Coolness Under Fire (but will a sharper message be enough)

[papau]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040920-695823,00.html

Sunday, Sep. 12, 2004
Coolness Under Fire

Kerry insists he will prevail, but will a sharper message be enough? Here's how the race is changing

By MICHAEL DUFFY AND KAREN TUMULTY
Sometimes a politician has to put his head down and just say it ain't so. That's how it went with Senator John Kerry last week. While the rest of the political world obsessed about the dive his campaign has taken in the past month, the growing doubts inside his party about his performance on the stump and a campaign clock that seems to be ticking faster now that Labor Day has come and gone, the Democratic nominee tried to present a picture of unworried resolve when he sat down in his campaign plane for a half-hour interview with TIME last Friday afternoon.

<snip>He voted for the war to strengthen Bush's diplomatic leverage with allies and against the reconstruction money as a vote of no confidence on the handling of the aftermath, and he insists he would have conducted both the diplomacy before the invasion and the cleanup afterward very differently. As he explained it to TIME, "The contrast could not be clearer. They spent a lot of money trying to confuse people, but I have been consistent. I would not have taken the country into war the way he did. I would not have put young Americans in harm's way without a plan to win the peace. I would not have interrupted as abruptly the effort to build alliances with other countries. I would not have turned my back on the international community. And Americans are paying a $200 billion cost today because this President rushed to war."


<snip>Hoping to halt that habit, John Sasso, a hard-nosed party veteran, has taken up residence on Kerry's campaign plane. Sasso's job is to help target Kerry's wandering message and keep him from going wobbly.

<snip>Republicans dismissed those visits as track covering. One claimed that perhaps no more than six or seven states were up for grabs now—a third of the number in early August and a reversal of fortune from just a few weeks ago.