Anyone Know This Guy?

Dem

ocrats once thought a bleaker outlook in Iraq would help their nominee convince Americans that the time has come to find another Commander in Chief and that new revelations about how the Administration missed advance signs of 9/11 were just the thing to put a dent in George Bush's political armor. Both possibilities have come to pass, but the latest polls suggest they may make John Kerry's challenge harder, not easier. As one Democratic strategist says, "No matter how bad Bush does on the war and 9/11, just having voters think about it kills us." Another puts it more bluntly: "If this election is about terrorism, Bush wins."

Kerry strategists acknowledge they have little hope of overcoming Bush's advantage on questions of strength and security. But they also argue they don't have to; all they must do is make voters comfortable enough with Kerry on those issues. Says one top adviser: "These are threshold questions for people, as distinct from comparative questions."

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The bar is high, though, and getting higher. The most obvious way for Kerry to clear it is by exploiting his record as a Vietnam War hero — something that Kerry often talks about on the stump but that Democratic polling suggests is still largely unknown to voters. Curiously, though, Kerry isn't leading with that punch in his ads. Many Democratic allies were dismayed when they got a look at the two 30-sec. spots that marked the $4.5 million launch last week of Kerry's national advertising campaign. Instead of a reprise of the well-received biographical ads that helped bring Kerry's candidacy back from the dead in Iowa (the campaign promises those spots are coming soon), the commercials feature Kerry talking to the camera. In the first one — met nearly universally with groans by strategists outside the campaign and even some within — the Massachusetts Senator says his priorities will be the predictable Democratic fare of health care and jobs, plus a "stronger America." In the other, he attacks Bush's Iraq record and promises to "reach out to the international community" to share the burden there — a position that most voters will find to be indistinguishable from Bush's of late. Those are not the kinds of spots that will help cement the support of voters like Krystal Brown, an 18-year-old nursing student at the University of Arkansas. "I am against Bush," says Brown. "I am going to vote for — what is his name?"

Meanwhile, the Bush campaign has done a lot of work filling in the picture of Kerry for voters. Democrats are discovering that when they ask voters in focus groups about their candidate, the answers frequently come back as nearly verbatim lines from the Republicans' anti-Kerry ads. To the degree voters have an impression of Kerry at all, Democratic strategists say, it is the Bush campaign's caricature of a calculating politician who flip-flops on issues and yearns to raise their taxes.

Nor does it help that the Kerry camp seems to have lost some of the surefootedness with which it put away the competition in the Democratic primaries. Rather than jump at a chance to showcase his official military records, his team spent three days last week explaining why he hadn't made them all public, only to reverse itself and produce what turned out to be 145 pages of glowing accounts of his service. On the other hand, Kerry's team also took the unprecedented step of releasing a list of his meetings with lobbyists — and then challenging Bush to do the same.

"A lot of people don't really know who I am," Kerry acknowledged recently. At a time when voters are especially anxious, and leery of taking a gamble, Kerry had better tell them soon.