, John Kerry is strong.' But in fact I'd never run nationally. I'd never been out there."

Yet the logistics of his announcement suggest some radical rethinking. Kerry dropped his plan to make his announcement in front of Old Ironsides in Boston Harbor and instead will do it in South Carolina, in front of an aircraft carrier. The switch puts more emphasis on his military background and less on his Massachusetts roots, which are both political baggage and a reminder of how directly he is competing with Dean. And the aircraft-carrier backdrop draws a more direct contrast with a different presidential candidate: George W. Bush. You can count on hearing Kerry's favorite applause line of late: "I learned something about aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin--I learned about them for real."

South Carolina may not be home ground for Kerry, but he figures it is alien territory for someone else. "I'm prepared to campaign in the South," says Kerry, "and elsewhere in the country where it's viewed as being harder." Harder, that is, for Democrats--and especially for one particular Democrat from Vermont who has become the darling of the party's angry antiwar, mostly northeastern left.