While Kerry could probably be stronger if he weren't constrained by his own record -- and the lack of easy answers -- on Iraq, as he traveled through the Northwest and back again this week, it was hard not to feel the momentum building behind him anyway. Although some polls still show Kerry and Bush running neck-and-neck, the latest CBS poll shows Kerry leading by 8 points. Perhaps more encouraging for Kerry is a new poll showing rising favorable impressions among voters where it matters, in 20 key battleground states. And on Friday, his increasingly confident campaign announced that Kerry would even challenge the president in Republican-leaning Virginia, a state where Bush beat Gore in 2000 by a solid 8 points.
Democrats have fretted that Kerry hasn't defined himself yet, but that process is now in high gear. With the primary season behind him, Kerry suddenly begins to come off not as one of eight guys on a stage with Al Sharpton, but rather as someone who looks and acts like a president. He's so in demand by the TV news that his campaign staffers run him through five or six or seven or eight satellite interviews a day, one after another in rapid succession, with just enough time in between for a press aide to tell Kerry which city is next and remind him of a few salient facts about it.
And when Kerry rolls into a town -- his plane landing at the airport, his motorcade racing through streets, waves of Secret Service agents sweeping through the restaurants where he eats and the hotels where he stays -- it looks to all the world like a presidential visit. In Portland Tuesday evening, people spilled out of bars to wave and cheer as Kerry's motorcade rumbled past. In downtown Seattle Wednesday morning, thousands of supporters lined the streets in the rain for a chance to see the candidate and to hear him speak. And in Green Bay Thursday night, the Kerry campaign rolled into a roaring, confetti-coated rally overflowing with all the raucous joy of a Packers victory party.
In an arena across the way from the Packers' legendary Lambeau Field, a certain green-and-gold color theme was probably inevitable. But when the local newspaper ran a photo of Kerry on the front page Friday morning, the campaign had what it wanted: a shot of the candidate, veterans arrayed behind him, and a big American flag overhead.
About the writer
Tim Grieve is a senior writer for Salon based in San Francisco.
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