How Bush Plans To Win

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The balloons hadn't even settled in Boston's Fleet Center after John Kerry's acceptance speech when George W. Bush's campaign set about popping them. The President's top aides had been BlackBerrying little darts to one another all through the address, and now they were on a conference call, comparing notes across a virtual war room. Bush confidante Karen Hughes in Texas said Kerry had come across as "lecturing," pointing his finger like a schoolmaster. In his Washington living room, Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, said Kerry's position on Iraq was a "puzzlement," a contradiction of his own votes. From suburban Maryland, White House communications director Dan Bartlett read an email an apolitical friend had sent him during the speech, saying he found Kerry's approach to terrorism unconvincing. From Boston, where Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie had set up a real war room to feed reporters responses to the Democrats all week, operatives added their barbs. Kerry included only 70 words about his 19-year Senate career. His biographical movie never mentioned that he worked with Michael Dukakis. Gillespie went in and out of the conversation between television interviews, his underlined copy of Kerry's speech in his hand. "He just stole the 'Help is on the way' line," he said, referring to a slogan Dick Cheney used during the 2000 G.O.P. Convention. "I mean, they just stole it!" Near Gillespie, three dozen staff members tapped away on their computers, truth-squading Kerry's claims amid enlarged photographs of the Massachusetts Senator in a goofy space suit he had been photographed in during a visit to Cape Canaveral in Florida. Some from Bush's inner sanctum did admit that Kerry had given a forceful speech. And high praise went to earlier performances by Kerry's daughters Vanessa and Alexandra. "They are terrific," Hughes emailed Bartlett during their appearances. "The most compelling thing from [the Democrats]." Still, all the President's men saw openings in Kerry's address. For months they had lampooned him as a liberal and waffler. "He painted a big target on himself," Rove said later. "'Judge me by my record,' he said. O.K., we will."

As eager as the Bush team may have been to point out Kerry's faults, they may have to be satisfied doing more of their dissing in private. According to the Bush playbook, the phone call marked the end of an era in the re-election campaign and what they hope is the beginning of a new one. In the spring and earlier this summer, most of the ads and energy of Bush's aides had been devoted to defining Kerry negatively. Those attacks will continue, Bush sources say, but they will take a backseat to a new, more positive message. "You have to pick your moments," says a senior Administration official. "You don't want to give a positive speech and then come out of the gate lashing out."

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The President plans to spend much of the four weeks before his convention, starting Aug. 30, offering a new stump speech, a fresh set of upbeat advertisements and proposals to help people balance work and family, retrain after job loss, prepare for retirement and gain greater control over their financial fortune. The new agenda is aimed squarely at the minority of undecided voters who may determine the election. Swing voters don't look backward, contends Matthew Dowd, Bush's chief strategist. "They want to know what you are going to do with a next term." What's more, the risk for Bush in continuing to assail Kerry is that undecided voters might pay less attention to the substance of the attacks than the simple fact of them and resent the President for dividing a country that may be longing to heal and fight as one.