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How Kerry turned the corner
A deliberate thinker
He's no one-note Johnny. If there is one thing friends and aides agree on, it's that John Kerry is complex. And in the world of politics, complexity is both a blessing and a curse.
For instance, with Kerry there is always the issue of verbiage. He talks. And talks. And so on. At times on the stump it seems you need a machete to whack away the supporting clauses and figure out what he really means.
But he does mean something, and that's the difference between him and soundbite-happy pols, say his friends. As a schoolboy debater he honed notes for hours while other students relaxed. As a senator he'll pick up an issue and examine it from all sides, colleagues say, like an object of art, talking out different positions before he settles his own.
Among his aides, Kerry is famous for asking questions and playing devil's advocate even as they stride towards the Senate floor for a vote. Proponents say it's these qualities that - seen up close by Iowa and New Hampshire voters - finally conveyed Kerry's substance and deliberate way of thinking.
"It's not a bunch of convenient political slogans, but the result of a working through," says Winer. "And that was okay with them, even though it's not very TV friendly or entertaining,"
Then there's the stiffness. Kerry can seem to lack a human touch; he's the kind of person who, if he tried to slap a back, might almost miss - so unskilled can he seem at political bonhomie.
On Super Bowl Sunday he watched the victory of his New England Patriots from a sports bar in North Dakota, but reporters there said he actually watched the game, and made little attempt to connect with other patrons.
Still, along with stiffness comes an evident feeling for others - a quality to which the men he commanded in Vietnam so movingly attest. Veterans are becoming an important constituency for Kerry, and the aging men in American Legion hats who crowd the stage at his rallies seem a support group for Kerry as much as a visual for TV viewers.
Aides say that the vets loosen Kerry up. They make him seem more human - in the way that candidates' wives and children often do, too. The increasing prominence of veterans at Kerry's side in New Hampshire "had resonance," says John Marttila, a campaign senior strategist and longtime Kerry friend.
The vet presence "really helped support him emotionally," says Mr. Marttila, who adds that veterans "will have very significant electoral implications."
The campaign will probably do all it can to remind voters of the role Vietnam service played in shaping Kerry as a youth.
Already ads featuring archival footage of the young officer have proved among the most effective of the primary season. The point may be not just to bolster Kerry's national-security credentials, but to portray him as a warrior. It's a side of him that friends say they see all the time - the alpha male, back-against-the-wall, drive-for-the-winning-touchdown kind of thing.
Of course, this aspect of Kerry's personality may be accompanied by a procrastination-in-the-middle-until-it's-almost-too-late kind of thing. But the bottom line is this: Remember Michael Dukakis, the former Massachusetts governor who cruised through most of his campaign without answering Republican attacks? John Kerry knows Michael Dukakis - was his lieutenant governor, in fact. Michael Dukakis was a friend of his. And Kerry is no Michael Dukakis.
"The people who thought John Kerry couldn't cut it and Dean would be the nominee only looked at the side of him that thought too much and talked too much, not the man of action," says Winer.
Kerry can be tough, even cold when he thinks it counts. During the late 1980s, his senatorial investigation of money laundering and other shady deals at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) threatened to implicate Washington lawyer and legendary wiseman Clark Clifford.
"Jackie Kennedy called up John Kerry, and said, 'Why are you doing this to my friend Clark Clifford?' " remembers Winer.
When the elderly Mr. Clifford appeared before Kerry's panel to testify, the senator treated him gently. But the investigation continued, eventually producing evidence that Clifford had been, at best, surprisingly ignorant of crookedness at a bank he was associated with. BCCI became a blot at the end of Clifford's stellar career.
A surge and a second look
On Jan. 12, the Monday before the Iowa caucuses, Paul Pezzella attended a press conference on the steps of the Iowa capitol building in Des Moines. Gov. Tom Vilsack's wife, Christie Vilsack, was endorsing John Kerry.
It was a clear and sunny day, and a turning point, thought Mr. Pezzella, a senior campaign volunteer. After all, Mrs. Vilsack was at least as popular as her husband. She was so popular that the campaign quickly used her voice in an automated phone message to potential caucus attendees. She taped a television commercial. Kerry's "numbers jumped up, because people really liked her a lot," says Pezzella.
Meanwhile Kerry's message had become far more refined. He sounded more populist, and more comfortable. Out in the field, Kerry's town-hall meetings were beginning to run late. "The senator wouldn't leave until he answered every single question," says Pezzella.
The surge had begun. As presumed frontrunners Howard Dean and Rep. Richard Gephardt slugged at each other with negative ads, Kerry cut their lead by the day. Five days before the caucuses, internal polls showed him pulling ahead.
As in 1996, when he won a tough Senate race against GOP Gov. William Weld, Kerry had kept slogging when things looked bleak. Iowa was only a primary.
But the slingshot effect of his Iowa victory was perfectly timed, sending Kerry to the top of New Hampshire polls and gaining him the most-sought desire of all once-trailing candidates: a second look from voters nationwide.
The nomination is not Kerry's yet, but it is his to lose. It would take a political earthquake to catapult any other contender ahead of him. That's possible, of course - look what happened to Kerry in Iowa and New Hampshire. But the odds are long, and lengthening by the day.
Kerry must now almost taste the nomination, the last goal he must achieve before making the final charge at what he's wanted all his political life: the Oval Office.
Few who know him doubt that he'll make that charge.
"He's a very tenacious and persistent guy who will keep pushing his head against a stone wall ... until the stone wall moves," says Ron Rosenblith, a close political adviser and fundraiser for most of Kerry's 18 years in the Senate.
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