John Kerry is right where he wants to be, Democrats ruefully joke: behind in the polls and remaking his campaign team.

The Massachusetts senator, suddenly trailing President Bush in a presidential race that had been deadlocked for months, was in this position last winter, when he appeared doomed to lose the Democratic nomination to a red-hot Howard Dean. The Democratic nominee also scored an improbable comeback in his 1996 Senate reelection race against a popular former governor of Massachusetts, William Weld.

Now, at the traditional Labor Day start of the presidential campaign homestretch, Kerry must once again fight back from a deficit. And even though running for president is many degrees more difficult than competing for the Democratic nomination or running for the US Senate in Massachusetts, no one is counting him out. Even Republicans acknowledge Bush's lead - 11 points in Time and Newsweek polls taken during the GOP convention last week - will settle down.

Analysts also note that the eight weeks between now and election day represent many political lifetimes in a presidential race and that there will surely be more twists and turns in the story line. What's clear, though, is that the debates now gain in significance for Kerry, as the only head-to-head opportunity to take on Bush before election day.

Before that first matchup - Sept. 30, if Bush agrees to the first date designated by the presidential debate commission - Kerry needs to pound hard on domestic themes, especially the economy, and go after Bush's record, analysts say. Kerry and his team "don't have to rip up their theme and start over," says John Kenneth White, a political scientist at Catholic University in Washington. "But they do have to say what John Kennedy did in 1960: It's time to get the country moving again."

Nonpartisan analysts tend to think Kerry erred at his convention by focusing too much on his military biography and on making America stronger abroad, and not enough on the "stronger at home" areas where the Democrats have had an advantage - jobs, wages, healthcare, and education. The Bush team, in contrast, put together a convention that had something for everybody: the happy warrior, Rudolph Giuliani, the sunny "Why I'm a Republican" story of Arnold Schwarzenegger, red-meat attacks from a thundering Sen. Zell Miller (D) of Georgia, and a low-key Vice President Cheney.

Bush himself won largely positive reviews for a speech that mixed flashes of intensity when the subject was terrorism with self-deprecating humor when the subject was himself, and a State-of-the-Unionesque recitation of domestic proposals and goals that already had been largely unveiled.

Page: 1 | 2