Critical Condition

For the most part, the Iowans had not traveled far. Most were from Des Moines, and the hospital is only half a mile from the city center. To get there from the east, you follow Grand Avenue until you reach 10th Street, take a right, and then, two blocks later, take a left on Woodland Avenue. It is a brisk walk, and on a late summer morning there is little traffic, the sidewalks are empty, and the cloudless sky stretches for miles.

For Kerry, however, the road to the Iowa Methodist Medical Center was long and harsh. Just look at the numbers. Last week was filled with polls that showed Kerry behind President Bush. On September 9, the morning Kerry visited Des Moines, Bush was ahead in the USA Today/CNN poll, ahead in the CBS News poll, and ahead in the ABC News/Washington Post poll. Early last week, shortly after the Republican National Convention, Newsweek and Time both released polls of their own, and both showed major post-convention bounces for the president. Polls change, of course, and yet, as the presidential race headed into its final stages, a trend had been established. The pollster John Zogby best captured the mood. “Mr. Kerry,” he wrote, “is on the ropes.”

For Kerry, August was littered with missteps, and mangled words, and strategic shuffles. Looking back even further, there was Kerry’s nominating convention, held at the end of July. At the time, the convention was thought a success. However, in retrospect, things look different. The convention focused so intensely on the senator’s Vietnam record that it left the candidate vulnerable when the independent Swift Boat Veterans for Truth stepped forward to criticize Kerry’s war record and antiwar activities in television ads. And things got worse. On August 9, a few days after the Swift vet ads began to air, Kerry stumbled when he told reporters, “Yes,” he “would have voted for the authority” that allowed President Bush to invade Iraq, even knowing what he knows now about Saddam Hussein’s apparent lack of weapons of mass destruction. “I believe it’s the right authority for a president to have,” Kerry said. In the course of a few brief sentences, as he stood in front of the vast, empty Grand Canyon, Kerry had undermined the foreign policy rationale of his campaign.

By the end of August, things were not any better. On September 2, the night Bush gave his acceptance speech in New York, Kerry flew from his vacation home in Nantucket to Springfield, Ohio, for a midnight rally. It was a last-minute addition to his schedule, and it was a disaster. “The vice president even called me unfit for office last night,” Kerry said. (Cheney had said no such thing.) “Well, I’m going to leave it up to the voters to decide whether five deferments makes someone more qualified than two tours of duty.” Every now and then, Kerry was interrupted by his own supporters, who screamed, “Take the gloves off!” And every now and then, Kerry smiled wanly. “I will not have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have, and who misled America in Iraq,” he said. It was a rambling talk.Attacked and attacked at the Republican National Convention for his voting record in the Senate, Kerry’s only response was to point out that he served in Vietnam.

MEANWHILE, there was a slow-motion staff shakeup in the Kerry campaign. To understand the Kerry campaign, it helps to think of it as a dry lakebed in which sediment piles up over time. The first layer of sediment is composed of staffers who worked with former campaign manager Jim Jordan. Call this the Jordan Era. It lasted from the Kerry campaign’s beginning in 2002 to November 2003. That is when Jordan was fired. Slowly, over the next six months, Jordan loyalists were phased out. Soon after Jordan left, for example, Robert Gibbs, a spokesman, left too. In May, the speechwriter Andrei Cherny left. The only senior adviser from the Jordan era who remains with the campaign is pollster Mark Mellman.

The next layer of sediment is marked by the ascendance of Kerry’s second campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill. Call this the Cahill Era. It lasted from November 2003 to August 2004. In this era, Cahill, who was once Edward Kennedy’s chief of staff, brought on people close to both her and Kennedy. Stephanie Cutter is an example. A Cahill protégée, she once flacked for the senior senator from Massachusetts and now flacks for Kerry. In the Cahill era, the influence of political consultant Bob Shrum, a longtime Kennedy confidant, was at its highest. Cahill, Cutter, and Shrum all remain with the campaign, but all three received much of the blame for August’s Swift boat debacle, and since then they have stayed out of the limelight. When senior Kerry advisers flew to New York during the Republican National Convention for a breakfast with reporters, Cutter did not say a word.

The third layer is the most recent. It is only a few weeks old. It is composed of old Clinton hands. You can call it the Clinton Era. Or you can call it the Lockhart Era. Joe Lockhart is a former Clinton press secretary, but these days he dominates the Kerry message machine. Another former Clinton communications adviser, Joel Johnson, is now in charge of Kerry’s rapid response team. Doug Sosnick, a policy adviser in the Clinton White House, is now at the DNC. Another Clinton ally who joined Kerry’s campaign recently is pollster Stanley Greenberg. Another is Howard Wolfson, who was formerly a senior aide to Hillary Clinton. The onset of the Clinton era came Saturday, September 4, when the former president spoke to Kerry from his sickbed. The conversation lasted about 90 minutes, it was forthright, and it was, for the most part, unidirectional. Clinton did most of the talking. According to the New York Times, he told Kerry to “move away from talking about Vietnam” and focus instead “on drawing contrasts with President Bush on job creation and health care policies.”

But Clinton’s intervention solved nothing. Kerry is still prone to mistakes. On September 6, he said Iraq was “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” On September 7, he mourned the thousandth casualty in Iraq by saying, “More than 1,000 of America’s sons and daughters have now given their lives on behalf of their country, on behalf of freedom, in the war on terror.” Again and again, however, Kerry has said President Bush neglected the “real war on terror” in “Afghanistan and Northwest Pakistan” by invading Iraq. So is Iraq part of the war on terror, or isn’t it? Kerry won’t say.

There have been other mistakes. Last Wednesday, in Cincinnati, Kerry gave an address on Iraq without ever really talking about Iraq. Instead he talked a lot about the cost of the war, a lot about health care, and a lot about outsourcing. The speech had lost its moorings by the second page. So had the candidate. Later that day, in Greensboro, North Carolina, Kerry said he supported the creation of something called the Department of “Wellness & Prevention.” And on September 6, Kerry told his audience in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, this story:

AND YET, judging from the audience at the Iowa Methodist Medical Center, you would think the Kerry campaign was doing just fine. The audience smiled and clapped and laughed and hugged Kerry last Thursday. A few called him “President Kerry.” One woman thanked him for coming to Iowa and said, “You tend to have a habit of rescuing people and things,” and hoped he would rescue America next. Another said she “couldn’t wait” until Kerry was president.

The audience was reserved. They were mostly white, they were mostly seniors, and they looked mostly sleepy. It was a stark contrast. In July, when I saw Kerry and John Edwards greet a crowd on a tarmac in Ft. Lauderdale, the supporters gathered there seemed crazed, their brains cooked by too much sun. Iowans are more relaxed. They have done this before. They are political pros. And so, as they waited for Kerry to arrive, they read newspapers, fiddled with cell phones, drank coffee, and adjusted their camcorders.

During the lull, I fell into conversation with a woman named Anita Campbell. Anita is from Saylor Township. Her husband, Dave Campbell, is the Democratic candidate for the Iowa House of Representatives in District 69. District 69 comprises much of Polk County. “Everything north of I-80,” Anita said. Anita is a nurse. In January, the caucus she attended went for Kerry, but she had been a Gephardt supporter. “Gephardt is a super, super guy, such a nice, big family,” she said. She has experience dealing with reporters. “At my caucus, there was a woman from a magazine in Washington,” she told me, “and she interviewed me, and she took my name, but I’ve forgotten hers!” She paused. “Look at that lady’s heels,” she said. Her voice was barely audible. She was watching a tall blonde woman shake hands with audience members. “O my lord, they must be three inches tall. She must be a hospital administrator.”

Anita and Dave were at the Des Moines airport Wednesday evening. They were there to greet Kerry, who flew into town from Minnesota, where he had been campaigning. Dave is a veteran, and so he was allowed on the tarmac to greet Kerry personally. Anita, who is not a veteran, had to remain far away. “There I was, holding a sign, but I couldn’t go out there,” she said. “I just waved and waved. But there was a nice lady Democrat from Polk County who couldn’t go out either and said she’d help with Dave’s campaign, so that was good.”

Anita is short, has brown hair, and wears glasses. Dave is short, balding, and also wears glasses. Both are thickly proportioned. At Christmas, Dave plays Santa Claus at a local mall. They enjoy politics, and they enjoy parades. “We have a parade on Saturday,” Anita said. “September11. When Dave ran two years ago, we were in five parades. So far this is the only one this time.”

The room was crowded. People waited silently. Anita yawned.

“Just a bunch of sitting around and waiting, isn’t it?” she said. She was always smiling. “But you have a nice book to read. The Bottom of the Harbor. That sounds exciting. What’s at the bottom?”

Dirt and fish, I said.

Anita laughed. “I think Kerry’s wonderful,” she continued. “He makes sense. Teresa? Well, she’s a little bit . . . out there, isn’t she? But at least she’s no milquetoast like Laura. Laura Bush. Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “I love Laura. She’s pretty, she’s poised, she’s well-spoken. But does she have a mind of her own?”

THERE WAS NO TIME to answer Anita’s question, because Kerry entered the room, and the crowd rose and clapped, and U2’s “Beautiful Day” played in the background. Kerry stood in the center of the crowd. He seemed tired; his voice was hoarse, he wandered around, and at one point he almost tripped over the microphone cord. “It’s great to be back,” he said. “This is my second home. I am a regular here, and I love it, and I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if it weren’t for the common sense and love and affection of Iowa. You ask me a question and I’ll tell you exactly where I stand on everything–except the Hawkeye-Cyclone game.”

The crowd chuckled, then clapped some more, then fell silent.

“This is the most important election of our lifetimes,” Kerry continued. “This is not politics, this is your lives. These are real choices, every single one of them. They”–he was talking about the Bush administration–“made a different choice.”

Kerry has a new riff he uses on the stump. It is based on the president’s middle initial. “W stands for wrong,” he said. “Wrong choice, wrong leadership, wrong for America.” He began to list the ways in which the president is W. Like outsourcing. “That’s W.” Or Social Security privatization. “That’s W.” Or Medicare premiums. “That’s W.”

Anita leaned over in my direction and whispered, “Did you get all those wrongs?”

“Health care just has this unlimited ability to keep going up every year,” Kerry went on, “and people can’t keep up with it. President Bush for four years has had an opportunity to try to deal with this, and he has no plan at all. In fact, he’s been busy losing people’s coverage.”

Sometimes Kerry tried to link his domestic message to his foreign policy one. “Just look at the most catastrophic decision of all that this man has made, and that is the way he decided to go to war in Iraq,” he said. “And now we’re spending $200 billion that we’re not spending on health care, that we’re not spending to help seniors cushion the cost of Medicare, that we’re not spending to be able to invest in new jobs.”

Anita took a photo.

Kerry droned on. “I’m tired of politicians who talk about family values but then they don’t go out and value families,” he said. Someone said, “That’s right.” The audience burst into applause.

Then Kerry took questions from the audience. These were softballs, mostly, like, “Do you have a plan for childcare?” and “Will you come back to Iowa?” Surprise! Kerry does, and he will.

Soon the question and answer period was over, however, and a member of Kerry’s staff who stood at the side of the room signaled it was time to leave. Kerry needed to fly to New Orleans, where he would address the National Baptist Convention Thursday evening. Before he left, Kerry told the audience to look at his and John Edwards’s plan for America. The plan is in a book titled Our Plan for America. You can get the book outside, Kerry said, and get several. Pass them around. “Please talk to your friends,” he said. There was a hint of desperation in his voice. “Strip away the labels.” Then he thanked the crowd, and his exit music began. An hour had passed by unnoticed.

“It was awesome,” Anita said. She took another photo of Kerry.

I said it seemed as if he were tired.

“I’d be surprised if he didn’t sound tired,” Anita said. “All that running around. Wouldn’t you be tired?”

He didn’t talk about Iraq much at all, I said.

Dave joined the conversation. “I don’t see any Iraq posters up, do you?” he asked. He pointed to the walls. “No, they say health care. That’s what this was about. We’re in a hospital.” Then he stepped back and watched Kerry hug a woman in a wheelchair, and pose for some cameras, and sign some autographs.

“What I was impressed with the most,” Dave went on, “was when he was out on that tarmac yesterday. He didn’t just scribble his name, every time someone came up to him. He signed his name, he signed it slowly, on every piece of paper put in front of him. Every piece.”

Anita nodded.

I left Anita and Dave angling for their own photograph with the candidate, and walked outside, past the press filing center, past the harried campaign aides preparing for the next leg of their trip. A volunteer sat at a table beside the exit. There were stacks of Kerry and Edwards’s Our Plan for America on the table. I asked if I could take one.

“Oh, please do,” the volunteer said. “Take as many as you like. And give them to your friends! We need all the help we can get.”

Matthew Continetti is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.

CORRECTION APPENDED: The original version of this article stated that Canonsburg, where John Kerry appeared on September 6, is a town in West Virginia. In fact, Canonsburg is in Pennsylvania.