Fortress Boston: The Happiest Place on Earth?

Published: Jul 27, 2004 8:56 AM

By Arianna Huffington

BOSTON — Forget Disneyland, for the next few days, Beantown is the happiest place on earth. Or at least the most civil.

The Kerry campaign has put the kibosh on Bush-bashing, preferring to make their candidate's positive vision for the country the overriding theme of the convention.

It's the Anger Management Platform—and a very sensible strategy.

Unfettered rage at Bush, his corporate cronyism and his lies about Iraq (oops, I think that's one of the proscribed phrases; my bad) has fueled the Democrats since Howard Dean gave the party a much needed spine transplant during the primary season. Kerry picked up the baton in Iowa and has run with it to great effect. At the moment, fifty-four percent of Americans feel that the country is moving in the wrong direction—and nearly three-fifths say we need to change course.

Now it's time for Kerry to convince voters that he's the one to chart the new direction, and to define just what that direction will be.

So everywhere you go here—or, at least, everywhere the police allow you to go—everyone is reading from the same positive playbook.

At a star-studded and jam-packed pre-convention event honoring Bill and Hillary Clinton, the former first couple was humble and on message, with Bill describing himself and Hillary as "foot soldiers for Kerry/Edwards". They had clearly gotten the anger management memo, and the former president, in particular, avoided the more critical stance he has recently adopted toward Bush.

The harmonious vibe at the Clinton party was so strong that William Safire, the New York Times op-ed page's conservative grise, turned to me after scanning the room and said, "There's so much discipline and unity here, it feels like a Republican Convention".

If there were one place where you would have expected the gloves-off approach to fall by the wayside, it would have been at the tribute honoring the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, held at the Old West Church, on Cambridge Street. The event was standing room only, and was attended by some of the most progressive members of the Democratic Party, including panelists Jim Hightower, Al Franken, and Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers of America. But even among this most passionately anti-Bush crowd, the wellspring of rage bubbling just beneath the surface remained almost entirely bottled up.

You know that the Positivity Party is in full swing when Al Gore, who not that long ago called President Bush a "moral coward", takes to the Convention stage and delivers an unfailingly upbeat message. One of his few discordant notes Monday night was a dig at 2000: "Let's make sure," he said, "that the Supreme Court does not pick the next president—and that this president is not the one who picks the next Supreme Court."

The former VP was quick to point out, however, that he's made peace with the contentious past: "I don't want you to think that I lay awake at night counting and recounting sheep." He didn't say anything about lying in bed counting and recounting dangling chads, however.

Anger was also the subject of a thought-provoking briefing I attended on Monday afternoon at the Four Seasons hotel, which is the hub of behind-the-scenes campaign activity away from the Fleet Center. It featured pollster Stan Greenberg discussing the mindset of potential Nader voters. "Anger," he said, "is the defining characteristic of the Nader voter. They loathe Bush but they don't want to cast their vote for the lesser-of-two-evils. They want to vote on principle." In other words, if Kerry is going to convince them to pass on Nader and vote for him, he's going to have to show them that he stands for more than just not being Bush.

I had my own Close Encounter of the Newly Unified Kind when I shared a stage with Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe at a raucous rally of over a thousand College Democrats. It was only 2002, after the Democrats' November debacle, that I wrote a column entitled "Bring Me the Head of Terry McAuliffe!" Now here we were hugging, him saying some nice things about me, and me giving him my ancient Greek secrets for helping his battle-ravaged voice to heal ("Don't forget the cayenne pepper!").

It just goes to show you what four years of George Bush in the White House can do to bring people together. I suppose he really is a uniter, not a divider.

Job One of this convention is moving the party faithful from Anybody But Bush backers to out-and-out Kerry enthusiasts. On the surface at least, that task seems to be Mission Accomplished (although such a reference would probably be vetoed by the powers that be for having too much of an anti-Bush subtext).

The vital next step is winning over the majority of Americans who have turned away from Bush but who are not yet comfortable turning control of the ship of state over to Kerry. Thursday night's acceptance speech will go a long way toward determining his ability to sway those undecided voters.

David Thorne is convinced he will succeed with flying colors. Thorne is one of Kerry's closest friends and the twin brother of Kerry's first wife—they were together at Yale and joined the Navy at the same time. He’s also the mastermind behind Kerry's highly successful Internet operation. I ran into Thorne, who has seen The Speech, at the New York Times party at the Gamble Mansion, and he gave me a preview not of its content but of its character.

"Have you seen the letters that John wrote to me when we were in the service?" he asked. "They show what a passionate, thoughtful, committed person he was—and that's the guy you'll be seeing on Thursday night."

The flip side to the Democrats' Anger Management strategy is the widespread anxiety over whether Kerry will deliver in his big moment. Absent the anger, will he be able to convey his passion and his vision for the country?

And no strategy has yet been invented to manage this anxiety. Only a kick-ass speech on Thursday will put an end to it.