A Loosened Kerry Wins Over Crowds at Rallies [View All]

[Feanorcurufinwe]

Senator John Kerry had just taken the stage on Saturday at a packed rally at the Oklahoma State Firefighters Memorial in Oklahoma City, and he was fired up. "George Bush thought he could play dress-up on an aircraft carrier and you wouldn't notice," he thundered. "Ask yourself, whose mission is accomplished?" As if on cue, the audience roared back, "His mission!" Mr. Kerry just smiled and deadpanned, "Nobody briefed me that I was going to have a real interactive crowd here."

For so long, of course, Mr. Kerry did not, and to see him on the stump these days is to conduct an unscientific but revealing study in candidate development and crowd psychology. Mr. Kerry says most of the same things he has been saying for weeks or even months, but he says them better and now that he is the Democratic front-runner the crowds respond in kind.

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At every stop, it seems, Mr. Kerry announces a new endorsement. Here it was Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer of New York. On Saturday in Oklahoma, as Mr. Kerry ran through the litany of his latest supporters, an interrupting voice rang out from the hall, "Senator, I am the mayor of Watonga, Okla., and I endorse you!" Without hesitating, Mr. Kerry did something that would have been all but unthinkable in his awkward months of campaigning in New Hampshire last fall: He scrambled down into the crowd, wrapped an arm around Mayor Richard Hightower, chief magistrate of the nearby town of 3,200, and swept him back onto the stage, holding his hand aloft and declaring, "Ladies and gentlemen, my latest endorsement."

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"I have been a Dean supporter up until today," said Charles Brittain, a retired industrial engineer for the Air Force who came to see Mr. Kerry in Oklahoma City. "I liked what he was saying, but what I saw was a vulnerability at the slightest sign of pressure. I believe I see in Kerry a man who can withstand the hurricane that I'm positive the Republicans are planning."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/03/politics/campaign/03CAMP.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5062&en=b06bf93aa33a74ea&ex=1076389200