Raising the Volume

JAY L. CLENDENIN / POLARIS FOR TIME
John Kerry meets with workers at Hill Mechanical in Chicago

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Can Kerry Keep it Up?
If the Bush team has been flat-footed, the Kerry campaign may have been on its toes too long. Handlers for presidential candidates see in Kerry's possibly unguarded comments into that open microphone in Chicago the mark of a tired candidate. Kerry will take a breather from the campaign this week, his first since a two-day break at Christmas.

For all its nimbleness in pre-empting the Raimondo nomination, the Kerry campaign has not always been as quick as it could be. When Bush attacked Kerry last week for proposing a cut of more than $1.5 billion in intelligence spending in 1995, the campaign responded that the Senator had voted for increases on other occasions but failed to add the more efFECtive retort that the Republican Congress had approved an even greater reduction in 1995.

Kerry may soon get help in defending his candidacy. It is a measure of the acceleration of the race that his campaign is debating whether to move up his announcement of a running mate to as early as May, rather than wait until the July convention, as is customary. With Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Laura Bush maintaining robust campaign schedules, Kerry could use a sidekick. An extra hand would also help with fund raising.

The Kerry forces, which are badly outfinanced, are turning more attention to money. The campaign has increased the size of its fund-raising operation tenfold, adding 150 new workers and sending the candidate on a 20-city cash-raising tour. Kerry hopes to tap into Howard Dean's high-tech machinewhich is why Kerry's former Democratic rival got such a warm welcome when he visited Kerry headquarters last week for a formal kiss-and-make-up session.

Will Those Ads Ever Stop?
The Bush team has already spent $11 million on TV. After only a week of positive ads about the President, the team went negative with a spot calling the Massachusetts Senator "wrong on taxeswrong on defense." In the limited markets and times his depleted coffers would allow, Kerry fought back immediately with his own ad, challenging the Bush claim that he would raise taxes by at least $900 billion.

It was a risky move for the Bush team to come out so early against their opponent, but his re-election campaign believes that candidates like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton won their second terms by engaging early. Those who didn'tlike Bush's fatherlost. Also, the Bush team felt that the risks it took in using images of 9/11 in the first round of ads, paid off. Bush campaign advisers say surveys of focus groups done after the ads aired registered approval among swing voters, and internal polls showed Bush's favorable rating increased 4 to 5 percentage points in states where the spots ran. The ads also spurred $120,000 in online donationsa modest amount but it included the biggest one-day haul yet for the Republicans over the Internetquickened the pace of volunteer sign-ups, and may have looked more timely in the wake of the terrorist attack in Madrid last week.

Will it Just Get Nastier?
Both campaigns recognize that this spring is a crucial period in which each party stands to gain ground for the fall. They talk hopefully of retreating to a more civilized pace once the summer doldrums begin. But has there ever been a campaign that started out nasty and intense only to turn nice and mellow?

One thing is for sure: outside groups, to which so much of the campaign has been outsourced, will not go on hiatus. Those organizations, most of them aligned with the Democrats, are operating without the funding constraints that the new campaign-finance law places on candidates and parties, and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has yet to tell the groups to desist. When the Republican National Committee last week sent 250 television stations a letter complaining that ads by Moveon.org were illegally financed by unlimited contributions and should not be broadcast, the liberal group promptly announced it was adding $1 million to its $1.9 million ad buy. In addition, there will be plenty of heat coming from Capitol Hill, where virtually every bill will be turned into a test of Bush vs. Kerry. Republicans in Congress took collective umbrage over Kerry's Chicago remarks. "The Democrats haven't produced anything but hate," said House majority leader Tom DeLay, who is not exactly known for sweetening his words. And Republican Senator John Ensign of Nevada violated Senate custom last week by launching an attack on an absent colleague. Of Kerry's vote against authorizing the $87 billion that Bush had requested for Iraq, Ensign said, "Senator Kerry voted to undermine the troops in the field, and that is not only inexcusable, it is reprehensible."

Kerry's fellow Democratic Senators are organizing an informal defense operation from the Senate floor. It is being modeled after the one that former Arkansas Senator Dale Bumpers put together for Clinton when he ran in 1992, with Senators who have authority on specific issuessuch as the budget and national securitystanding at the ready to go before the television cameras in defense of Kerry when he is attacked.

Meanwhile, the war rooms of the two campaigns are organizing to quickly seize any opportunity for attack. On the first floor of the brick-and-glass office building where Bush forces are housed in Arlington, Va., a bank of TiVos captures Kerry's every word. A team arrives at 4:30 a.m. to sift through the papers and prepare responses before the sun rises. When Kerry unleashes even the mildest broadside, the young staff members go almost giddy, and a call issues: "Attack!" Comments from Kerry in the morning papers are incorporated into Bush's noon speeches.

Kerry has his own version of that operation in temporary quarters in a converted downtown Washington law office. An aide comes in at 9 each evening and watches the wires and news reports all night long. The rest of the team is expected by 6:30 the following morning. It was on one of their 8:30 a.m. conference calls with the Democratic National Committee last week that someone came up with Raimondo's name, and by 1:30 p.m. they had the information in the hands of reporters.

Those are the techniqueswith an assist from 21st century technologythat both sides learned from Clinton's campaign, which famously operated on the principle that speed kills. Says Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan: "All of us grew up learning you have to get out ahead. You've got to move within seconds, not within a day." Which is quite a challenge, considering that there are nearly 20 million seconds between now and Election Day.