Bush team works to get under Kerry skin

WASHINGTON -- The plot to irritate John Kerry started to emerge last week, as President Bush traveled to Boston for an event his advisers boasted was just "walking distance" from the Massachusetts senator's Beacon Hill town house.

Next came the "Democrats for Bush" drive, featuring Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, who in a conference call with reporters said he appreciated Kerry as a friend and fellow Democrat -- before denouncing his policies and endorsing Bush.

Tomorrow, Bush officials again hope to hit Kerry where he lives, this time with a scathing assessment from a Boston area police officer. "John Kerry has been my senator for 20 years," Officer Jay Moccia of Hyde Park says in the 60-second radio spot, his Boston accent underscoring the point.

"You might want to know him the way some of us in Massachusetts do. Take his record on taxes. John Kerry likes to raise taxes . . . He's done it before, and he'll do it again."

For the most part, such endeavors are designed to accomplish traditional political goals -- in this case, convince voters that Kerry can be undermined where he is strongest, counter his proposal to cut corporate taxes, and give the Bush team an opportunity to repeat criticisms of his record and his past. Kerry steadfastly denies he would raise taxes on those making less than $200,000 a year.

But politics is also personal, and campaign strategists are fond of concocting ways to get under their rivals' skin. "Every good campaign tries to play a little psychological warfare with the other side," said Mike Murphy, the Republican strategist who ran Mitt Romney's campaign in 2002. "While it won't win or lose a campaign, it will help on the margins . . . You want to keep your opponent off-balance psychologically."

Bush aides think that if they push the right buttons, they can knock Kerry off stride given what they have seen of him so far.

"He has a thin skin, and he's demonstrated that for most of his life," said Ron Kaufman, a Bush ally and the Massachusetts committeeman at the Republican National Committee. "It's not just that we can torment Kerry; we're having fun with his entire team because they're all from Boston, and so it reverberates even more sometimes."

To take advantage of that perceived weakness, Kaufman said, he went on WBZ radio last Thursday morning ahead of the Bush fund-raiser in Boston to declare that the Republican campaign had raised more money in Massachusetts than Kerry himself.

Kerry advisers brush the theory aside, saying sophomoric pranks are unlikely to sway voters in this election. "It gives their field operatives something to do," Michael Meehan, a Kerry strategist, said.

But Kerry aides are not above playing their own jokes. They sent Wesley Clark's campaign a stack of Zero candy bars during the primary season to represent the number of Republicans who have won a Democratic primary. Clark had been chided for joining the Democratic Party relatively late. Meehan said Bush and his advisers are not always as funny as they think. "His jokes about not finding the weapons of mass destruction at the D.C. cocktail party last week were on the national news two nights in a row," Meehan said, referring to the skit Bush taped for the Radio and Television News Correspondents Association dinner last Wednesday night, which showed him on a fake hunt for the weapons that triggered the war in Iraq.

Kerry, as well as families of US soldiers killed or wounded in Iraq, questioned the appropriateness of the joke.

"Sometimes, the Bush-Washington sense of humor has backfire potential," Meehan said.

Officially, Bush officials say their aim is to tackle Kerry on substance rather than merely psych him out. If the latest radio ad is at all directed at Kerry rather than voters, it is to "remind him that the people of Massachusetts, who know him best," are not all in his court, senior Bush media strategist Mark McKinnon said.

"What's problematic for Kerry is when he has to face his own record," McKinnon said. "All we're doing is rolling out a record of 19 years of votes that he would rather ignore."

But the Bush team delights in stunts that needle its rivals, according to operatives both inside the campaign and out. "They revel in them," said John Weaver, an adviser in 2000 to Senator John McCain, who challenged Bush for the Republican presidential nomination. "I don't know if it ever garners them any votes, but they do enjoy the high jinks."

On top of that, numerous Republicans -- and even Democrats -- said Kerry's serious, competitive demeanor makes him easy to taunt, as advisers to Howard Dean learned at the height of their primary run. When Dean began outpacing Kerry in fund-raising and the polls, Kerry grew irritated in public settings with his rival; he was overheard muttering Dean's name aloud over and over during a debate, a moment Dean advisers said showed they had pushed Kerry's buttons.

Campaigning in an opponent's backyard, as Bush did last week, is a favorite trick. George H.W. Bush took a highly publicized tour of the polluted Boston Harbor when he was facing off against Michael S. Dukakis in the 1988 campaign (during which the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association endorsed the sitting vice president over the Bay State's governor). And Al Gore traveled to Texas to highlight problems in Bush's home state in 2000.

But Republicans hope to do more than use Massachusetts as a backdrop in this year's campaign. They also hope to aggravate Kerry and his staff.

One stunt aimed at Kerry that Republicans relish came in 1996 during the Senate race between Kerry and former Massachusetts governor William Weld, whose aides posted a giant "Weld for Senate" billboard within view of the Democrat's campaign headquarters on Portland Street.

But if the billboard incident is indicative of what the Bush campaign has in mind this time around, more pranks of its kind may be welcomed by the Kerry camp.

"We saw that as a monumental waste of time and money," said Meehan, who also worked for Kerry in the '96 race. "They thought they were hilarious, and we thought it was symbolic of them blowing money."

Michael Feldman, a Democratic strategist and former adviser to Gore, conceded that any psychological warfare can be effective to a degree. "To some extent, campaigns are about discipline, and any tactic that successfully undermines the discipline of a campaign or knocks that campaign off its stride, knocks the messenger off their message, can be very valuable."

But, Feldman said, "Ultimately, the American people are going to decide this based on the issues. And it's going to take more than mind games or clever tactics to undermine a message for change if, at the end of the day, that's what the American people want."

Anne E. Kornblut can be reached at akornblut@globe.com.