No questions right now; he's gotta run Kerry hasn't been chatting much lately with the media traveling with him, the Tribune's Jill Zuckman writes
By Jill Zuckman Tribune national correspondent, covering the Kerry campaign
NEW ORLEANS -- Who knows what lurks in the heart and mind of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry?
Not the traveling press corps, that's for sure.
Kerry has been under wraps for the last month, declining to subject himself to what must surely be the painful process of answering national reporters' questions.
Kerry used to regularly assure his audiences that, if elected president, he would hold a press conference every month to communicate with the nation's citizenry. (That was a not-so-subtle dig at President Bush, who has held only 12 formal press conferences during his four years in office, a record low number.)
"I have pledged that I am going to have a press conference at least once a month to talk to the nation about what I'm doing because I don't have anything to hide," Kerry said during a campaign stop in Beloit, Wis., after the Democratic National Convention. "I want America to know what I'm doing. I want you to know what I'm fighting for. I want you to ask me questions."
But Kerry doesn't make that promise anymore.
"Here we have issue 9,611 that Kerry's now on two sides of," joked Mike Murphy, the Republican political consultant who advised Sen. John McCain's non-stop presidential talk-a-thon in 2000. "It's easy to start off with the old, `I'm Mr. Transparent.' It's hard to do it when things are hard."
At the front of the plane
Kerry travels across the country on a 757 airplane packed with staff, Secret Service agents, reporters, photographers and cameramen. The candidate sits at the front of the plane while the media stay in the back. Usually, reporters can get a glimpse of his gray mane when he stands in the aisle chatting with staff. Occasionally, he throws around a football on the airport tarmac, sometimes inviting a reporter to join in.
But ask him a question and Kerry shakes his head, puts up his hand and walks away with a small smile.
Perhaps the reason he has been unavailable has something to do with what happened the last time he took questions from a small group of reporters, known as a pool, while visiting the Grand Canyon on Aug. 9. He was asked if he, knowing there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, would have voted to give the president authority to use force there.
"Yes, I would have voted for the authority; I believe it's the right authority for a president to have," said Kerry, in remarks that were instantly controversial and a deviation from Democratic orthodoxy.
Or perhaps he just doesn't want to answer questions about his Vietnam service, about why he recently shook up his campaign staff and about whether he's worried about losing.
"Once you've taken the oath of office, you're guaranteed four years of employment. When you're still a candidate, there's a consuming fear that even the best-prepared, most disciplined candidate can slip and say something embarrassing," said Ross Baker, a Rutgers University political scientist. "Also, the level of fatigue is so intense that even people with really nimble minds can make gaffes. I think they just don't want to tempt fate."
Talking to voters
To be sure, Kerry does answer questions almost every day. Frequently, they are from adoring supporters at town hall meetings. In Greensboro, N.C., on Tuesday, one woman asked him when he would debate Bush, but she prefaced her question by declaring, "I think you're hot!" In Des Moines on Thursday, a grandmother stood to thank him for rescuing his daughter's hamster, saying, "It captured the essence of your character."
Sometimes, Kerry takes questions from local television reporters. Other times, he speaks by satellite with local television reporters in other parts of the country.
But most of the time, he stays away from the 60 or so members of the national press corps, other than to occasionally wish someone a happy birthday.
"Between two national conventions, bus trips and train trips, it's made the schedule different from the usual stops on the campaign trail," explained Kerry spokesman David Wade. "We'll be accessible on the campaign and we'll continue to be accessible."
The Kerry campaign's decision to keep their candidate at arm's length from the press corps is hardly unusual in presidential campaigns. In 1996, Bob Dole, the Republican nominee, stopped hanging out with the news media after repeatedly saying what he actually thought rather than what his campaign staff wanted him to say.
In 2000, Al Gore kept his distance from reporters, too, at one point going two months without direct contact. And then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush used to schmooze with his press corps on a daily basis at the back of his campaign plane, but would often retreat whenever someone popped a policy question.
The exception to all this verbal reticence was McCain, the Arizona Republican, who dubbed his campaign bus "The Straight Talk Express" and sat at the back of the bus with the reporters who covered him. There he held forth all day, answering any and all questions even as tape recorders ran out of tape and reporters keeled over from exhaustion, not to mention too many sugar doughnuts.
But that strategy was not without its pitfalls.
"The toughest day in the McCain campaign came when we got tangled up in an abortion comment that he made," Murphy recalled. "I always said this is a cute thing and we're all going to love it until we have a bad day and we're a kebab on the fire."
In the end, McCain lost the GOP primary race to Bush, who issued nicknames to reporters and largely limited his comments to baseball.
At the Beloit campaign stop, Kerry sounded incredulous that a president would avoid talking about his plans for the country through the news media.
"And, you know what? If you're working for all of America and you've got a good idea, my gosh, what better way than to try to communicate it to America than to stand up every day and talk about it and sell it and market it?" he asked.