TRENCH WARFARE

"You gotta see this," Kildae told campaign communications adviser Terry Holt. "Oh, my God," Holt replied. "You have to send that to me on my BlackBerry." The video of Kerry's shooting himself in the foot flew around Bush-Cheney headquarters and, very soon, into the hungry ether beyond.

McKinnon and his ad team wasted no time. "The second we saw it, we knew we had a new ad," McKinnon later recalled. "The greatest gifts in politics are the gifts the other side gives you." It was so simple. All they had to do was drop the footage of Kerry saying "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it" into the ad that was already running, chastising Kerry for cutting funding. McKinnon called the new ad "Troops-Fog." Much of its airing was free: news shows picked up the clip of the "flip-flop" and plastered it on screens like wallpaper.

It took a while for the Kerry campaign to even realize that its candidate had been badly wounded. Kerry himself realized he had made a mistake, but at his headquarters, most of the chatter was about the "weird heckler" who had asked him the question. The Kerry campaign would later insist that the Bush campaign had spent millions that spring to smear its candidate without much effect, but in fact Kerry's "negatives" climbed in some key swing states. Just as important, perhaps, he had missed an opportunity to define himself in a positive or memorable way. The Bush "Troops-Fog" act blew enough fog to unsettle voters, to make them wonder about Kerry's consistency and the depth of his conviction.

The Kerry campaign continued to drift, unable to break through. Kerry himself was flummoxed. Paging through a speech draft in early April, he wondered aloud, "What is our message?" Kerry's caution, his fondness for nuance and his essential sense of responsibility kept getting in the way. To the dismay of aides, he cut voter-pleasing preschool programs from his proposed domestic-spending plan because he didn't want to run up the deficit. He boned up on foreign-policy arcana for interviews--you never knew when Tim Russert might ask a question about, say, Cyprus. But he continued to say nothing remarkable about Iraq. On Capitol Hill, Democrats were panicking. Kerry's own family was hearing the bad buzz and anxiously trying to reassure themselves that "staying the course" was the way to go.

On a morning in early April, Bob Shrum seemed even edgier than usual, popping Nicorettes and spinning a conference-room chair next to him. Shrum was determined to "play our game and not the press's game," as he put it. Let the media squawk and the Republicans take the low road. The money was pouring in now--more than $50 million in the first quarter of 2004, about half of that from the Internet, the money machine discovered by Howard Dean. (In April, Kerry would outraise Bush.) There would be time to build up Kerry; in the meantime, let Bush self-destruct as his failed policies became more and more apparent.

Somehow, though, the long-awaited Bush collapse wasn't happening, at least not yet. Iraq seemed to be in flames. At a press conference in mid-April, Bush told a reporter that, try as he might, he just couldn't think of a mistake he had made since 9/11. The press and the chattering classes hooted in derision. But Bush actually went up in the polls. Most voters seemed to like the president's show of resolve. Kerry was baffled. He said with a sigh to one top staffer, "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot."