FITS AND STARTS

First came some discipline. Ted Kennedy's no-nonsense chief of staff, Mary Beth Cahill, took over as campaign manager. (She had been watching the campaign, she said, with a "horrified fascination.") Cahill, white-haired and matronly in a steely sort of way, shut off the back channels to Kerry by turning off his cell phone and letting it be known, like a nun rapping knuckles, that she would not tolerate any more petty bickering.

Then came a marked improvement in the candidate. Kerry's speechwriter, Andrei Cherny, had been trying to think of a way to convey that Kerry was ready to go toe to toe with President Bush on national security, the Democrats' weakest front. The expression "Bring it on" popped into his head. He wrote the line into a Kerry speech to be delivered to the Democratic National Committee in October, but Shrum crossed it out. "Bush-type bravado," he sneered--too undignified for Kerry.

But with the press reporting his campaign in meltdown, Kerry needed to do something to change his soporific style, and at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines on Nov. 15, he used Cherny's "Bring it on" line. The crowd loved it. (Kerry later apologized to Cherny for not using the line earlier. "I was wrong," he said. But a few weeks later Cherny was purged by Shrum as a Jordan holdover whose punchy style did not suit the candidate.)

Strong, crisp--and presidential--Kerry was a hit at the JJ dinner, an important annual rite and showplace for the candidates. Kerry's campaign packed the crowd with supporters chanting "Real deal," Kerry's latest slogan (the real deal: that is, a candidate who could win in November, unlike Dean). It was a sign, if anyone had been looking, that Kerry should not be counted out. There were other omens that the race was far from over. Before the dinner, a curious event took place. The Dean campaign, eager to show off its vast army of Deaniacs, took reporters out on the skywalk in downtown Des Moines to watch 40-plus yellow schoolbuses rumble into town--shock troops in the Dean onslaught to get out the vote for the January Iowa caucuses, the first electoral test on the road to the nomination. One of the reporters noticed something odd. "Is it just me, or are they empty?" asked Liz Marlantes of The Christian Science Monitor. The other reporters tried to peer through the tinted-glass windows. All they could see was row after row of empty seats.

But in New Hampshire, Dean's polls continued to soar, while Kerry's remained flat. The press had already begun to look for someone else to play the role of spoiler to Dean, maybe Gen. Wesley Clark, who had entered the race late (in September), stumbled about as a campaign neophyte, but still held allure for Democrats paranoid about their own perceived weakness on national security. The capture of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13 made Democrats despondent. Iraq was looking like a worthy cause after all; the violence seemed to be abating there. Bush looked invincible. Actually, Saddam's capture was good news for Kerry: it helped remind Democrats that in the end the nominee had to be electable, and that Dean was too far to the left and Clark was unready for the national political stage.

All this would become clear--in perfect hindsight. On Dec. 9 Al Gore showed the political fingertips that lost him the 2000 election. He endorsed Howard Dean, probably at the precise moment when Dean had peaked and was about to head down. Gore's endorsement came as a blow to Kerry, who had thought Gore was his friend, or at least his political ally. When the Kerry camp heard the rumors that Gore was endorsing Kerry's opponent, Kerry tried to call the former veep to find out if it could be true. Kerry had Gore's cell-phone number and called him. "This is John Kerry," he said when Gore answered. The phone went dead. Kerry tried to call several more times and never got through. He was hurt. "I endorsed him early. I was up for consideration as his running mate," he complained to an aide.