Kerry's big moment in limelight

By RUPERT CORNWELL in Washington

This is make or break week for Senator John Kerry.

Over the next four days in a Boston turned into a fortress to match the Green Zone in Baghdad, Democrats will be selling their man for the White House to a country that knows remarkably little about him.

It seems an eternity ago, not a bare eight months, that the Massachusetts Senator's presidential campaign was sinking like a stone.

Just before Christmas, as Kerry took out a US$6.4 million ($10 million) mortgage on his townhouse in fashionable Beacon Hill, the question was not whether he could beat President George W. Bush.

Reporters were taking bets whether he would fold his hand even before the first primary-season vote was cast.

But propelled by his upset win in Iowa, Kerry staged a comeback for the ages. The mortgage has been repaid, and barely three months before the election, he is in the driving seat.

Though the impact of his popular selection of John Edwards as his running mate has faded, he leads by a point or two in almost every poll.

When the Democratic convention opens in his home town tomorrow, Kerry will be at the head of a party united as rarely before by an all-consuming desire to beat Bush.

The aim this week is to repeat Bill Clinton's feat in July 1992, when the little-known Arkansas Governor went into his convention in New York more or less tied with George Bush the elder. He left it 20 points ahead and cruised to victory that November.

There are clear parallels between then and now. Both have selected attractive southern senators as running mates (Tennessee's Gore in 1992, North Carolina's Edwards now).

More even than 12 years ago, this week's gathering has been sanitised into a giant party political broadcast, where every whiff of argument has been ironed from proceedings.

Now as then, the convention will lean heavily on the candidate's biography: proceedings in Boston will dwell on his heroic service in Vietnam.

Kerry, of course, cannot match Clinton's convention "bounce". The US is, if anything, even more polarised today than in the cliffhanger 2000 election. The overwhelming majority of voters - 83 per cent, says one poll - have already picked their man, and nothing that occurs at the minutely choreographed pageants that are modern nominating conventions will change their minds.

But even a small net gain for the Democrats, say 4 or 5 per cent, may be decisive. By dint of his office, Bush is a familiar quantity to the electorate, and his convention, in New York in five weeks, will change even fewer minds. First, though, Kerry must get it right.

There will be important supporting roles - for his wife Teresa, for Democratic lions such as former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Clinton, for Ted Kennedy, for Ron Reagan jnr, and, of course, for Edwards.

Basically, however, the next four days are about Kerry, whose acceptance speech in Thursday night primetime (Friday NZ time) will be the convention's climax.

Despite all the publicity, few Americans know who Kerry is or what he stands for. This week he must find a theme, and tell Americans why they should vote for him, and what he will do if elected President on November 2.

He is a reserved and thoughtful man who prefers not to talk about himself. During 20 years in the Senate, he earned the reputation of a loner.

He does not have Clinton's warmth and ability to connect, and does not project Carter's virtuous honesty.

The famously incurious Bush likes difficult issues boiled down to one-page summaries. Kerry, by contrast, knows those issues inside out and thrives on nuance.

But that very subtlety makes him a far harder political sell than the what-you-see-is-what-you-get President. It also gives unlimited fodder to the Bush campaign's merciless ads lampooning him as a "flip-flopper".

But Kerry has a compelling life story Bush cannot match. His heroic record in Vietnam (thrice wounded and decorated several times for gallantry in combat) will be front and centre in Boston.

For the convention to succeed, the competent but uninspiring senator who enters it must leave it as a war hero with a compelling vision for his country. If he does, then he may have effectively closed the deal with the American voter, just as Clinton did back in 1992.

- INDEPENDENT