Bad news for Bush boosts Kerry's standing

DURHAM, N.H. -- Last week -- while soldiers were dying in Iraq at a clip of a half-dozen a day, officials were pointing fingers at one another on the 9/11 Commission witness stand, and President Bush was trying to remember whether he'd ever made a mistake -- John F. Kerry was on a road trip.

His ''Change Starts with U: Kerry Campus Tour 2004" began and ended last week with the lanky candidate venturing into partially empty gyms like a nostalgic alum looking for a pickup game.

If the Kerry campaign were, indeed, a basketball team, it wouldn't have made the National Invitation Tournament based on its performance at the college tour kickoff, at the University of New Hampshire. But it proved to be a good week for the campaign, with polls generally indicating small improvements in Kerry's standing against President Bush. Kerry's gains sprang from Bush's woes, but the candidate played them just right: He was so quiet he could have spent the week hiding in the back of Econ 101.

George W. Bush is standing at the center of the presidential campaign, and that's not necessarily bad for Kerry. With his shifts in foreign policy, and bigger tax cuts than Ronald Reagan, Bush has headed one of the loudest administrations in history. And yet its campaign arm, overseen by Karl Rove, seems to think it can yell over the din and fixate voters on Kerry's 19 years of liberal votes in the Senate.

Bob Woodward's new book, based on the unprecedented access to the Bush team, features an ebullient Rove running through binders of opposition research on Kerry like a rabbi exalting over the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The early evidence, however, suggests that the news of the day, from Iraq to Israel to North Korea to Haiti to Spain and beyond, will continue to put Bush's policies on the line.

Kerry, for his part, seems to have realized that his best hope is to run as the Default President, the place to which voters can connect when the regular president goes on the fritz.

This makes Kerry's position unusual, to say the least, for a presidential challenger. Instead of painting castles in the sky and urging voters to share his dreams, Kerry has been grounding himself in the policies of the past. He will try to become the incumbent in the race, representing 50 years of postwar consensus against four years of Bush.

In foreign affairs, he hopes to signal a reassuring return to the days of the East Coast establishment, with its emphasis on preserving order and building international consensus against common enemies. His praise of George H. W. Bush during Sunday's ''Meet the Press" interview was probably a harbinger, with Kerry reminding voters that even the president's own father didn't share many of his son's policies.

Domestically, Kerry is promising a return to Clinton-era ''pay as you go" economics, a formula that suggests that budgetary restraint -- on both spending and tax cuts -- brings down the deficit, frees up capital for investment, and thereby promotes long-term prosperity. Clinton's chief economic adviser, Gene B. Sperling, recently signed up to write Kerry's plan.

To succeed in creating an air of incumbency, Kerry must appear mature and almost boring -- a mannequin ready to take his place alongside the faux Calvin Coolidge and William Howard Taft in Walt Disney World's ''Hall of Presidents." Kerry seems to be preparing for the role.

Last week, the Bush campaign was hungry for a Kerry gaffe to deflect attention from all the bad news. With soldiers dying in Iraq, the Bush team was prepared to portray even a mildly intemperate show of opposition as a betrayal of the troops.

Kerry held his tongue. Such discretion was at least partly responsible for his tepid performance at the University of New Hampshire.

''Thank you, Wildcats -- there's a lot of energy here," Kerry said enthusiastically.

But there wasn't much energy. The audience was shepherded into a tiny portion of the cavernous field house, separated by the kind of blue curtains used to mark space at a high school science fair. Some students left after the warm-up act, the college band Guster.

Advance staff did everything but put former New Hampshire governor Jeanne Shaheen in a letter sweater to convey an atmosphere of collegiate fun, but Kerry wasn't playing along.

The crowd cheered after a stray reference to Iraq, but the candidate veered away. By the end, he was vowing to preserve Social Security until today's students retire, a promise that seemed to strike most of the kids like a math assignment: How many more years until Social Security kicks in? Forty-six or 47?

But Kerry doesn't have to excite the young. He only has to strike them as more reasonable than Bush.