2004 Election: Inside The War Rooms

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But Kerry was smart enough to know something else. "You're the only Democrat who's been elected twice since F.D.R.," he told the ex-President. No one had been so tested as Clinton's team when it came to digging themselves out of a crater, and Kerry had already recruited some of the most combat-hardened of them out of retirement--former White House press secretaries Joe Lockhart and Mike McCurry, ex-Clinton aides Joel Johnson and Doug Sosnik, and Hillary's old chief of staff Howard Wolfson. Almost from the moment they arrived, Kerry's operation showed a new edge and agility. Less than an hour after the last chant of "flip-flop" echoed across Madison Square Garden, Lockhart engineered a midnight rally in Springfield, Ohio, where Kerry told a crowd of 15,000, "I will not have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and who misled America into Iraq."

The rally barely made a dent in the news cycle--or in the bounce that Bush got in the polls after his convention. But it sent a shock through Kerry's dispirited troops. "They had gotten to the point where they had lost their ability to be aggressive," an adviser recalls. "But all that had changed, and the campaign finally was getting the message: You don't have to roll over. It was more a message to our own people that if they hit us, we'll stay up all night to hit them back."

There were other changes as well. Respected longtime adviser John Sasso moved from the Democratic National Committee to the campaign plane, where he cut through the clutter that had so often surrounded decisions that had to be made on the spot and offered the mature sounding board that Kerry had been missing. Kerry's traveling staff took to calling Sasso "the Wolf," after Harvey Keitel's fixer character in Pulp Fiction. The old hands like Cahill, Cutter and Shrum remained in place, leaving everyone to wonder how well the campaign would function with two camps vying to guide it through the final, most difficult phase of the race. But one thing was clear: it would be different from here on.

KERRY

The Midnight Conversion

When Lockhart reported for duty at Kerry headquarters, the first thing he did was pick a fight--the one the campaign had been avoiding for months. Kerry's shifting answers on Iraq had become more than a damage-control problem. When the candidate had fallen into Bush's August trap, the truth he had been trying to outrun since he slipped past Howard Dean in the primaries finally caught up with him: his position on Iraq was incomprehensible to anybody who wasn't a regular lunch guest at the Council on Foreign Relations, and it was getting more so every time Kerry tried to explain it.

Advisers like Shrum believed that Kerry's best course would be to turn to domestic issues, which polls suggested would ultimately decide the race. Kerry tried that approach for a bit, maintaining that the war's $200 billion cost would be better spent at home, but the commentariat found that laughable: Was Kerry, who had supported the war, now saying he wasn't willing to spend what it would take to win it? So Lockhart kept hammering: no one was going to listen to Kerry on anything else until he found his voice on Iraq.