TRENCH WARFARE

On March 2 Kerry swept the last big slew of primaries, and Senator Edwards, who had been waging a spirited if futile race, finally conceded. On the campaign trail Kerry ran chronically late. He did not like to be "handled," and when advance men rushed him, he gave them a "back off" look and proceeded at his own deliberate pace. On the night of the Feb. 3 primaries, Kerry had taken so long to get to the cameras to declare victory that he had permitted Edwards to dominate the airwaves. His chief strategist, Bob Shrum, had ranted and raved that Kerry was going to miss the Eastern media markets altogether if he didn't get onstage any faster.

But with the race over, Kerry was suddenly thrust into the bubble of the Secret Service, which was charged with protecting the Democratic nominee. The Secret Service was usually able to make anyone, with the possible exception of Bill Clinton, run on time, in part because its agents could literally stop traffic. So on the night of March 2 it was a thrill and a relief for the family entourage to be able to roar downtown from Teresa's house in Georgetown to a victory celebration at the Old Post Office Pavilion on Pennsylvania Avenue in just seven minutes, sirens whooping, lights flashing. Whispering into their cuffs, the Secret Service agents rushed the presumptive nominee into the elevator and everyone piled in for the ascent to the main hall, one story up.

The elevator rose half a floor and abruptly stopped. The increasingly agitated agents and advance men began loudly whispering into their sleeves again. One agent fruitlessly tried to wedge the door open. The heat rose. Kerry's stepson Chris Heinz and his two daughters, Vanessa and Alexandra, tried to crack jokes. The candidate sat down on the floor, rested his forehead on his arms and went into a silent trance. Heinz looked down at his stepfather. "You OK down there?" he asked. The senator tersely replied, "Heat rises."

After 15 minutes of increasingly hot and claustrophobic waiting, a technician arrived, the door was pried open, an advance man climbed out and the elevator--lighter now--began to rise again. The doors opened. Kerry looked out at the waiting crowd. "Let's not take that elevator again," he said coolly. Everyone chuckled, nervously.

On the drive back to Georgetown, the motorcade raced south of the White House on Constitution Avenue. Vanessa Kerry could see the White House ablaze in light, the tantalizing prize--now, incredibly, within her father's reach. She and Alex felt moved, overwhelmed, but noticed that their father didn't. Within a couple of minutes of delivering his victory speech he had been back on his cell phone. "Dad," said Alex, who is close to her father and direct with him, "will you please appreciate this moment for 10 seconds?" He mumbled, yes, yes, he was happy, it was good, and then went back to working the cell phone, trying to find aides to line up fund-raising events. It occurred to Vanessa that the cliche was wrong; her father was not, as the scribes would say, a fourth-quarter player, he was a marathon man. Kerry liked to say that "every day is extra" after Vietnam, but actually every day was like the day before, a relentless march toward his goal.

The period between the last primary and the summer conventions is an odd time in presidential campaigns. In earlier campaigns it had been the political equivalent of the "phony war," the long, strange lull in fighting in World War II between the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the blitzkrieg through Europe in the spring of 1940. This time around, there would be no phony war. The polarized electorate, the constant chatter on talk radio and cable TV, the frenetic pace of campaigning by the candidates, gave the campaign a truly warlike feel in the spring of 2004. A better comparison was World War I: trench warfare, muddy and gassy, with neither side able to secure much ground and keep it.