THURSDAY, JULY 29, 2004

Sen. Barbara Boxer of California summed up Wednesday what this convention seems largely about: Americans need to see what’s inside John Kerry. Once they do, they’ll vote for him, Boxer thinks.

What does Kerry need to do in his speech Thursday night? “I want him to talk about his life, his values that he learned as child, what he learned when he went to war, the courage he had to have,” Boxer told reporters Thursday at a press conference at the Westin Copley Hotel.

“This is a man who says, ‘Send me’ (to Vietnam) when Dick Cheney was ducking it, George Bush was ducking it, and Bill Clinton said he was ducking it. John Kerry said, ‘Send me.’ I want to know about that decision; I want to know what inside him gave him that courage,” the California senator said.

As a career politician, Boxer said, “one of the things I’ve found that rivets people is when you tell your story.”

So, suggesting that Kerry would be speaking Thursday in an autobiographical, perhaps therapeutic, mode, Boxer said, Kerry must portray himself as “a man who has faced down cancer” and as a candidate who came back from being written off by pundits last December.

Boxer reminded reporters, “You guys said he was finished, dead, done, over — and lot of us thought the same — but he came back.”

Boxer’s observations were right on target: This convention is primarily a set-piece for displaying Kerry’s persona, not his policy proposals, and emphatically not his Senate roll call votes.

Some TV network anchor people kept saying on the air Wednesday that this convention is an opportunity for Kerry to “define himself.”

But don’t more than 5,000 roll call votes in the Senate give a pretty, well, definitive, definition?

Vote on Iraq war
Some reporters persisted in asking Boxer about those roll call votes. How to explain Kerry’s vote for the October 2002 resolution authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq?

Boxer said Kerry was one “in the middle ground” who were willing to give Bush authority to attack Saddam Hussein’s forces but wanted to attach “a lot of strings,” such as requiring the president to report back to Congress every 60 days.

“They felt in their hearts that this president would never just take that authority and go (make war), that he would in fact go to our allies in NATO, he would go back to the U.N.” before ordering an attack on Saddam’s armies, Boxer recalled.

So Kerry and 28 other Senate Democrats ended up voting "yes" on the war resolution.

Boxer said, unlike Kerry, she and Sen. Robert Byrd thought in October 2002 that Bush would go to war without NATO or U.N. backing.

“We felt he was going to go, no matter what we did,” she said — and thus she voted “no” on the Iraq resolution.

Does this episode prove that Boxer had better judgment than Kerry did, one reporter asked? “No, it shows that George Bush had bad judgment,” she said.

Asked whether Kerry’s vote last year against a ban on the procedure known as partial-birth abortion would be a liability for him in trying to win conservative voters in states such as Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, and West Virginia — all of which Al Gore lost in 2000 —Boxer said she and Kerry wanted to ban all late-term abortions, except for those necessary for the life and health of the pregnant woman.

The bill against which Kerry and Boxer voted, she said, had been blocked by federal judges. “I think he is on really solid footing. John has been very clear about his personal views on abortion and his belief that Roe vs. Wade should be maintained.”

Moore in the spotlight
Meanwhile, the man in the glare of the TV lights all over the Fleet Center and around Boston this week has been not an elected official but a man with broader and less tangible power: anti-Bush "Fahrenheit 9/11" director Michael Moore. Wherever Moore goes, he attracts the kind of excited crowds a Kennedy used to attract at a Democratic convention.

And Republican spokesmen seem to be running as much against Moore as against Kerry.

The Republican National Committee sent out a steady flow of anti-Moore talking points, including one quote from an interview he gave to CBS: “Three thousand Americans were killed. There’s 290 million Americans, all right? The chance of any of us dying in a terrorist incident is very, very, very small.”

WEDNESDAY JULY 28, 2004

“We hear echoes of past battles … in the cries of the false patriots who bully dissenters into silence and submission,” Sen. Ted Kennedy told the Democratic convention in his address Tuesday night.

Silence and submission? They were nowhere in evidence at this convention city Tuesday. Instead, on television and in person, in the convention hall and outside it, Bush opponents, from filmmaker Michael Moore to former presidential contender Howard Dean to film actor Ben Affleck, joined the outcry against him.

In his 30-minute speech to the convention, Kennedy denounced “this misguided war” in Iraq.

Kennedy voted against the October 2002 Iraq war resolution; Kerry voted for it. Kennedy was too diplomatic to mention this discord Tuesday night.

Later in the evening, Teresa Heinz Kerry declared, “With John Kerry as president, we can, and we will, protect our nation's security without sacrificing our civil liberties.” She was too tactful to point out that Kerry had voted for the USA Patriot Act, which some Democrats see as the direst threat to civil liberties.

Heinz Kerry continued the theme that Bill Clinton had sketched out Monday night, accusing Bush of mistaking “stubbornness for strength.”

So much fun were the Democrats having in Boston that someone they consider a skunk at the garden party sought to join them. Independent Ralph Nader got a sliver of the day’s publicity by mailing an open letter to the Democratic National Committee requesting a press credential to cover the convention.

“Since 1971 I have been a syndicated columnist whose columns have been published in two books, daily newspapers and weeklies throughout the United States and through the Knight-Ridder syndicate,” Nader wrote in his letter. “I have reported from three continents and throughout the United States” — but he will not in all likelihood report from this small piece of Boston real estate any time this convention week.

As one Democratic strategist pointed out Tuesday afternoon, after soaking up the mood at parties for the past three days, what was remarkable about the chatter at this convention so far is how little mention there has been of the Nader threat.

Democrats feel quite confident they’ll beat Bush and have ceased almost all their primary-season dissonance to back Kerry.

On Wednesday night, Democrats will hear one of their newest stars, vice presidential nominee John Edwards.

TUESDAY JULY 27, 2004

As the Boston convention opened Monday afternoon, speakers trooped to the podium to praise the party’s inclusiveness. But the people whom party leaders really must include if Democrats are to win back the White House are non-voters and the unregistered.

John Kerry’s hopes may hinge on the efforts of people who weren’t speaking at the convention: former labor union political strategist Steve Rosenthal and his colleagues at a group called America Coming Together (ACT), which has deployed 540 canvassers to register and mobilize millions of new voters who could lift Kerry to victory in 15 states from Maine to Arizona.

ACT has already raised $80 million and is looking to a goal of $125 million. Organized under section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code, ACT can accept unlimited donations from individuals, corporations and labor unions. Among its biggest patrons: currency trader George Soros, Progressive Insurance chief Peter Lewis, and Chicago radio-TV mogul Fred Eychaner.

“There has never been anything of this magnitude in terms of voter contact in the history of this country,” Ellen Malcolm, ACT’s president told reporters at a briefing Monday at Boston’s Four Seasons Hotel. Malcolm was taking advantage of the presence of well-heeled Democratic donors in Boston this week to make her pitch for more money to fund ACT’s registration drive.

ACT has already registered 73,000 new voters in Cleveland alone. Now the question is: In Kerry’s Thursday night address, will he inspire them and thousands of others like them, to vote?

Gore appeals to Nader voters
In opening night rhetoric on Monday, the 2000 Democratic nominee Al Gore made a plea to voters who backed Ralph Nader four years ago: “I urge you to ask yourselves this question: Do you still believe that there was no difference between the candidates?”

Former President Jimmy Carter used his speaking slot to accuse President Bush of “extremism” and of not telling the truth about Iraq.

Mild in delivery, harsh in content, Carter’s speech also insinuated that Bush had not served honorably during his stint in the National Guard 30 years ago.

In the evening’s finale, Bill Clinton compared Kerry to two other Massachusetts men who became president, John Adams and John Kennedy, and praised him for serving in Vietnam, which Clinton had not.

Reinforcing the Democratic theme of the need for a more internationalist approach, Clinton said, “we live in an interdependent world in which we can not possibly kill, jail, or occupy all our potential adversaries, so we have to both fight terror and build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists.” 

Accusing the Republicans of using social issues for divisive purposes, Clinton did not mention a measure that he signed into law in 1996 and which has been much debated in recent weeks, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which permits states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. Kerry voted against that bill.

In Massachusetts, the state’s highest court has ruled same-sex marriages legal, making this the only state to legalize such marriages.

On the agenda Tuesday night are speeches by Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, a link to the glory days of the Democratic Party’s past, and Teresa Heinz Kerry, who sparked controversy Sunday by telling Pennsylvania delegates to the convention, “We need to turn back some of the creeping, un-Pennsylvanian and sometimes un-American traits that are coming into some of our politics."

Heinz Kerry later denied using the phrase “un-American” and told a journalist pestering her about the statement to “shove it.”

MONDAY, JULY 26, 2004

"Convention” is the apt word. If Democratic planners have done their job as one would expect,  what will unfold over the next four days here at the Democratic National Convention in Boston will be an utterly conventional ritual, with the dance steps all nicely choreographed.

Will it make for compelling theater, a “must see” as theater critics would say?

That’s up to the speakers, from Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama to legendary orator Sen. Ted Kennedy.

If the planners have done their duty, there will be dramatic and memorable oratory, but no unexpected, haphazard or dissonant events.

A first for some
Yet, no matter how conventional this convention will be, for some Democratic activists, whether a delegate from Arkansas or a campaign volunteer from Iowa, this will be their first national political convention and yes, if you’ve never been to one before, it is exciting to rub shoulders with feminist champion Sen. Barbara Boxer, or 1984's near-nominee Gary Hart, or Tom Hayden, veteran of the battles at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

For convention first-timers, there are plenty of parties to go to and ebullient beat-Bush chatter to overhear.

At a reception Sunday night at Sophia’s restaurant in Boston, where food, wine and ebullient Democratic optimists were in ample supply, the New Democrat Network’s Hispanic Project welcomed Democrats from the five battleground states  — Arizona,  New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Florida — where NDN is running a heavy TV ad campaign to woo Latino voters.

President Bush carried four of those five states in 2000, just missing by a whisker in New Mexico (a heart-stopping 366-vote win for Al Gore).

New Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, and California Rep. Hilda Solis were among the Democratic leaders who showed up to see and be seen at Sophia's.

Maria Cardona, Director of NDN’s Hispanic Project, said the group’s Latino ad campaign started eight months before the election, not two or three weeks before the election, as previous Latino ad campaigns have.

“It is an ad campaign that is focused not just on getting Latinos to the polls or getting them to register, which traditionally has been the focus of Democratic campaigns towards Latinos,” she told MSNBC.com above the din of the crowd at Sophia’s. “It is an advertising campaign that is focused on education and persuasion. We are starting from the standpoint of not assuming that this group knows what the Democratic Party stands for…. We can’t assume that if we get them to the polls, they are going to vote for the Democratic Party.”

NDN wants to ensure that Kerry gets 70 percent of Latino voters and that nine percent of the Latino population will be voting on Nov. 2, compared to six percent of Latinos voting in the 2000 election.

Three former candidates
On Monday’s official convention agenda, look for speeches by three of the party’s past presidential candidates, with a combined batting average of .600, which any hitter on the Boston Red Sox would die for. The party’s loser four years ago, Gore, will join 1976 winner/1980 loser Jimmy Carter, and two-time victor Bill Clinton in addressing the delegates.

Most political junkies would agree that Clinton is the best speaker of the three, but Gore may be the most fascinating to watch.

In recent months Gore has given white-hot speeches accusing President Bush of lying about a link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein and leading the nation into what Gore sees as an unnecessary war in Iraq.

Will Gore cool his rhetoric out of concern that this convention ought not to appear to the national TV audience to be a gathering of zealous Bush haters? Or will he give his audience a fiery first course to whet appetites for speeches by John Kerry and John Edwards later this week?

Gore, Clinton and Carter are all Southerners, but only Gore was unable to carry a single Southern state in a presidential election. Listen for any lessons that Clinton and Carter might have to offer Kerry on how to carry some Southern states.

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