Kerry hopes to capitalize on 'buzz'
PORTLAND, Oregon -- By 9 a.m. on Friday, throngs of John F. Kerry supporters clogged the city center, blocking the garage where Julie Edwards parks for work. So rather than fight the crowd, the 41-year-old Republican joined it.
Four hours later, as the Democratic nominee was wrapping up his stump speech, Edwards finally made it through security. As she trudged toward the stage, it was not the candidate who amazed her but the massive crowd that turned out for him, even as President Bush was speaking just outside town.
"I've never seen anything like this," she said, surveying the more than 40,000 audience members. "This is going to make a real statement, a swing state turning out [for Kerry] like this, especially with Bush in town. I worry for Bush."
After worrying about their message, advertisements and grass-roots drive, the Bush campaign now has another concern on the horizon: the buzz generated by theatrical events, celebrity endorsements, and heavy supporter turnout on the other side, adding the glow of momentum to the Kerry campaign in a race that is locked in a statistical dead heat in most voter surveys.
Kerry, with the help of an occasional rock star joining him on stage, has sustained crowds into the tens of thousands since the convention in Boston, in a few instances clearly dwarfing the ticketed events President Bush tends to hold. Kerry, with fewer security concerns than a sitting president, can throw open his doors in ways Bush cannot, giving him a logistical advantage in building big audiences.
Crowd size can be an unreliable measure of how a campaign is progressing -- especially after a political convention that gave star billing to the candidate. But as the campaigns continue to chase each other from swing state to swing state, holding events within days -- or even hours -- of each other in the same media markets, the large crowds play to Kerry's advantage and generate a persistent story line in the local media wherever he goes: that the Kerry camp is more open to members of the public. And this, it is said, comes from both political parties.
To that end, Kerry campaign aides collect stories about closed Bush events from the local press, and gleefully celebrate stories about undecided voters turned away at the door. As all campaigns do, the Kerry staff keeps statistics -- and on occasion exaggerates them -- on the size of the crowds.
And the aides unabashedly add side attractions to lure audience members; on Friday, rock star Jon Bon Jovi and actor Leonardo DiCaprio teamed up with Kerry in Portland, instantly adding a level of glamour to his event. Across town, meanwhile, Bush was announcing new funding to deepen the Columbia River shipping channel, before holding an invitation-only rally with about 2,300 loyalists.
"In terms of buzz and intensity, you've got to remember that probably the campaign with the most buzz in terms of intensity and crowd size and the nexis with pop culture would be the Dean campaign," a Bush official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of the crowd sizes. "And so I don't know what that means."
Of course, former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who initially generated enormous buzz, saw his popularity melt away once Democrats began to cast primary votes. Nevertheless, each side works hard to demonstrate its popularity, by the few measures available. The Kerry campaign offers what it describes as concrete evidence they are on the move: By its count, 300,000 people saw the Kerry-Edwards tour from Boston to Portland over the past two weeks, the Kerry-Edwards book, "Our Plan for America," was downloaded 20,470 times from the campaign website, and a roster of 12,000 people signed up at events to volunteer for the campaign.
The Bush campaign has its own data: According to a spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise, 57,000 volunteers signed up to help Bush in the two weeks after the Democratic convention. During the Boston event, Bush campaign fund-raising totals amounted to six times the normal level, and its website traffic was three to four times greater than usual, she said.
Beyond that, momentum is difficult to quantify: Fund-raising is no longer a viable measure of popularity, since Kerry is now forbidden from raising money for his own campaign under federal financing laws. That leaves political strategists holding onto polling data, and grasping at ephemeral signals such as the numbers of campaign posters and bumper stickers, the chatter on various web logs -- and the size of the crowds.
"This is the most excited I've ever seen Jackson County Democrats, and I've lived in Jackson County since 1965!" said Linda McGraw, 59, a Kerry volunteer who spoke to reporters Thursday at an event in Medford, Ore.
She marveled at the size of the crowd packed in to see Kerry at the local rodeo, where the fair is held -- and pointed out that when Vice President Dick Cheney stopped at the same venue in July, the dusty enclosure was reported to have welcomed 3,000 guests, rather than the 7,500 the Kerry campaign had counted.
"It was very much an invitation-only thing when Cheney was here," she said, a point that was reported in local news accounts.
Political strategists argue that local media coverage of a visit is more important than the sheer volume of guests at a given speech; anyone who bothers to attend a rally is likely to be a supporter already, whereas local coverage reaches voters who aren't yet decided. Furthermore, Republicans show enthusiasm in less visible ways than Democrats, according to a political analyst, Charlie Cook of the National Journal.
"You see it more on the Democratic side," said, who has his own website. "I think that Democrats, liberals, tend to go see 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' while Republicans listen to Rush Limbaugh and go to [conservative website] freerepublic.com.";
But in the political world, where perception often passes for reality, the impression that campaigns are gaining or losing momentum can have tremendous impact on voters who are making up their minds -- and who frequently cast their lot with the campaign that appears to be winning. It is for that reason that campaign aides are often sensitive about crowd estimates, accusing rivals of hyping head counts while exaggerating their own.
The comparison has become the subject of more heated debate in recent weeks as the campaigns have played a cat-and-mouse game across the country, repeatedly crossing paths in swing states -- and important cities -- preventing either from fully monopolizing the news in a given media market.
Bush diverted his campaign bus in West Virginia two weeks ago to stop in Wheeling just ahead of Kerry, then followed him to Iowa several days later, and then last week trailed him to the West Coast, with stops in Los Angeles and Portland.
When the Bush and Kerry campaigns crossed paths several weeks ago in Davenport, Iowa, the appearance of momentum was reversed: Kerry held a closed business meeting with about 350 invited guests, while Bush appeared at a rally that drew at least 5,000.
And at Bush events that have sometimes seemed mixed on quantity -- such as a rally this month in Saginaw, Mich., that filled the seating in a sports arena but that left most of the event floor empty -- the crowds have more than compensated in quality, displaying wild enthusiasm with cheers that interrupt his speech every few sentences.
"When you look at all the empirical evidence available, the bases of both campaigns are motivated and engaged," said a Bush campaign spokesman, Steve Schmidt. "The support for the president among Republicans is at higher levels than it was for Ronald Reagan, which was the previous record high. The fact is that at this point in the presidential campaign, people are excited, and all over the country people are greeting the president with a great deal of enthusiasm."
Bush campaign officials are delighted to step on Kerry's message along the way, as they did in Portland, where all four of the local TV networks aired split-screen images of both Bush and Kerry during their dueling events.
When Bush's comments ran past schedule, Kerry delayed the start of his remarks across town; the next day, the Oregonian newspaper reported on the airtime rivalry between the campaigns and ran front-page photographs of both Bush and Kerry, allowing neither to dominate.
But the direct comparison in Portland offered one clear distinction: On Friday night and again the next morning in the newspaper, the images showed Bush virtually alone, against an empty backdrop, while Kerry was seen being amid a sea of supporters.
