Kerry speech tonight aims to bring him into focus

By Dan Balz and Jim VandeHei
The Washington Post

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The challenge is clear. Still an amorphous figure to most Americans, Kerry must show he is strong enough to fight terrorism and appealing enough to win undecided voters.

And as a candidate known for meandering and arcane orations, he must speak with the clarity Bill Clinton showed Monday and the conviction Barack Obama displayed Tuesday, Democrats say.

"His task is really to clarify and simplify and boil down his vision," said Harold Ickes, former White House deputy chief of staff in the Clinton administration.

"He hasn't come close enough yet. ... But these are works in progress. I'm absolutely confident Kerry will develop a sharper focus."

After 18 months of campaigning, polls show that Kerry remains an enigma to many voters — a candidate who has run through a series of campaign slogans and grappled with the right mix of ideas to capture how he would lead as president. Last week alone, Kerry has focused alternatively on values, national security, optimism, technology and science, but there was rarely a unifying theme.

Kerry, who professes a love of poetry, history and the written word, penned the speech longhand, with input from a few speechwriters, family members and letters his father wrote to his mother long ago, aides said. He spent at least 30 minutes a day for the past month, including a recent weekend in Nantucket, refining it.

Early on, Kerry sought input from several speechwriters, many outside his campaign. But a top aide said Kerry was persuaded to work from fewer than a half-dozen drafts written, for the most part, by Robert Shrum, a longtime adviser and one of the party's best-known wordsmiths, and Terry Edmonds, a former Clinton speechwriter.

Kerry seemed focused on sharing more of himself in this speech, the aide said. He talked with brother Cameron about childhood memories, and read from journals he has kept over the years. Kerry would read parts of the speech to staff, but most of his practice time was before his wife or daughters.

Some veterans of the 1992 campaign said Kerry's challenge is far easier than what Clinton faced in his acceptance speech. "We forget this now, but he went into the convention with most people only knowing about Gennifer Flowers or draft dodging, and most people before the convention assumed he was a rich kid whose daddy bought him out of the draft," Democratic strategist Mandy Grunwald said.

"We had to undo things," she added. "With Kerry, he needs to deepen impressions and give people a fuller sense of who he is."
 
Grunwald likened Kerry's challenge to that faced by Ronald Reagan in 1980, which was to reassure voters ready to change presidents that they could entrust the White House to him.

"This country wants change, but they're not sure about John Kerry," she said. But, one Democrat noted, unlike Reagan, it is not clear Kerry has a black-and-white set of beliefs he can communicate to voters even if they are willing to give him a serious look.

Andrei Cherney, former director of speechwriting for the Kerry campaign, agreed Kerry is in a position familiar to many challengers. "People know a little about him — some details of his biography," he said. "This is the time where he is going to have to both tell his story, tell the country his vision and connect the two."

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found a significant number of Americans who said they want to know much more about Kerry's positions on major issues, but strategists who have worked in previous campaigns say the goal of an acceptance speech should not be the enumeration of five-point plans on health care or the economy. Instead, they said, what is crucial is for the nominee to connect with and leave an impression on the television audience.

"What matters is that they're comfortable," Grunwald said. "They want to get a gut sense of who he is and whether he can do the job and whether he can do it in a way that benefits them."

The tightly controlled themes of this convention reflect two of Kerry's main goals with the speech: appear strong on national security and optimistic in tone. A Kerry adviser said that while Kerry plans to talk about his agenda for national security, the economy, health care, energy independence and other issues, he does not plan to dwell on the details.

The goal, this adviser said, is to convey a persona that voters can identify with. "It could be character, it could be personality, it could be leadership, it could be humor," the adviser said. "It's putting texture to the person."

Where some Kerry advisers part company with outside strategists is in their belief that the Massachusetts senator already has passed a crucial threshold in the campaign. Voters, they said, see him as capable of being commander in chief. "The American people know he can lead the country," the adviser said.

Democrats outside the campaign are far less sure, saying that with so many Americans still not certain they know enough about Kerry, demonstrating his fitness to be commander in chief is still the most important test he must pass.

Given all of the attention to national security in this campaign, and the effort to surround Kerry with former crewmates from Vietnam and retired military brass, campaign officials at least implicitly agree.