Quotes of the Day

Two nights, no sleep, sipping bottled water, John Kerry sits in his flying war room, a 737, cruising from frigid Iowa to frosty New Hampshire, in a state of sublime shock. He had known that for him to rise, Howard Dean would have to fall, and even that might not be enough to win. He had already fired his campaign manager, retooled his stump speech and endured months of derision from party professionals for his dead-on-arrival campaign. He had ignored every piece of conventional strategy, decamped from his home field of New Hampshire, thrown everything at Iowa and held on tight. When the first results were coming in, he did not believe them. Early Iowa exit polls suggested a Kerry win; later ones, a blowout. "We were pinching ourselves," says an aide.

Now it's 4 in the morning, and his staff is trying to figure out how to ride the wave, where to go after New Hampshire, what to spend, how to spin. Kerry finally leans back, stretches out and closes his eyes. He wakes when the plane bounces down on the tarmac, the sun rising over Manchester; he's still a little too groggy for a 7 a.m. airport-welcome event in a chilly hangar. He turns to an aide, Stephanie Cutter, and asks how many people are out there waiting for him. "It's a very cold weekday morning," she replies, to a candidate who is used to having as many staff members at an event as voters. "About 1,000."

She is exaggerating, but the hundreds there are on fire, chanting "J.K. all the way" to Springsteen and U2 music. Kerry lets it all sink in. "I guess we really did win last night."

And as a result, everyone else had to recalculate. Howard Dean found himself clawing his way back from his near-death experience, pulling his ads from other states in order to spend all his money and manpower in New Hampshire, throwing nearly $850,000 worth of ads on the air and even handing out to undecided voters 50,000 copies of his warm and fuzzy Howard-and-Judy interview with Diane Sawyer. John Edwards' team was holding on tight, hoping to scoot past Wesley Clark and at least narrow the race a little more by the time it heads south. A new story line was taking hold: the election was all about electability; once again voters had flirted with the insurgent and then kicked him down the stairs, so they could snuggle up with the safe, steady guy the party matchmakers had offered up in the first place. It happened with Mondale and Hart, Buchanan and Dole, McCain and Bush. Kerry fans were on the streets with signs saying dated dean, married kerry. "They switched from grievance to governance," explains Dick Gephardt's pollster Ed Reilly. "They switched from who was the loudest voice to who can lead. Kerry fits that picture well, and that's why they went with him." The question for every campaign is, will they stick, or are voters still shopping around—and if so, is anyone else on their list?

You would think that all elections are about electability, the tension between whom you like and whom you think can win. But listen closely to what voters are saying, and you find that electability is a lazy word to cover all the deeper things they watch and listen for. Hearing that people want to vote for the candidate they think can win doesn't tell you anything unless you know what they think makes a winner. Is it the guy who looks most like a President or who knows the most, or the one they just like the best and can imagine watching on TV for the next four years? Will people vote for someone they agree with but don't like? Or for someone who they don't really agree with but they think can win? "I have no idea. You'll have to ask the voters," John Kerry tells TIME late Friday night on a bus from Claremont, N.H., to Manchester. "I'm asking people about what's in their hearts."

Such earnest talk is the luxury of being in the lead—Kerry watched his support surge in two days. For the rest of the field, the test now is to define electability to their advantage. They are trying to convince voters that whatever quality distinguishes them best equips them to take the fight to Bush. Iowa set the table and offered each some hope. Dean, the fighter, won among the voters who were looking for someone to take strong stands on the issues. Kerry, the statesman, won the people who cared most about beating Bush. John Edwards, the Everyman, prevailed among people in search of someone "who cares about people like me."

Each came out of Iowa with a calling card to show voters why Bush should fear them most. But the early contests have a habit of turning success into a cautionary tale. Dean's passion both raised him up and slowed him down. He brought new voters into the process, but nearly half proceeded to vote for someone else. Dean's performance made it safe for Kerry to be dull, which may, down the road, make Kerry just as unappealing to voters as he was when he was at 5%. Edwards' optimism and empathy open him to the charge that he won't be tough enough in the fight ahead. And Clark's claim to be able to win independents doesn't change the fact that he still had to show he could win Democrats. Given the fact that hardly anyone predicted the Iowa outcome, everyone had some course corrections to make.

So What is Presidential?

"Maybe the problem is the doc," posted one supporter on Blog for America, the official weblog of the Dean campaign, after watching Dean's Vesuvian speech Monday night. "The dinosauric yells were scary, and we probably lost many votes right there. I, a faithful supporter until yesterday, am beginning to question it all." Some went so far as to say the unspeakable: the candidate looked unpresidential, and there may be no more obvious observation than that to be electable, a candidate for President has to look like one.

But that may just be an excuse for people looking to explain their defection. There's a weird metaphysical link between seeming electable and seeming presidential. Bill Clinton played his sax and talked about his underwear and managed to win twice. George W. Bush had the genes of a President but not the resume and yet made it to the White House and spent more than a year as one of the more popular modern Presidents. To many Dean supporters that Iowa moment actually reminded them of why they liked him. "This is a passionate person who's really excited, who gets supporters excited," said Kristin Ruthenberg, 34, a church organist who brought the son she homeschools to see the Governor in Claremont. "I saw someone who's tenacious, who's going to hold on to the dream."

In fact, the issue of style and temperament has everything to do with how Dean earned his front-runner position in the first place. He was the first to correctly read the Democratic electorate and channel its anger—not just at President Bush but at the Democrats in Washington who were still playing nice with a President who was playing for keeps. But this meant he could least afford to make a mistake. Once the conventional wisdom challenged his electability, the rationale for his candidacy started to crumble, and voters went searching elsewhere. "Six months ago, they were all looking for straight talk," said Joe Lieberman pollster Mark Penn. "Now they're looking for someone who is serious enough to be President of the U.S."

Dean's string of gaffes in the closing weeks before Iowa gave Kerry and Edwards their opening, but his detonation Monday night blew the race open. After voters had started to wonder about his self-control, the last thing Dean could afford was to lose it. And so, following the time-honored rituals of campaign damage control, by Tuesday his staff was looking to perform an extreme makeover, no easy feat for a candidate who is selling authenticity. He pulled down his attack ads, rolled out his wife as a softening agent and assumed a new and humble tone: to his mantra "You have the power," he added "I need your help." Hoarse from a cold, he planted his feet on the stage of the peach-and-cream Claremont Opera House with his hands in his pockets and an all but visible leash, to make sure he did not jab and roam and punch too hard. He cut his stump speech almost in half so he could take more questions, show more leg. And he started talking about his warts so much that even some of his Deanie babies asked him to quit it.

Kerry was the clear beneficiary of all Dean's bad press. In New Hampshire, familiarity with Kerry once bred indifference, if not contempt. Suddenly, it brought comfort. Even when Kerry was doing badly, says Gephardt campaign manager Steve Murphy, "he always had great favorability ratings. They were always better than Dean's. He just never really connected until the end. He shed some aloofness, and he started answering questions, and he started to listen. He just got better." His height and bearing and senatorial stature make it easy to imagine him wearing White House cufflinks on his Turnbull & Asser shirts. And in the end he was a safe haven for spooked Dean voters who had had a near-death experience. "It was a process of elimination," says a rival campaign manager.

Whom Do You Like?

"Like many of you, I worked through college. Didn't hurt me a bit. In fact, one of my jobs was unloading tractor trailers. You spend the night in North Carolina unloading a tractor trailer, and I guarantee you, you'll get up and study the next day." John Edwards, Iowa's other love child, is standing on a plastic crate in a diner in Nashua, N.H., sharing his story and giving voters a good look at his crisp blue suit and grungy, mud-caked boots. His oldest daughter, Cate, gave them to him for Christmas to help negotiate the Iowa snows, and ever since his surprise second-place finish, he has been wearing them like a talisman. At some stops, voters were taking snapshots of his feet. But even after staff members urged him to lose the boots, he refused, and plans to keep them on even when the crusade heads south.

Edwards is superstitious, which is a curious trait in a campaign that sells itself as being all about optimism. He is sunshine all year round, unchanged in the vision of hope and help he lays out for voters. The least known and least experienced one in the field was also the only one to pick a plan and not blink when Dean was getting traction, the only one not to get caught slicing someone else's tires. For months his vision of two Americas made whole and fair again felt a little mushy and out of step with these tumultuous times. But by the last days, the Iowa race had turned so ugly that his approach made him Mr. Clean.

But is likable the same as electable? How much does winning Mr. Congeniality help convince voters that you are the one to send into the ring against Bush? History helps here, because the more optimistic candidate nearly always wins, and most recently, it worked for George W. Bush. In the 2000 campaign, pollsters found that even voters who didn't like his tax plan or his inexperience did like him, saw him as a regular guy. Phoniness is a political toxin and charisma, a vaccine, and Edwards claims to have the cure.

While Kerry and Clark are making a visible effort to climb down off their pedestals, Edwards—his professional life spent before juries as a trial lawyer—could establish rapport with a saltshaker. Where Dean's populism can sound hostile, Edwards' is sugarcoated, the mill-town boy who knows what your life is really like because he married his wife with an $11 ring. Speaking to Time between events, Edwards recalled, "My father always said, 'I can tell if someone is talking down to me in 30 seconds.' Voters can tell that, they can sense it. The only way you can effectively communicate is if people feel that you're real."

Kerry may be the one using the Real Deal as his slogan, but there's a sense that he's protesting too much. Herbert Hoover once said of Franklin Roosevelt that "he was a chameleon on plaid," and there has been something of that quality throughout Kerry's campaign. He has written poetry and wind-surfed and ridden a Harley. He has played both hockey and his guitar. It was meant to make him seem more human, change the scale, since he looms over the field like a tall dark cloud. For months nothing seemed to work. He still came across as a classic Massachusetts Yankee, easy to admire but hard to like. The consolation out of Iowa was that maybe it didn't matter if he wasn't all that likable if he's what voters think they need.

For his part, Dean proudly sat out the personality primary. He declared that he didn't have to feel anyone's pain as long as he could heal it. He seemed to care less about whether people liked him than whether they agreed with him. In the few days after Iowa, he did make an attempt at being a kinder, gentler Dean, telling voters that if they had come to hear his red-meat speech, they would be disappointed. Having denounced his rivals as Bush Lite, he declared they were all good guys. He was going back to talking about his nice moderate record as Governor. But when all else failed, Dean's best bet was to make bluntness an asset. "I'm willing to say things that are not popular but ordinary people know are right," he said. "I'm not blow-dried. I'm not coached. I obviously don't look at polls, and if I did, they didn't do me any good, anyway, in Iowa."

Clark's campaign was also among those on a self-conscious likability crusade, especially when it came to female voters. He was so determined to prove his feminist bona fides that he defended abortion right up to the moment of birth, then spent last week dialing back to a position that was viable. Faced with a 17-point gender gap between him and Dean, Clark dropped the uniform navy blue suit, put on a sweater and was not afraid to tear up in interviews. But traveling too far down that road would undercut his main rationale; the Gentle General might be a hard sell. "You don't elect a President to go have a beer with," he told reporters, ignoring evidence to the contrary in every election since Nixon. "You elect a President to do a job for the country. A lot of people say they like [Bush]. I'm not trying to tell them, 'Don't like him.' I'm trying to tell them he hasn't done his job." But perhaps that's what you would expect from a man who, when asked if he has a nickname, says, "Other than 'Sir,' no."

Experience Counts

Fire-breathing filmmaker Michael Moore is at a huge rally for Clark, with as many as 2,000 people at the Pembroke Academy in Pembroke, N.H., explaining why the author of Stupid White Men ... and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! has fallen in love with a military man. "We have been handed a gift," he told the crowd. "A four-star general, Rhodes Scholar, head of his class at West Point, captain of the debate team." Moore was interrupted by cheers at this point. "I want to see that debate! I want to see that debate! I want to see that debate!" he shouted. "That's right! The general versus the deserter!"

It was that moment Peter Jennings referred to when he asked Clark during Thursday's televised debate whether he agreed with Moore's "reckless charge" about President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. This posed an interesting test for the general, who pundits say has three things going for him: resume, resume and resume. But Jennings' question revealed the kind of experience Clark doesn't have and can't fake: the ability to deflect or diffuse a question that is bound to hurt you with someone, no matter how you answer it. Clark responded that he didn't know the facts of the case, but he said, "I've seen this charge bandied about a lot" and that Moore was entitled to his opinion. That meant Clark had to spend precious time the next day answering the same question over and over, until he finally declared, "I can't agree with Michael Moore." But by then the damage was already done.

Clark has a war-hero story at least as compelling as Kerry's, but he rarely talks about it. Instead, he spends most of his time arguing for Clintonian education and health-care proposals. He often sounds like he was just briefed an hour before. It's good he's a quick study, but that just reminds voters that he has to be. Asked what he would do to promote preventive health care, he recalls how in his Army days, "we used to march our troops to the dental clinic to make sure they got their teeth X-rayed. We called it 'dental readiness.'"

But it was not clear how that approach would work in a world where you can't order people to stay healthy. He can talk about education, but what he knows about is training. At the Seacoast Family ymca in Portsmouth, N.H., he came across Duncan, a preschooler daydreaming at the art table. Clark walked over, took hold of the kid's chair (with the boy still in it) and turned him around to face the table. "Aren't you supposed to be coloring?" he asked. "Isn't that the project right now?"

But no one else really has the edge on experience either. Dean hammers home the fact that he's the only candidate who has ever balanced a budget. But while he promises to do the same in Washington, he has yet to explain how he would pull it off, particularly if faced with a Republican Congress. Kerry long ago made his resume his running mate, but his legislative accomplishments are not plentiful, and his experience in the Senate has taken a toll on his persona. Where Dean denounces the ways of Washington, Kerry honors them; he dwells on the commissions he has chaired and the bills he has sponsored as his way of explaining what values he holds and what skills he brings. The Republicans quickly dispatched party chairman Ed Gillespie to push the line that Ted Kennedy was the more conservative Massachusetts Senator.

Listen to the far less experienced Edwards, and it seems to be an advantage that he has not served in the Senate long enough to have been shaped by it. He pulls in voters by appearing more like an outsider than the other Senators, but more in tune with how Washington actually works than the other renegades. That still leaves him with a problem Clark and Kerry do not have: a relative lack of national-security experience that in these dangerous times could be disqualifying with some voters.

Edwards milks what credentials he does have, mentioning that he serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee and never missing the chance to cite his meeting with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who is conveniently one of the leaders George W. Bush couldn't name four years ago. In fact, he has more experience than candidates Carter, Reagan, Clinton or the present incumbent had, but in the post-9/11 world, that still may not be enough. All Edwards can do is fall back on faith that experience is not the key to winning. "Voters don't elect a resume," he told Time. "They never have, and they never will. The most important thing is that people get a sense that you have an understanding of what's happening, of what America's role is around the world and whether you're strong. Do you have character? Do you have judgment? Can they trust you? I think those are the things people look for in a President."

The Character Test

It's especially amazing that a campaign that is rewriting the book on how to make biography a character reference found its best chapter by accident. Like most men who served in Vietnam, Kerry is reluctant to talk about his combat experiences. But Jim Rassmann, a passenger on Kerry's swift boat 35 years ago as a young Green Beret, was not. With less than 72 hours to go till caucus night, Rassmann phoned the campaign's Washington office and offered to help. Kerry's aides rushed him to Iowa with no idea what the 56-year-old Republican former Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy might say.

Rassmann told his story all over Iowa in the final days: about how Kerry's boat ran into a Viet Cong ambush and hit a mine, knocking Rassmann out of the vessel. Wounded in the blast, Kerry ordered the boat to race out of the cross fire, not knowing Rassmann was overboard. Two hundred yards downriver, when he discovered that the Green Beret was missing, Kerry turned the boat around and raced back to find Rassmann, still in the water, dodging bullets. His arm bleeding, Kerry reached down from the bow of the boat and pulled him in. "John didn't have to, but he came to the front under fire and pulled me over," Rassmann said, adding that Kerry "could have been shot and killed at any time. I figure I owe this man my life."

In political terms, Kerry could say the same. This race has shown that voters do want to know a candidate's biography, but not necessarily because it tells them how to vote. Instead, it offers the key to the qualities that matter, a candidate's faith, fortitude, judgment, courage. Kerry's war record helps him across the board. He knows a Massachusetts liberal has to show he'll be strong on national defense. He loves contrasting his experience with aircraft carriers to Bush's. One aide dates his comeback to when the campaign started airing the ad of testimony from another Vietnam crewmate named Del Sandusky. In speeches, the battles Kerry discusses most are those he fought as part of the antiwar movement when he got back. That bit is code for saying, I took on a Republican President when I was 25; I can do it again.

Each campaign puts biography to different use: Clark's and Kerry's heroic tales show all they ways they are better than us. Edwards' bootstrap story shows how he is just like us. Only Dean dared to design a whole strategy around the idea that the personal was not political. Rejecting the rituals of revelation, he adamantly refused to talk about himself, his family, his faith journey, his heartwarming moments as a doctor. Some of this was camouflage: the tribune of the common man who grew up on Park Avenue and went to prep school. During one debate, Dean talked about how, when Vietnam started, he was at college in New Haven, Conn., the accepted Wasp way of avoiding saying that he went to Yale—as did John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and George W. Bush. But there was also a principle involved: the idea was to keep people focused on what he would do for them.

The problem was, voters then had no sense of the guy to fall back on when he started shooting off his mouth. There was no context to his meltdown in Iowa. So Judy Dean, the invisible woman of the campaign so far, is suddenly at his side, talking about why she loves her husband and how he would make a great President.

All sorts of instincts and insights go into a voter's calculation about whom to support. But after two years of quality time with the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire, the candidates are in a crowded race of first impressions. Are the qualities that make for a good first impression the ones that make a good President? And where exactly do ideas fit in (not just why you have the best chance of winning the office but what you would do when you get there)? The 2004 race plays out between parties split over war and peace, rich and poor, justice and fairness, but voters seem caught up in the meaning of electability. But in the end, even being presidential doesn't mean you'll be a good President.

• Nancy Gibbs