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Just as his alliances with Senate soldiers made Kerry both more successful and more human, so has his dependence on veterans during the campaign. In their company Kerry seems least like the cartoon version of himself: the loner, the striver who escaped from the wax museum. With his comrades-in-arms, including the ones who come up to him at campaign events with a memory to share, a story to tell, Kerry finds time to pay attention, lean in, not look over their shoulder to see who else is in the room.
--WHAT KIND OF LIBERAL?
Whatever his accomplishments on Vietnam issues, they had not given Kerry much of a record to parade before voters looking for reasons to re-elect him. "It's hard to say what John Kerry really cares about, other than the Vietnam stuff," says a Capitol Hill Democrat. That opened him to a fierce challenge in 1996 from the popular Republican William Weld, who had been elected Governor with 71% of the vote in a historically Democratic state. Weld's attacks on Kerry provide the playbook for the G.O.P. opposition-research elves, who even now are busy rummaging through every speech for arrows to sling at him.
There was plenty to support the notion that Kerry was just a classic bleeding heart: his ratings from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action have always hovered in the 90%-to-95% range. He has long been a supporter of gun control and gay rights, though not gay marriage. He voted against mandatory sentences for drug dealers who sell to children; against the death penalty, even for cop killers; against restrictions on abortion. He favored higher gas taxes and raising the minimum wage; he supported providing disability payments to people whose disability was drug addiction or alcoholism--a position he defended in part because of the number of veterans still wrestling with substance-abuse problems.
But Weld's fate in that race also provides an object lesson for other opponents. The debates were that rare thing--two smart guys, quick on their feet, actually talking about the issues without so much as a moderator. Weld seemed to think he could win on charm; Kerry proved to be extremely deft about how he took his affable opponent down because anything too personal, too nasty could easily backfire. At one point Weld challenged Kerry for coddling criminals by producing the mother of a slain Springfield cop and asking him to "tell her why the life of the man who murdered her son is worth more than the life of a police officer."
Kerry goes quiet and lethal at moments like that. "It's not worth more," he replied. "It's not worth anything. It's scum that ought to be thrown in jail for the rest of its life." But that didn't change his view of the death penalty, and he added, "I know something about killing," he said. "I don't like killing. That's just a personal belief I have."
Kerry aced the test and pulled ahead, thanks also in part to some last-minute sweetening of his record by the Kennedy shop. Kennedy's staff worked closely with Kerry to write a bill extending children's health coverage, paid for by a cigarette tax. That not only gave Kerry a consumer-friendly piece of legislation to run on but also reminded voters that Weld had blocked such a plan in Massachusetts. Kerry ended up winning by more than 7 percentage points.