As his campaign caravan cuts through the mountains of New Mexico, chugs into Arizona and pushes west and north to Nevada and Oregon, Sen. John Kerry offers himself up as a non-partisan Everyman, just trying to do what’s best for America.
There’s no talk of his Massachusetts roots or his liberal Senate voting record. Instead, he introduces himself to voters as a soldier, hunter and fisherman as he invokes President Franklin Roosevelt’s approach to public policy and as he talks over and over again about the need for Main Street common sense in solving the nation’s problems.
His slashing rhetoric of the primaries has all but evaporated. And there is some evidence that it has benefited him as one national poll indicated this week that voters see Kerry as more optimistic than President Bush, no small feat for a man to whom a smile doesn’t always come easy.
“There’s a lot of shouting in America, there’s a lot of partisanship. I don’t want that, I want to get away from that,” Kerry told voters gathered in a hockey rink in Beloit, Wis., earlier on this cross-country trip.
In fact, Kerry told thousands of voters jammed into Flagstaff’s Heritage Square late Sunday, they deserve to know what he would do as president.
“I’m not going to spend a lot of time telling you what they’ve done wrong,” he said. “I think Americans want a positive campaign. I think people are tired of all this negative attack.”
Republicans have been trying mightily to pigeonhole Kerry as a typical say-anything politician. They say he can’t be trusted with America’s future because he doesn’t know what he stands for, citing his vote to authorize war with Iraq and his subsequent vote to deny additional funding for the military.
“John Kerry has demonstrated an ability to say anything to anyone at anytime if he sees a political benefit,” said Steve Schmidt, a Bush campaign spokesman.
But on the campaign trail, Kerry has adopted an almost apolitical pose.
“This doesn’t have a political label,” Kerry said of cutting the deficit and balancing the budget. “I see a lot of people here. I know you’re not here just for a label, you’re not here because of Democrat or Republican or independent or liberal or conservative.
“You’re here to find out whether or not someone can lead this country with common sense and mainstream American values that make America fair, where we take care of everybody in the American family,” Kerry said in Beloit.
Often, he identifies himself with presidents who are no longer thought of by their party affiliation, but for their accomplishments.
“Like Franklin Roosevelt, I don’t care if it has a Democratic label or a Republican label, I care if it works for America,” he told thousands of voters in Kansas City, Mo.
And appropriating a theme from Bush’s 2000 campaign, Kerry said he wants to unite America, not divide it.
“Some people want to divide America into just red states and blue states,” he said in Flagstaff. “I don’t. I want America to be one America, red, white and blue. And I want us to come together around the things we need to do to solve our problems.”
To be sure, Kerry still throws punches at Bush, though often his criticism is implicit and muted.
In Flagstaff, he told the crowd that he has a plan to solve the nation’s health-care crisis and Bush doesn’t.
“I mean, think about it, sometimes I scratch my head and I say to myself, `Is this real?’ We’ve gone four years and there is no plan for America’s single biggest domestic problem other than jobs, which is the crisis in health care,” Kerry said.
Though he is aiming to talk more about what he would do as president and less about what he sees wrong with the chief executive, Kerry casts his disagreements as patriotic, not partisan.
“There are differences. I’m not telling you I’m not going to stand up and if I see them do something I think is wrong, I’m going to talk about it,” Kerry said in Beloit. “But we don’t want this to be personal. It’s not personal, it’s about our country.”
When he talks about who he is and where he comes from, Kerry never mentions the pricey boarding schools, the Ivy League or his homes in Georgetown, Beacon Hill, Sun Valley or Nantucket. He generally leaves out his love of windsurfing.
Instead, Kerry has talked about “dangling a line” with his father as he learned to fish. He has talked about his love of hunting, and discussed how his religion has shaped the values that inform his public works.
“I’m a person of faith, so is John Edwards, so are our families,” he told more than 20,000 people in Kansas City. “We’re taught in the Scriptures, `What is it, my brother, to have faith if there are no deeds.'”
And Kerry rarely forgets to implore his audiences to work on his behalf, trying to make the case he will mind their tax dollars and nurture the economy.
“I have a plan and I want you to go to your Republican friends,” he told thousands of voters gathered on both sides of the Milwaukee River in Milwaukee. “I want you to go to Republicans, I want you to go to independents, I want you to go to conservatives. I want you to say to them, `What is conservative about piling debt on our children for the future and driving up the biggest deficits in American history?'”
Still, not every voter readily accepts the portrait that Kerry is presenting. As his train rolled slowly through the small town of Raton, N.M., a man stood holding a sign for the nominee: “Democrats exist to divide.”
As Kerry stood on the back platform of the 1930 Pullman train that President Harry Truman once campaigned from, he saw the sign and said, “That’s not very nice.”
