CLEVELAND—Everything you need to know about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run—and therefore, everything a Democrat needs to know about taking the White House from an incumbent—is supposed to have been scrawled on a wipeboard in Little Rock 12 years ago by James Carville. “It’s the economy, stupid,” the phrase that has become holy writ, was only one-third of Carville’s message. The other two tenets of the Clinton war room were “Change vs. more of the same” and “Don’t forget health care.” John Kerry has been running on two of those three planks, the economy and health care. But one day after talking with President Clinton on his deathbed—Kerry’s, not Clinton’s—the candidate has finally embraced the third: change.
Kerry offered a taste of his new message Monday morning at one of his “front porch” campaign stops in Canonsburg, Penn., but he waited until the afternoon in Racine, W.V., to unveil his new stump speech in full. The new message: Go vote for Bush if you want four more years of falling wages, of Social Security surpluses being transferred to wealthy Americans in the form of tax cuts, of underfunded schools and lost jobs. But if you want a new direction, he said, vote for Kerry and Edwards.
It’s a simple and obvious message, but Kerry hasn’t used it before. There were other new, even more Clintonesque wrinkles, too. Kerry talked about the same issues—jobs, health care, Social Security, education—that he’s talked about in the past, but he had a new context for them: how Bush’s policies were taking money out of taxpayers’ pockets. The deficit, the Medicare prescription drug plan that forbids bulk-price negotiation and the importation of drugs from Canada, and the “$200 billion and counting” Iraq war all “cost you money,” Kerry said, by increasing the cost of government. Kerry even pushed his health-care plan as a selfish device to put more money in voters’ wallets (rather than an altruistic plan to cover the uninsured), in the form of lower health-insurance premiums ($1,000, he says). He also talked about a Clinton favorite, putting 100,000 new cops on the street during the 1990s, and he said he wanted to cut taxes for corporations by 5 percent to lower the cost of doing business in the United States. Talking about corporate tax cuts on Labor Day—if that’s not a New Democrat, I don’t know what is.
In West Virginia and later Cleveland, Kerry framed most of the new message around a mantra: “W stands for wrong. Wrong choices, wrong judgment, wrong priorities, wrong direction for our country.” If you like those wrong choices, the lost jobs, “raiding Social Security,” rising health-care costs, and “a go-it-alone foreign policy that abandons America,” then vote for George W. Bush, Kerry said. If not, vote for me. The cost of the Iraq war is coming out of your pocket, he said, and it’s taking away from money that could be used for homeland security. “That’s W.; that’s wrong,” he said. With each issue Kerry raised—from Iraq to rising Medicare premiums to Social Security to jobs—he concluded his criticism of the president’s policy by repeating, “That’s W.; that’s wrong.”
It’s not a perfect speech, nor is it delivered all that well. Kerry will never win an oratory contest with Bush, and he is fond of bizarre extemporizing. For example, he said, after being given a shotgun by a union leader to emphasize his support for hunting, “I’m thankful for the gift, but I can’t take it to the debate with me.” Still, even with Kerry’s shaggy delivery, the speech—and more important, the message, if he sticks with it—should be good enough to get his campaign out of its latest sinkhole.
Sometimes, Kerry even improvises well. During the event in Canonsburg, Kerry was heckled by a small but noisy group of Bush supporters. But he managed to pull something out of Clinton’s bag of tricks. When Kerry began talking about how the average family’s tax burden has risen during the past four years, a man shouted, “Yeah, you’re average, Kerry!” In response, Kerry adopted the tactic that Clinton used at the Democratic Convention in Boston: He embraced his affluence. “Just to answer that guy, ‘cause he’s right,” Kerry said. “I’m privileged,” just like President Bush. As a result, “My tax burden went down,” Kerry said. “And I don’t think that’s right. I think your tax burden ought to go down.”
Before today, Kerry’s public image was starting to resemble that of a different Democratic candidate of recent vintage: the Republican caricature of Al Gore, a self-promoting braggart with a weakness for resume-inflating exaggerations. When Kerry was so angered by a Washington Post headline last week that he decided to speak directly after Bush’s acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, he appeared to be imitating Gore’s unfortunate tendency to let his campaign strategy be driven by the whims of the political media. Some Democrats feared that, by shaking up his campaign over the weekend and bringing in John Sasso and Michael Whouley, Kerry was overreacting in Gore-like fashion to some bad August press. On Monday, anyway, those fears seem overstated. The revamped Kerry campaign looks more like the Democrat who beat a president named Bush than the Democrat who lost to one.
