A Reminder To People Who Doubt Kerry's Itch For A Real Campaign Dogfight

DrFunkenstein

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Wed Aug-27-03 09:56 PM
Original message

A Reminder To People Who Doubt Kerry's Itch For A Real Campaign Dogfight

This is from Joe Klein's New Yorker profile on Kerry. Joe Klein did a similar piece for Clinton in '92 that made him a legitimate contender. He is also the anonymous author of Primary Colors.

The 1996 Senate campaign between John Kerry and William Weld was the rarest of events in latter-day American politics: a civil, closely contested, intelligent, and wildly entertaining brawl. "Both candidates were incredibly popular," the Kerry consultant John Marttila said. "Both had sixty-per-cent favorable ratings, and negatives in the twenties. And they maintained their popularity throughout the race."

Both were Brahmins, but Weld, with a shock of strawberry hair and irony to burn, seemed an honorary Hibernian-once again, Kerry was faced with an opponent bound to be favored by the reportorial romantics at the Boston Globe. "We were both comers," recalls Weld, who had just been reelected governor, with seventy-one per cent of the vote. "We were both at the height of our powers. If I'd won that race, I was going to turn straight around and run for President in 2000. I think he was, too-although I guess he eventually decided that Gore had too big a head start."

The campaign began with a remarkable agreement to limit campaign spending, negotiated face to face by the two candidates in Kerry's Beacon Hill mansion. They also agreed to a series of eight debates, some of which would be Lincoln-Douglas style, with the two candidates questioning each other directly, without a mediator. Weld figured that his issues-crime, welfare reform, and tax cutting-and his charm would see him through, but mostly his charm. "John isn't really a cold person, but he does seem aloof," Weld said recently. "The truth is that he's courtly to the point of gentility. We were pummelling him through August, but his campaign turned on a dime when Bob Shrum was hired as his consultant. It went from flaccid to sharp in a week."

Kerry's aides insist that it was more than Shrum. They say that Kerry was distracted in Washington, that he didn't really focus on the campaign until the Senate recessed. "It wasn't a lack of focus," Kerry says. "It was a strategy. I figured people wouldn't really be paying attention until the fall debates."

The last four debates were fabulous political theatre-two very smart men having at each other. "John's at his best under pressure, when he's being seriously challenged," Paul Nace, an old Navy friend, says. "He gets really cool, very calm. He really is a warrior-he just loves it. I took one look at him as he was walking into Faneuil Hall for one of the last debates and I thought, Bill Weld has no idea what's about to hit him."

Weld-who calls the debates a "bloody draw"-says that Kerry successfully attached him to the national Republican Party. (Weld had said some embarrassingly positive things about Newt Gingrich two years earlier.) "The turning point came when he asked me if I'd vote to keep Jesse Helms as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That was a killer."

I asked Weld how he responded. "I ducked it, of course," he said, with a smile. "I mean, I hated Jesse Helms. But what could I do?"

Kerry won the election by eight percentage points. "John has always been underestimated politically," Marttila says. "But that race had the quality and intensity of a Presidential campaign, and he won. I don't see how they can underestimate him anymore, but they probably will."

----

A follow up on Weld-Kerry from the Windsurfer interview:

During his celebrated acceptance speech and shortly after the bitter battle that saw Weld's team attack very personally, John Kerry rose above the storm and invited Bill Weld to join him at a local pub so that they could put the past behind them by having a beer of civility.

Six months later, Weld made a bid for the ambassadorship to Mexico-a move that unfortunately brought his political career to a screeching halt. Firmly planted in his way was an intransigent and powerful Jesse Helms, who refused to open the door for a simple hearing. Seeing the injustice, Kerry could have easily stayed in the background. Instead he stood up against the potent Helms and wholeheartedly came to the aid of Weld- his 12 million dollar foe.