THE VETS ATTACK

Bob Shrum was brooding over a rough profile in the Style section of The Washington Post. Shrum generally got good press, in part because he was a source and friend to so many top political journalists. But this article went on about the "Shrum Curse," his 0-for-7 record in presidential races, and revealed that Kerry staffers wanted to make up T shirts reading break the shrum curse. The story dwelled on gritty details, like Shrum's habit of parking his Nicorette gum on the rim of Diet Coke cans. Shrum was wounded and wanted to find the campaign mole. He recovered after a few days, but his friends wondered if he might not disengage from the campaign and fade into the background.

At Kerry headquarters on McPherson Square, quiet gloom had settled in. By the end of the summer the campaign was sponsoring cocktail happy hours, encouraging the troops to go to a local bar and put on a glow before coming back for a long night of work. But the drinking had taken a melancholy turn; the mood had a "last hurrah" feel to it. Young staffers who once dreamed of a job in the White House were now wondering what they might do after Nov. 2.

On the Tuesday after Labor Day, a special guest slipped in. Ted Kennedy didn't want it known by the press that he was visiting Kerry headquarters; the campaign had been careful to keep the very symbol of Massachusetts liberalism at arm's length. Kennedy had heard the staff was dispirit-ed, and he wanted to give them a pep talk. He told how his brother Jack had played through pain during the 1936 football season at Harvard. Turning red in the face, he shouted, "In the next two months I want you to fight harder than you'll ever fight!" The staffers roared. Morale improved, at least a little.

The real boost came when Joe Lockhart took over the campaign's communications and "message" from Cutter and Shrum. Every morning at 7:15 Lockhart held a meeting for top staffers. The topic was always the same: "What headline do we want and how do we go about getting it?" Lockhart wanted, in classic Clinton fashion, to start winning the news cycle of the day. The Republicans had been beating the Democrats at their own game of rapid response. Lockhart was going to win back the franchise.

In the beginning of the last week of September, Kerry went on the offensive about Iraq. The war was getting much worse again. There had been a lull (in the fighting but especially in the news coverage) after the United States had handed over authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 30. But in July, August and September, casualties steadily climbed, and the fighting bled back onto the front pages. Former Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg had been pressing Kerry to tie the war to domestic needs--to declare that $200 billion spent on Iraq meant that much less funding for education and health care at home. Kerry used the line in a few speeches, but reluctantly. He didn't really believe it. In truth, he was willing to spend whatever it took to win in Iraq, or at least to extricate the United States with some semblance of honor.

Still, he was appalled by the carnage in Iraq and the waste of the war. On Sunday night, Sept. 19, the campaign staff met to discuss, one more time, the candidate's position on Iraq. The Clintonistas pushed a harder line against the war. But the campaign's old guard wasn't so sure. Couldn't Kerry play it both ways? Shrum cautioned against appearing too dovish. Kerry seemed to let the debate go on, circling around and around.