Right tone, right time
HAMPTON, N.H. -- All right, guys, what did you do with our junior senator? Somewhere along the back roads of some battleground state, it appears that John Sasso and Mike McCurry dragged John Kerry kicking and screaming into an empty motel room, taped sheets over the windows, and proceeded to beat the insincerity out of him.
They must have attached electrodes to his arms and legs, and every time he used words like furthermore, and phrases like ''just three more things," shocked him back to smiling silence.
How else to explain how yesterday, as time ran out on an oddly engaging forum on stem cell research, Kerry suddenly remembered he had told a student in the last row that he could ask a question? ''I actually promised this young fellow," he announced to the crowd, as aggravated aides stewed in the wings.
And how else to explain how he remembered everyone's name around him without so much as a note? Or why he intently zoned in on people as they spoke, often nodding his head in appreciation? John Kerry, paying attention to someone other than himself? Get me rewrite.
In fact, by every measure, Kerry is a candidate transformed, not so much reinvented these past 10 days as significantly refined, more disciplined, more succinct, and more empathetic.
Thursday's debate performance was but one example. A few days before that, he gave the most forceful and cogent Iraq speech of the campaign, and the day after the debate, he delivered a speech in Orlando that drew sharper lines of difference with President Bush on domestic issues than Kerry had drawn before.
What it means remains unclear, except that this race will be as tight as first expected. Kerry was never doing as poorly as every two-bit cable television commentator and the schizophrenic national press corps had him last month, nor is he faring quite as well as they all say he's doing now. Say one thing about the on-air bloviators: They can probably relate to Kerry's difficulty in making up his mind.
But within Kerry's campaign, two significant changes have taken place, one stylistic, the other strategic. On the style front, he has changed the tone of his speeches. No longer is he lecturing or speechifying or orating like some Shakespearean actor, the way he did at the Democratic National Convention.
Yesterday, his volume was turned down, his tone confiding. He wasn't speaking at audience members as much as he was conversing with them, at once empathizing in their plight -- in this case, diseases that could be addressed by stem cell research -- while bringing them along in his cause. For lack of a better way to put it, he was Clintonian in delivery, asking questions of audience members, reminiscing about foliage drives with his daughters, showing a command of the facts without being ostentatious about it.
Strategically, Kerry is in the process of not only blunting Bush's sharpest line of attack, the whole flip-flopping thing, but actually using it against the president. He has argued that the steadfastness and determination that Bush claims as an attribute are actually willfulness and stubbornness and often result in the president refusing to acknowledge crucial facts in making bad decisions, whether in Iraq or the ballooning budget deficits or stem cell research funding.
By contrast, in this line of attack Kerry comes across as the more sophisticated thinker, open to the ever-changing ways of the world, willing to correct mistakes.
Within his campaign, Kerry is gaining what one high-placed aide described as ''a certain confidence." As another said, ''He's becoming more comfortable in his own skin." His new advisers are raising warning flags about Friday's town hall-style debate, saying Kerry could easily suffer amid overly high expectations.
It's been said here before that presidential campaigns are long for a reason, and right now, amid the back and forth and give and take, we're seeing why. Yes, Mr. President, it is hard work. But with an almost breathtaking amount of politics left to go in the next four weeks, Kerry is doing more and talking less.
Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.
