At birthplace, Kerry begins journey home
DENVER -- John F. Kerry may be a senator from Massachusetts, but the Democratic presidential candidate laid claim to his Colorado roots yesterday as he kicked off a cross-country tour to the Boston convention by casting himself as a Westerner at heart and by birthright who would bring a frontier spirit of possibility to the White House.
Kerry, who spent the first four months of his life in Aurora, Colo., used glowing language to describe the city during a campaign rally in Denver, noting that Aurora's name means "dawn" and hailing its residents because they "never lost their Main Street values and their boundless sense of optimism." Kerry's speech echoed candidate Bill Clinton's own autobiographical remarks in 1992 as a man from "a place called Hope" -- although Clinton lived in that Arkansas town for most of his young life, while Kerry, until yesterday, had not visited Aurora since he was born there in 1943.
"Maybe it's something in the water -- you can tell me -- but I can tell you, even though I spent just a little time here over the course of a lifetime, I am always proud that I can claim I have at least some roots in the West," said Kerry, an avid outdoorsman, to a crowd of 5,000 prior to his touring the hospital where he was born.
Over the next six days, in visits to cities such as Sioux City and Philadelphia that have special meaning for him or in US history, Kerry hopes to draw on the patriotic feeling and "can-do optimism" -- a favorite phrase of his these days -- as he prepares to accept the Democratic nomination next week.
"On Thursday we're going to wind up in Boston, where the next great journey will begin -- the journey that will take us to the White House on November 2, the journey that will restore America's values," said Kerry, who was joined by his wife, two daughters, and two of his three stepsons, as well as his running mate, John Edwards, and his family. "We're the ones who just need to lift ourselves up, reach for the next dream, and look to the next horizon, remember how we built America. What the people in Colorado have always known is still true: America's best days are still ahead of us."
Kerry's 30-minute speech was largely devoid of the stinging attacks that he has made on President Bush all year -- leaving it instead to Edwards, who campaigned for the Democratic nomination last winter as an optimist, to call the current administration up short.
"When John Kerry is commander in chief of the American people, he will lead the world -- not bully it," Edwards said, as he introduced Kerry at the rally at Denver's Filmore Auditorium. "We can reject this tired old hateful negative politics of the past, and instead we can embrace the politics of hope, the politics of what's possible -- this is America, where everything is possible."
While another speaker, Democratic congresswoman Diana DeGette, took a swipe at Bush for not enlisting for Vietnam as Kerry had -- "others made a different choice, to be safer here in the National Guard" -- Edwards assailed the White House's record of military leadership, saying that the Democratic ticket would "build strong alliances around the world so that no young American, man or woman, ever goes to war needlessly."
Edwards also drew laughs by setting the theme for the day, noting that Colorado was "the birthplace of the cheeseburger, the birthplace of the rodeo, and the birthplace of the next president of the United States of America."
Campaign advisers said that yesterday's event was as much designed for competing in this 2004 electoral battleground state as laying out Kerry's biography and tying it to "a lifetime of service," starting with his father's World War II service in the Army Air Corps and his mother's long involvement with the Boy and Girl Scouts; Kerry's father was treated at a tuberculosis clinic in Aurora's Fitzsimons Army Medical Center, which brought the family there.
Kerry included a bit of news in his remarks on public service in the rally, proposing a $10 million Citizen Patriots Fund that would make $100,000 grants to former military service members, Peace Corps and AmeriCorps members, and others who want to create their own service projects.
After the Denver rally, Kerry and his wife and daughters visited the Fitzsimons ward and nursery where Kerry was born -- and which he jokingly noted was in the hospital's West Wing, a reference to the Oval Office of the White House. "This was the nursery -- can you hear me screaming?" Kerry joked at one point.
He also took a brief tour of the Eisenhower suite in Building 500, where Dwight D. Eisenhower recovered from a heart attack in 1955. The spartan suite has been restored to look as it did then; Kerry perused a 1955 Reader's Digest that Eisenhower had read and later signed a guestbook.
Patrick Healy can be reached at phealy@globe.com.
