Kerry takes steps to unbutton his emotions

APPLETON, Wis. -- With 16 days left to make his case to voters, John F. Kerry is trying to break through as a crowd-pleasing, storytelling political salesman -- although in many ways his communications style remains more buttoned-up and workmanlike than dazzling, according to some campaign advisers, allies, and analysts of presidential rhetoric.

The Democratic nominee's efforts to connect with Americans have found Kerry to be something of a paradox: His most human and likable sides came across when he was at his lowest, ignoring bad polls and poking fun at himself with voters last fall, and drinking beer and cracking up reporters with off-color jokes.

But now that more people want to see that personal side, Kerry is far more cautious -- hugging and mugging and listening to people's problems, yes, but rarely displaying his emotions, even shooing away Alex, his camera-toting daughter, as she tries to film his private moments for a documentary.

Despite all the former Clinton aides now working for him, Kerry has not approached Bill Clinton's starry heights as a communicator: He does not always console the people in tears, and he doesn't always remember names. Senior Kerry advisers joke about putting money into a kitty for each sound bite he delivers cleanly, hoping that with precious days left to campaign, Kerry will stop fumbling some of his best lines. And if he speaks more articulately and coherently than Bush -- as has been evident in the recent debates -- he performs with less heart-on-the-sleeve appeal than the incumbent.

"I'm surprised at how modestly Kerry's evolved as a communicator after two years of running for president," said Alan Schroeder, a Northeastern University professor and a specialist on political speech.

"Take people's fears about the future of Social Security. In the last debate, he kept talking about the CBO until it dawned on him that he had to explain what the Congressional Budget Office was. I was surprised that after all this time on the campaign trail, he still lapses into that kind of speech."

At one point last winter, Kerry once said he could "dumb down" his language, speak more plainly, but he thought voters would sense the phoniness and punish him for it. So he has tried to connect in other ways. At two rallies in Wisconsin on Friday night, he went for empathy as he told the story of an out-of-work Ohio father who had said he had lost his pride by relying on others to buy his daughter a dress for her first homecoming dance. Voters also enthusiastically applaud his most optimistic lines, like "let America be America again" and "hope is on the way," but his public sense of humor -- about unemployed Elvises or Bush's middle initial standing for "wrong" -- often falls flat, if laughter is the measure.

"I was in Colorado recently talking about likability, and many of the people thought Kerry was equally likable to Bush," said Susan Estrich, a political analyst who was campaign manager for Michael Dukakis in 1988, making a point reflected in recent polls. "Now, that is not something people from Boston would have ever said, even his best friends. What is warming him up, I think, is that he has more stories and can demonstrate almost any policy point these days with a story."

The missteps from his rookie days as a national campaigner have largely been corrected, aides say. Minutes before a speech on energy policy in Santa Fe on Monday, for instance, Kerry learned that his teleprompter wasn't working. It was a nervous moment for aides: Kerry made some of his rambling speeches in the primaries when he had to read from paper, in unfamiliar lighting. But the malfunctioning machine did not faze Kerry; the precise words mattered less, he told aides, than showing passion for his ideas, like weaning the country from Middle East oil.

"He used to get so rattled over unnecessary problems like a broken teleprompter," said Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who watched his reactions before the speech. (The machine ultimately was fixed.) "But he was serene, confident, calm."

For weeks now, Kerry's advisers on the campaign plane have focused on communications strategy. They remind the candidate to hammer home, consistently and firmly, the catch phrases that sow doubts about Bush's leadership choices. But television camera crews who have covered these races for years say Kerry still routinely mangles sound bites. In Las Vegas on Thursday, he turned one crisp line -- "the president just doesn't get it" -- into a flatter version when he said, "this president just doesn't seem to get it."

"The sound bites -- he's still working on them," said Michael McCurry, a senior adviser who was a press secretary for Clinton. "Part of me appreciates his resistance to the seven-second sound bites.

"It's human. But we joke with him sometimes that we want to see if he can actually do the sound bite in order to get his competitive juices flowing."

McCurry said preparing for the recent debates had helped Kerry enormously in honing his message. At the first debate Sept. 30, where Kerry was widely seen as a big winner, his top advisers cheered and hugged while watching him on TV; at the third on Wednesday, there was delight in Bush's missteps but moments of concern about Kerry's ability to connect. Some advisers thought he had given an eloquent answer about homosexuality as a trait, not a choice, but then damaged himself by citing the example of Mary Cheney, the gay daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney; the comment drew fire from the Cheneys as gratuitous.

"It was the debates where Kerry began communicating that he could be a strong leader, not the bureaucratic flip-flopper that Bush described," said Doris Kearns Goodwin, the presidential biographer who is now working on a book about Lincoln. "But the challenge continues -- to convey leadership by showing he can speak from the heart in ways that move people and shape opinions."

Engaging on a human scale has perhaps been toughest for Kerry, Goodwin and other observers say. He is in many ways solitary: He loves playing his guitar but does not entertain crowds with it on the trail. He loves certain sports -- biking, windsurfing, skiing -- that allow him to be alone with his thoughts, aides say. Last Monday, as he spoke about the death of his friend Christopher Reeve a day earlier, several aides and reporters perked up because he rarely expresses deeper feelings.

Last Thursday, Alex Kerry pointed out a photo in a book of her dad in his youth, grinning in khakis and an Izod as he played "roof ball" on the eaves of a Cape Cod home. She laughed at the image of a man who makes her laugh in private moments.

"That's the man I wish people saw more of," she said of the photo.

Patrick Healy can be reached at phealy@globe.com.