Kerry is emphasizing his veteran status, or at least he did today.
First, at about 11:30 a.m. CST, 60 war veterans arrived by bus from Boston. Mostly Vietnam-era vets (with a sprinkling of Korean and Gulf War I veterans for good measure), they made it from Kerry's North End offices to Des Moines in 18 hours straight. (Not sure if it is symbolically intentional, or merely because office rents are cheap there, but apparently Kerry's Massachusetts office is located not far from the Fleet Center where the 2004 DNC convention will be held this July.)
I spoke with a Vietnam vet named Paul, a 57-year-old native of Boston. He was a sergeant in the 9th Marine regiment for ten-and-a-half months during 1968 and 1969. Fighting in the DMZ, he said most guys "up in front," like himself, were lucky to survive 90 days. "I only got shot once," he says, as if he won some sort of lottery. "The average was twice for the 9th."
Paul knows Kerry personally, but says he would support him even if he didn't. "If I didn't know him, he's more than likely the only guy who can handle Bush." Paul proceeded to laundry-list his grievances with Bush's foreign policy and pre-emptive approach. Richard Perle's name came up, and I thought - geez, folks really ARE paying attention to the details. Or at least the veterans who took one fewer bullet than some of their less-fortunate cohorts happen to be paying attention. Paul and the other bussed-in vets from Beantown took time to check into hotels or rooms with hosts, ate quickly, and then got right to phoning a targeted list of veterans from makeshift phone banks at the Kerry volunteer space.
Shortly thereafter, I attended an event that some of you may have seen carried live on C-SPAN and some other channels. The event was held at the Creative Visions community center, which serves the African American community in Des Moines. Huge murals adorn the walls, with the faces of MLK, Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass, among others. Also in the room were some of the more familiar faces from the punditry class: Joe Klein, Michael Barone, Stu Rothenberg, Jeff Greenfield. I even got a chance to chat briefly afterward with Pulitzer-prize winning satirist Dave Barry. (His take on Kerry is that "he's very tall, with nice hair" even taller than Edwards - though he'd have to "check the polls first about that." The guy's on even when he's off!)
Despite the venue, the press release on the event headlined the fact that a Vietnam vet, whose life Kerry saved three decades ago, had flown all the way from coastal Oregon to stand by his rescuer. Consequently, the event that ensued was sort of a hodge-podge: Kerry was introduced by a local activist from the community center, then a testimonial from a man whom Kerry pulled him from the waters before the cargo nets on the boat drowned him.
Yet Kerry didn't talk much about Vietnam or Iraq or foreign or military policy. Instead, he gave what must have been the originally planned speech on education, health and other social issues. Kerry's stump speech - if that was it - is decent. But he meanders too much, especially when fielding questions from the audience. Asked by a local woman about the problem of incarceration rates for young African American males exceeding their college matriculation rates, Kerry wandered circuitously through a non-sequitur answer - at one point even invoking corporate fraud at Tyco - before getting to his point, which was that the incarceration-matriculation imbalance is shameful.
All the military talk suggests that Kerry is trying to counter Gephardt's union-based and Dean's youth-based constituencies with a core corps of his own.
Kerry is reportedly surging in the polls, but the real question that everyone is buzzing about in the press corp is this: What's the "hard number" for the campaigns? (More on that in future posts....after a report on how Edwards is the real surge candidate, and how the numbers reported in the Des Moines Register and other polls may be seriously, seriously misleanding.)