Slogan Points Kerry in ‘New Direction’

LAS VEGAS —  After months of struggling to find a theme to capture the essence of his candidacy, Sen. John F. Kerry has settled on one: The election, he says, boils down to a decision between four more years of “wrong choices” or a “new direction.”

Since Labor Day, the Democratic presidential nominee has stuck to that theme relentlessly, using it to shape arguments on Iraq, the economy and nearly all other topics he broaches.

To some Democrats unnerved by President Bush’s recent surge in the polls, Kerry’s adoption of a clearly defined theme to draw contrasts with the Republican incumbent offers a measure of hope. The question for Kerry is whether this new approach to framing the election comes too late to matter.

“He’s shifting the game plan in the fourth quarter here,” said Joe Tuman, a San Francisco State University political communications professor. “It’s coming very late, and that doesn’t speak well for how they’re managing their campaign.” The thematic adjustment coincides with an expansion of Kerry’s top circle of advisors. Amid widespread concern among Democrats that Kerry’s candidacy has floundered, several former Clinton White House aides and other seasoned campaign operatives have joined his strategy team.

One of the most visible results is the change in rhetoric. Earlier attempts by the Massachusetts senator at clarifying his message -- among his slogans were “Let America Be America Again” and “Stronger at Home, Respected in the World” -- had little effect, analysts say.

“You had a lot of mush,” said Tim Hibbitts, an independent Oregon pollster.

With the election a little more than six weeks away and debates looming as the last predictable milestone of the race, he added, “they don’t have a lot more time to try out new themes.”

Mike McCurry, former press secretary to President Clinton and now a senior Kerry advisor, said the “wrong choices, new direction” theme should “crystallize the choice” that voters face.

“A referendum on where people think the country is, they lose,” McCurry said of the Bush campaign.

In his travels around the country, Kerry has applied his “wrong choices” theme to prescription drugs, civil rights, gun control, education, Halliburton defense contracts and stem-cell research.

“George Bush made the wrong choice,” Kerry told a Las Vegas reporter who asked Thursday about the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump here in Nevada, which Bush has approved and Kerry opposes.

“And what’s interesting is that now that he’s made the wrong choice, he’s so stubborn, he won’t change his mind and move in a better direction. It’s like Iraq. It’s like the budget deficit. It’s like what’s happening on healthcare, where people are losing their healthcare. Wrong choices.”

The “wrong choice” mantra serves as a device for Kerry to raise doubts about Bush’s character and credibility. By turning each time from “wrong choices” to the “new direction” in which he vows to take the country, Kerry has also tried to clearly define his own agenda, which remains elusive to many voters, polls suggest.

In a Detroit speech on the economy, Kerry hammered Bush last week for “the wrong choices that always give more and more to those with the most,” then promised to “lead this country in a new direction” with tax credits for healthcare, college tuition and clean fuels for automobiles.

For Kerry, this thematic framework could work as a counterpoint to Bush’s charge that he vacillates.

With a steadiness that Kerry’s campaign has found hard to match, Bush has used the accusation as a template for attacks on matters as large as Iraq and as trivial as what kind of car Kerry owns. No matter the topic, Bush and his allies have cast Kerry as a wavering politician unfit to lead a nation that needs a strong and consistent commander in chief.

“The person who has been most effective in defining Sen. Kerry as a flip-flopper is Sen. Kerry, because he has repeatedly taken both sides of all the important issues,” Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said.

Still, even some Republicans say Kerry’s new theme could be effective, but strategists say his biggest problem is timing. Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster, said Kerry’s new theme could have produced “pretty powerful results” in the spring by driving two trends: Bush’s declining job approval ratings and the rising number of voters who saw the country as moving in the wrong direction.

But now those trends are no longer in place. Since August, Kerry has spent weeks on the defensive over his Vietnam War military service and his stands on Iraq while Bush’s standing has been on the rise. So the Democrat is “shooting up the mountain instead of shooting down the mountain,” Fabrizio said.

“If what you’re trying to do, when you’re running against an incumbent, is to explain why they should be fired, the question is are you talking about it when people are apt to be of that mind, or when people are starting to think things are better?” he said.

Thomas Hollihan, associate dean of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, said Bush largely succeeded in turning the race into a referendum on his challenger rather than himself, but Kerry’s new theme carries potential to reverse that dynamic. “If people hear it often enough,” he said, “they’re going to remember it.”