APPLETON, Wis. - Two days out from the presidential election, here's the real deal for Democratic Sen. John Kerry: He faces a powerful incumbent whose campaign often has him on the defensive, especially on national security. Polls show his base is less excited about electing him than dumping President Bush. And he's struggling in several states the Democrats won four years ago.
But Bush's approval ratings are mediocre at best, Iraq continues to make for messy headlines, and few here in Wisconsin, Ohio or even Florida are feeling flush. Kerry and his team, jetting about America like rock stars, often with rock stars, say they're feeling good.
He has about 60 hours until the polls close. In Tampa tonight, as he has the past two days, Kerry will try to distill his rambling array of points on Iraq, the economy, Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy and stem cell research into a simple argument for voting for him and against the president:
Life in America is not better than it was four years ago, unless you're rich, and it will only get worse if Bush is re-elected. I will make it better.
He must produce a massive turnout of Democratic loyalists - African-Americans in Jacksonville, students in Columbus, Ohio, elderly Roosevelt Democrats in Broward County - that will rival the record turnout for Al Gore in 2000.
At a boggy ball field at a middle school in Appleton on Saturday morning, Kerry told several hundred supporters bundled against the gray, damp chill that Tuesday's election is too crucial to ignore, as he exhorted them to herd their friends and neighbors to the polls.
This election, he said, is about, "everything that affects the quality of life, every single one of them. Your job, your health care, the level of your college tuition, whether your kid can go to an afterschool program.
"Not those little trumped up hot-button issues they use to try to divide America, but all the things that really matter. ... I believe George Bush has it backward. He fights for the wealthy, I fight for the middle class and the people who are struggling to get into it."
Mike McCurry, a senior adviser who has helped Kerry sharpen his message in recent weeks, said Kerry won't deviate much from a new, shorter version of his stump speech he adopted Friday that lays bare the differences between him and Bush.
"The American people are capable of absorbing lots of information like the Osama (bin Laden) tape and focusing on the campaign and the issues," McCurry said. "We're confident we're making the right arguments here."
There isn't much room for error. Polls show a dead heat in Florida and Ohio, which Bush won in 2000, as well as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which Al Gore won. Hawaii, which usually votes Democratic, is teetering; but New Hampshire, which Bush won in 2000, is teetering, too.
Meanwhile, Kerry's frequent criticism that Bush became distracted by Iraq when he should have focused on al-Qaida in Afghanistan has assumed new significance with the release of the videotape in which bin Laden said he ordered the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Bin Laden also referred to the presidential race.
Kerry did not mention the video Saturday at rallies in Wisconsin, Iowa and Ohio. But the al-Qaida leader's eerie visage and the apparent theft of 380 tons of high explosives from an unguarded ammunition dump in Iraq are "things that crystalize for Americans what the stakes are," McCurry said. "This allows people to judge for themselves."
Republicans believe the tape helps Bush because it reminds Americans al-Qaida is still a threat, and polls show Bush has an edge on security issues.
The last leg of a presidential race is not the time for surprises, and undecided voters hoping the candidates will discuss the environment or potential appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court likely will be disappointed.
This is the time to rally voters and to be cautiously frenetic. The Kerry campaign has assumed the feel of a college dorm at the end of exams, its denizens wired on too much caffeine and too little sleep, and subject to emotional swings.
Kerry will visit Dayton, Ohio, and Manchester, N.H., before his rally along the Hillsborough River in downtown Tampa tonight. Reporters traveling in the back of his red, white and blue campaign plane often study the national weather map in hotel copies of USA Today to figure out where they are. Each day starts near dawn and ends after midnight.
Friends say this stage of the campaign - neck-and-neck, scrapping for votes - plays to Kerry's fortitude, and his exuberance on the stump the past week reflects his confidence and thrill of the hunt.
At each stop, he assails Bush as blind to the persistent loss of good jobs in manufacturing states and to the growing insurgency in Iraq, as well as beholden to big oil, big business and the rich. He pledges to mend international fences and recruit other nations to help in Iraq, to raise the minimum wage, to roll back Bush's tax cuts for those who make more than $200,000 a year, and to remove $43-billion in corporate tax breaks for offshore operations, part of a tax bill the president signed last month.
Lately he appears more loose and comfortable on stage, appearing with Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi and, tonight in Tampa, with the Goo Goo Dolls. He's managed to ad-lib without running on and on, to talk about defending America without relying so heavily on his own Vietnam War experience. He told voters in Miami on Friday that this election is the most important of their lives - and he said it in halting Spanish.
"No mas Bush, no mas Bush," the crowd chanted.
"He's polished up over this last year," said Terri Deems, 48, of Ankeny, Iowa, who heard Kerry speak Saturday afternoon outside the gold-domed state Capitol in Des Moines. "We're back 15 years from where we were four years ago. I don't understand how anyone can look at Bush's record and not elect Kerry."
Still missing, however, is much sense of Kerry's off-stage personality. Friends and family describe him as warm, fun-loving, even funny. But the only recent glimpse came when he donned a Boston Red Sox cap and yelled "Yeah!" into a TV camera the day after the Sox won the World Series.
The night before, he missed a chance to play regular guy by reneging on a promise to have a beer with his press corps if the Sox won.
Unlike the campaign's early stages, Kerry's personal encounters with supporters these days have become more rare, although in Appleton he did pet a golden retriever wearing a Kerry-Edwards T-shirt. He and his handlers have become increasingly guarded, as any gaffe could divert attention from his message or, worse, make him look unpresidential.
Critics say that reticence has robbed him of the chance to cultivate the rapport with the press and voters that helped Bush appear so much more likable than Al Gore in 2000.
At rallies in Madison, Wis., Orlando, Des Moines and elsewhere, supporters asked about their affection for Kerry often cite his intellect, his palpable stage presence, his military service and his concern for working people. They do not say they would like to have a beer with him or that he seems like a regular guy.
Then again, some note, nobody with a 50-50 chance of becoming president of the the United States is a regular guy.
