2004 Election: Inside The War Rooms

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KERRY

Operation Gutsball

Everyone looked perfectly serene in the private cabin of the Boeing 757 ferrying the Democratic nominee and his newly named running mate to their first campaign rally together on July 7. The Veep hunt had proceeded just the way Kerry wanted it: smoothly, surefootedly and secretly, right up to the moment when John Edwards' selection was announced. A beaming Kerry was popping in and out of the cabin. Edwards was catching a nap, his ever present Diet Coke on the tray of the armrest next to him; his wife Elizabeth was reading. But across the aisle, campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill was explaining her biggest worry to TIME. "August." Cahill said simply. "We haven't figured out how we get through August."

Five treacherous weeks stretched out ahead, weeks that many in the Kerry camp believed could sink the candidate before the fall campaign got under way. Vertigo was a sensation those around Kerry had come to regard as normal. More than once he had been written off for dead in this race. He had marched through the primaries, but only after a year of bad starts, restarts, setbacks, comebacks. Kerry had fired one campaign manager and mortgaged a house to raise money. And he had yet to convince voters that he really stood for anything.

The new danger ahead in August sprang from the combined vagaries of the calendar and the campaign-finance laws. Once Kerry accepted his party's nomination at the Democratic Convention on July 29, he would be bound by a strict spending limit of $75 million in public money--a straitjacket that President George W. Bush would not have to put on until his own convention finished Sept. 2. By early June, some of Kerry's media advisers wanted to change the game.

Inside Kerryland, it was called Operation Gutsball, chiefly because it would take a gritty determination to pull it off. Gutsball was a secret plan to supercharge the way Kerry would fight and finance his fall campaign. He would pass on the public dough altogether, not exactly a precedent that the avowed campaign-finance reformer would want to be the one to set. But the idea was tempting.

And terrifying. A top Kerry fund raiser condensed the pros and cons of Gutsball in a memo and sent it round to the inner circle. Gutsball meant Kerry would try to raise $150 million in the final three months of the race. It meant diverting Kerry and Edwards at least 40 times to blue-state cities like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, where money was plentiful but swing votes were not. And playing Gutsball ensured that Bush would opt out of funding too. On the other hand, the memo noted, if Kerry didn't opt out, Bush still might. And if he did, no one doubted Bush could raise $100 million without breaking a sweat.