PHILADELPHIA -- Since winning the Democratic nomination, John Kerry has mystified pundits. How is it, they've asked on endless rounds of talk shows, that a man who so lacks charisma won the nomination? And can he reach out to and inspire voters, given his personality? He's too stiff, they'd complain, and not likable enough. Why, he can't even properly order a cheesesteak. The energized Democrats, declared the pundits, must be motivated by hatred of George W. Bush, not love of John Kerry.
But are these sentiments still accurate? Monday, at Philadelphia's Love Park Kerry rally featuring former President Bill Clinton, I decided to find out by asking people a simple question: “Are you anti-Bush or pro-Kerry?”
The first person I interviewed gave exactly the answer the pundits would lead you to expect. “The majority of people here are probably anti-Bush voters, I guess,” said an African American woman whose husband used to work for Kerry and so asked to remain anonymous. “I shouldn't have said that. It sounds bad. I guess I'm pro-Kerry.” But she was not enthusiastic about him. “Kerry unfortunately does not have the same charisma as Clinton,” she said wistfully. “People haven't warmed up to him.”
Bob Curatoal, a Head Start program specialist from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, tried to look on the bright side of things. “I mean, I can't stand the president,” he said, “but I think it's important to focus more on the positive than the negative.” There will be “more opportunities in what I do for children and families if we make a fresh start,” he added, relentlessly on message. In his hand, he held a sign reading “Eight Days More to a Fresh Start.”
But as I moved through the crowd, I found that perspectives on Kerry became increasingly positive the further from the press stands I traveled. Indeed, if you were to draw a map of anti-Bush intensity in the crowd, the white-hot center of such sentiment would be John Kerry himself. The Democratic nominee is the ultimate anti-Bush voter and activist, delivering a critique of Bush's foreign-policy actions so blistering that it made Clinton's raspy, appealing introduction quickly look like the warm-hearted warm-up act it was. When Kerry reached his main accusation -- “George Bush has failed the test of commander in chief!” -- a wave of sound traveled down the crowd of around 80,000, with chants of, “Bush must go! Bush must go!”
Radiating out from Kerry, anti-Bush sentiment was next strongest in the VIP section of the crowd, closest to where the national press corps was penned. This was where activists, partisans, and volunteers with special passes got their close-up glimpses of Kerry and Clinton as a reward for all their hard work (or political connections).
Here you'd find people like the economist from Washington who was volunteering for the day wearing a button that read “Somewhere in Texas, a Village is Missing its Idiot.” “I lived in Texas for four years; I know he's an idiot,” she said of Bush, though she declined to be named in accordance with Kerry campaign rules. Few people here gave names, because of jobs in the lower rungs of politics or friendships with campaign workers. More sophisticated and cynical, these viewers were close followers of politics who may have backed other candidates during the primary season and were here because of an overwhelming desire to defeat the president. Or re-defeat him, as they'd say. “Personally, I'm anti-Bush,” explained a woman who works for a pharmaceutical company in Philadelphia and used to live in Washington, where she worked for the government.
But out in the crowd, back beyond the metal barricades in the “real people section,” as one Kerry press aide put it, where only local reporters bothered to go at this late date in the campaign cycle, you could find less deeply partisan and cynical people like Peyton Brown of Doylestown, Pennsylvania. “I heard [Kerry's] speech when he announced for president way back a year ago,” recalled Brown. “I almost cried.”
Dorothy Mann of Philadelphia, a self-declared pro-Kerry voter who works for a women's health-care group, was very clear that she was at the rally because of what Kerry stands for and not just because of Bush. “I love his ideas!” she said. “I love his strength. I love his patriotism. I love his story, his values. His values are my values. And he's a leader.”
Indeed, the obsessive focus on undecided voters in swing states has done a great deal to obscure a central fact of campaign 2004: In a narrowly divided country, every poll still shows between 45 percent and 49 percent of the electorate backing Kerry, which means that there are probably somewhere upward of 100 million people nationwide who unashamedly and unabashedly see him as the standard-bearer for their values and their vision of how America should operate.
“He's a very charismatic man, and I believe in him,” said Barbara Lavin of Quakertown, a single mom and business owner who wore a Daughters of the American Revolution cap. She'd brought her two kids to the rally, and explained that her 9-year-old son is also a huge Kerry fan. “I never did like Bush from the beginning. I think Bush is honestly in Neverland.”
While many in the crowd described themselves as longtime loathers of the president, that sentiment is no longer their sole motivating passion. “All of us started out anti-Bush and then became pro-Kerry,” said Leeann Bruzek, a guidance counselor from New Jersey who was at the rally with three friends. “He's not just another candidate. He brings a lot of hope to our country, and great ideas” on such topics as health care and solving the problems in Iraq.
“Anti-Bush, yeah, that's pretty important,” said Damon Getka of Philadelphia, a computer technician who voted Republican in the last mayoral election. “I was anti-Bush from the beginning, from four years ago, from the debates with [Al] Gore. He's just a moron. . . I started out anti-Bush, but after the debates I became pro-Kerry.”
In the debates, Kerry did something no one else in America has been able to do for the past four years: He publicly confronted the president and proved -- to a national TV audience, no less -- to his detractors that all the anti-Bush suspicions of the past four years have some basis in fact. Kerry helped TV viewers see the Bush that people like Getka have seen for four years, and, in the process, earned the anti-Bush crowd's respect. Before the debates, Kerry may still have been a gangly, awkward man from Massachusetts who spoke in long and winding sentences. After the debates, he was their guy.
Polls have found this, too. Democratic intensity, after lagging through much of the spring and summer, now matches or exceeds Republican intensity, according to Newsweek and Democracy Corps polls.
Kerry may not have started the fire. But there's no question any more that he's become the torchbearer for half a nation.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor.
