FITS AND STARTS

Kerry didn't know what to do about Dean. His own advisers were divided. Most of the pros, his paid political consultants and campaign manager, wanted to go negative. The philosophy of Chris Lehane, one of his media advisers, was "You either hit or you're being hit." The hawks wanted to go at Dean from the left, to convince voters that Dean was not a true liberal. "We didn't want to rip the guy's face off," said Jordan, "but he wasn't going away, and we had to strip at least a third of his liberal support away."

On the other side, leading the so-called pacifists, was Kerry's most important adviser, Bob Shrum. Shrum is the brand name among big-money Democratic campaign consultants, the most-sought-after hired gun, brilliant and fluent but also insecure. He was Kerry's friend, his peer; everyone else was Kerry's employee. Staffers crossed Shrum at their peril. Edgy and superstitious, Shrum prefers, in tense moments, to wear a fuchsia scarf given to him by Washington superlawyer Robert Bennett--even in the middle of summer. He had forgotten to take his lucky scarf to Nashville on election night 2000, and he wasn't going to make that mistake again. Shrum had worked on the successful political campaigns of a third of the U.S. Senate. But when it came to presidential politics, his luck had generally not been good. He was 0 for 7 (his past clients included Ed Muskie, Ted Kennedy, Bob Kerrey, Dick Gephardt and Al Gore).

Shrum was a gifted wordsmith, the inheritor of the Sorensenian mantle, crafter of lofty phrases and speeches filled with the lift of a driving dream (which, after a time, started to sound alike, no matter whose lips uttered them). He had written Ted Kennedy's famous "Sail against the wind" speech in 1980, and politicians had lined up ever since, hoping that Shrum could make them eloquent, too. Shrum wanted to ignore Dean and take the high road with a series of "Great Speeches" about the future of the country. It was somewhat uncharacteristic for Shrum to argue against slashing attacks; he was known for taking a "people against the powerful" populist line. But his intuition told him that by demol-ishing Dean, the Kerry camp would only open the way for a late surge by Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, a young but honey-tongued populist with a seemingly boundless future. (In the so-called Shrum primary, Kerry and Edwards had vied for the services of the superconsultant; Shrum had initially leaned toward Edwards.) When Team Kerry met in the summer and fall of 2003, Shrum acidly undercut the hawks who wanted to trash and burn Dean. "What do you want to do?" he asked. "Elect Edwards?"

For months, as Kerry sank in the polls and Dean soared, the argument rattled on inside the Kerry camp. Campaign manager Jordan had worked for Kerry for five years, serving as staff director of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee when Kerry was its chairman. A soft-spoken but hard-nosed operative from North Carolina, Jordan admired Kerry, but he was weary of his indecisiveness. "The world around Kerry is a lot of white males talking," he groused. Every time Jordan decided something, the person who lost out went behind his back to appeal to Kerry, who spent inordinate amounts of time on his cell phone not resolving various disputes. Kerry was known for being deliberative--he was proud of it--but Jordan despaired that Kerry had been turned into a caricature of the U.S. Senate. Kerry's didactic, overlong speeches, his insistence on explaining every nuance of his rational thought process (while not revealing much of his true feelings), reinforced his image as a windbag. Jordan was blunt with Kerry, telling him that voters in focus groups said "they don't understand you, you won't shut up, you sound like a politician."

For the Labor Day announcement speech, the hawks presented a draft meant to be sharp and punchy, with lines like "Spring training is over" and "My mother was an environmental activist before it was cool." Shrum dismissed the speech as "sophomoric." At midnight before the speech, Shrum arrived at Kerry's house in Boston--he had taken a two-hour cab ride from Cape Cod--to insist that his speech be used, untouched. Kerry ended up giving Shrum's speech--"flowery bulls--t," according to Jordan. The reception was at best ho-hum.

Kerry was fading fast. The press got wind of the infighting and began joking that Kerry's campaign was like Noah's Ark--two of everything--as Kerry straddled the advice given him and tried to please everyone. "I couldn't get the man to make decisions," said Jordan.