Hijacking The Campaign

By Karen Tumulty/Washington

To all appearances, it was just another made-for-TV moment, brought to you by the John Kerry for President campaign: a balmy summer Sunday evening that found the newly official Democratic nominee playing a few carefree innings of softball with fire fighters and autoworkers on a small-town diamond in the heartland. But unknown even to some of Kerry's top aides, something that hadn't been written into the script was quietly taking place inside the luxury campaign bus parked just beyond right field in Taylor, Mich. Secret Service agents were laying secure phone lines, hanging privacy curtains and installing high-tech gear so Kerry could get a top-secret, 40-min. briefing on the intelligence that had prompted the Department of Homeland Security hours earlier to raise the terrorism alert level in New York City and Washington.

Kerry's was not the only campaign whose plans had been jolted that weekend. When the information reached President Bush two days earlier, he had been in almost the same position, launching what was supposed to have been a feel-good Midwestern bus tour focused on domestic politics. Even as Bush went from rally to rally, claiming achievements in education, health care and the economy, his thoughts were on the scary information that was pouring into the White House situation room. "It's hair raising," the President privately told an adviser aboard his campaign bus as it rolled between stops in Ohio and Pennsylvania. "This stuff is really hair raising."

That's what it's like, both men are learning, to be in a tight presidential contest in the post-9/11 world, where message and stagecraft keep tripping over reality. Last week's terrorism alert, coming on the heels of the 9/11 commission's devastating account of the missed signals that might have saved thousands of American lives, put the two candidates at odds over terrorism in a way that was more confrontational--and personal--than ever. In a Rose Garden ceremony that reminded everyone of the advantages that come with being an incumbent Commander in Chief, Bush, surrounded by his war Cabinet, declared it "my most solemn duty" to protect the nation and embraced part of the commission's recommendations--only to have Kerry dismiss the move as insufficient and late. Kerry then added the charge that the President's policies are "actually encouraging the recruitment of terrorists," which prompted Bush's stern reply that Kerry suffered from "a fundamental and dangerous misunderstanding of the enemy we face." Kerry even faulted Bush's reaction in 2001 upon learning of the 9/11 attacks--the scene that everyone who has seen Fahrenheit 9/11 will remember as seven excruciating minutes of reading The Pet Goat with a classroom of Florida schoolchildren. At that point the Bush campaign hauled out that icon of 9/11, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to brand Kerry "an indecisive candidate who has demonstrated an inconsistent position on the war on terror" and one who has been reduced, moreover, to "armchair quarterbacking based on cues from Michael Moore." So much for terrorism being the one issue that was supposed to be too grave to be sullied or manipulated by politics.

But if Bush and Kerry think there are voters to be won by squabbling over the proper approach to protect the homeland, they might want to pay heed to the results of the latest TIME poll. It suggests that the fear of terrorism, absent another attack on U.S. soil, may be losing some of its edge with voters. In the three-day poll, conducted after the alert level was raised, just 21% of likely voters reported being "very worried" about a terrorist attack in the near future--which was only slightly higher than the 17% who described themselves that way in mid-July. Voters' main concern continued to be the economy--cited by 27% as their top priority. That was virtually unchanged from two weeks before and suggests that last week's disappointing employment numbers may have more political impact than the terrorism alert. In July only 32,000 new jobs were created, which was about 200,000 fewer than expected. Only 19% of likely voters polled cited the war on terrorism as their main concern, the same percentage that named either the war in Iraq or moral issues like gay marriage and abortion as most important in determining whom they will vote for in November.

All of which helps explain why the chilling news has done little more than leave the presidential race frozen in place. TIME's poll showed the lead remains within the margin of error, with Kerry ahead of Bush 48% to 43% among likely voters, with Ralph Nader receiving 4%, and a mere 3% of those polled saying they are undecided. Kerry failed to get much of the boost he had hoped for from the Democratic Convention two weeks ago. Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd gleefully declared the convention's effect a thud, not a bounce, but Democrats insisted the unchanged polls merely reflect an electorate so entrenched on one side or the other that few voters are up for grabs.

Yet a closer look at the numbers suggests that the impressions voters have of Kerry have shifted in the wake of the Boston convention, with its theme of strength, its spotlight on the candidate's war record in Vietnam and its cast of featured speakers who would have looked more at home in a VFW hall than at Democratic gatherings in the past. Kerry is gaining ground on the very issues that Bush had been assuming would be his own. The gap on the question of which candidate would provide "strong leadership in difficult times" has been cut in half since July, with Bush winning out, 49% to 44%. The two are dead even at 47% on the question of which man voters would trust more to be Commander in Chief. And likely voters expressed virtually equal amounts of confidence in Bush and Kerry to lead the war on terrorism, with 61% saying they would trust Kerry and 62% saying they would put their faith in Bush. "This is a new Democratic Party," says Kerry adviser James Rubin. "John Kerry can face off and win a debate with George Bush over who can keep us safer."

Bush strategists dismiss those gains by Kerry as a postconvention blip and predict they will soon be erased by what voters see of the Democratic Senator now that he is back in the fray. The real Kerry, they snickered, is the one who asserted last week that he could fight "a more sensitive war on terror"--a statement that couldn't have sounded more dainty if he had uttered it in French.

That was mild compared with the attack, funded by a major G.O.P. donor in Texas, that Kerry endured on his freshly shined national-security credentials from a Vietnam veterans' group independent of the Republican Party. The group began airing in three states a 60sec. ad claiming that Kerry had lied about his war record. But the move backfired when Senator John McCain, a former Vietnam POW and a keynote speaker at the upcoming Republican Convention, blasted the ad as "dishonest and dishonorable" and called on the Bush campaign to condemn it. White House spokesman Scott McClellan took issue only with the manner in which the ad was financed.

Meanwhile, the fallout from the 9/11 commission and the terrorism alerts reveals that Bush may have developed some vulnerabilities on the issue that is considered his greatest strength. Bush tried to walk a delicate line with the commission: he supported its recommendation to create a new national intelligence director but wouldn't give the position the power that comes only with budget authority. That avoided a bitter turf war within his Administration, but it left him open to charges--not only from Kerry but also from Republican members of the commission--that he was dodging real reform. The commission's Republican chairman Tom Kean even went so far as to tell TIME that the watered-down version of the recommendations as initially proposed by Bush would be a "waste of time." Kerry, on the other hand, has said he would adopt all the commission's recommendations if elected, although some in his party are wary of certain proposals, such as one for national identification cards. The challenger has argued he would protect the homeland better than Bush has, by increasing spending, setting national standards for community responses to terrorist attacks and improving port security.

In what may be an even more dangerous development for the President, the announcement of new terrorism alerts so soon after the Democratic Convention invited suspicion that the Administration was cranking up fears to scare voters into sticking with the leader they know. In the TIME poll a surprisingly large 40% of those asked said they believed the Administration was not above using a terrorism alert for political reasons. That sentiment also came through in interviews with likely voters around the country. "I've gotten so I don't believe the Administration [when it puts] out information," said Richard Rasmussen, 81, a retired stockbroker and Kerry voter in Davenport, Iowa, a town where the two candidates found themselves campaigning within blocks of each other last week. On the other hand, most of those polled--53%--were more inclined to agree with another probable Kerry voter in Davenport. "You just nowadays can't take a chance," said Helen Eberle, 78, a retired teacher. "It's hard for us to believe that they would use that as a political ploy. I just don't think they'd play around with that."

Still, that people--and especially in sizable numbers--would even raise that possibility could mark a real shift for both Bush and Kerry. If there was one thing that both sides were figuring into their calculations in this race, it was that the fight against terrorism would be Bush's strongest asset. And if there was one other thing, it's that this would be the issue that would trump every other. Now it seems the only thing that isn't changing about the presidential race is the one thing that has been constant almost from the start: it's still too close to call. --With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington and Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi/Washington and Betsy Rubiner/Des Moines