With 50 days left in his presidential campaign and nearly 10 points behind in the polls, Senator John Kerry found himself this week in a familiar situation: surrounded by people willing him on, but who were having trouble understanding what he had to say.
The venue was the cavernous semi-dome of Cincinnati's art deco railway terminal, now a stunning museum but a problematic place to hold a rally. Kerry's voice echoed like a forlorn platform announcement, and determined local supporters like John Figurel struggled to hear what he was saying.
"I want him to get tougher," Figurel said, conceding that if Kerry had been tougher in the speech, he had missed it.
That has been Kerry's problem all along.
After all the months on the road, many Americans are unclear about what he stands for, partly thanks to the efforts of the White House, which spent much of last week's Republican convention in New York lampooning him as a "flip-flopper."
The charge has been hard to scrape off, because it contains a large fragment of truth.
Kerry has altered course on key issues, most notably Iraq, and he has yet to convince people that changing your mind is better than making consistently bad decisions, as he insists President George W. Bush has done.
A Washington Post and ABC poll published on Friday confirmed that Bush had come out of his convention with a 52-43 percentage point lead nationwide.
But Kerry appears to thrive on bad news. Over the past few days, his tall, normally rigid frame seemed to relax -- he has even attempted jokes, telling pensioners in St. Louis they were lucky he wasn't staying behind to beat them at bingo.
The sunny mood was reminiscent of the most difficult hours of his primary campaign in January when the prospect of defeat seemed to inject much-needed urgency and clarity into his rhetoric.
But the inescapable truth is that the Democrat campaign has been blown off course; the president has succeeded in conveying his simple "me strong, him weak" tune.
The tension has been noticeable in the Kerry camp, where speeches are being rewritten hours before delivery, and new faces have begun to appear on the team.
The senator has brought on two distinct groups of reinforcements: political street-fighters from his Boston past, John Sasso and Michael Whouley; and famous faces from the Clinton White House, like the former presidential spokesmen, Joe Lockhart and Mike McCurry, and a prominent pollster, Stanley Greenberg.
New staff can help, but it is clear to a lot of Democrat supporters that much of the problem lies with the candidate himself.
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