With Personal Notes, Oratory Will Further Define Kerry

BOSTON, July 28 -- John F. Kerry, who has struggled to find a clear and imaginative way to fuse a biography of public service to a vision for the nation, Thursday night will strike a highly personal tone, with nods to history and family, in the highest-stakes speech of his political life, according to aides.

The challenge is clear. Still an amorphous political figure to most Americans, Kerry must demonstrate he is strong enough to fight terrorism and appealing enough to win over undecided voters. And the candidate known for long, meandering and sometimes arcane orations must do so with the clarity of Bill Clinton on Monday and the conviction of Barack Obama on Tuesday, Democrats say.

"His task is really to clarify and simplify and boil down his vision," said Harold Ickes, former White House deputy chief of staff in the Clinton administration. "He hasn't come close enough yet. . . . But these are works in progress. I'm absolutely confident Kerry will develop a sharper focus."

After 18 months of full-time campaigning, polls show that Kerry remains something of an enigma to many voters -- a candidate who has run through a series of campaign slogans and grappled with the right mix of ideas to capture how he would lead as president. Last week alone, Kerry focused alternately on values, national security, optimism, technology and science, but there was rarely a unifying theme.

Many Democrats say when Kerry steps onto the podium in FleetCenter, he will be in an enviable and difficult position -- enviable because about half the country appears willing to turn Bush out of office, difficult because Kerry alone must make the sale and will have few better opportunities to make his case between now and November.

Kerry, who professes a love of poetry, history and the written word, penned the speech longhand with the input of a few speechwriters, family members and letters his father wrote his mother long ago, aides said. He spent at least 30 minutes a day for the past month, including a recent weekend in Nantucket, refining it.

Early on, Kerry sought input from several speechwriters, many outside his campaign. But a top aide said Kerry was persuaded to work from fewer than a half-dozen drafts written, for the most part, by Robert Shrum, a longtime adviser and one of the party's best-known wordsmiths, and Terry Edmonds, a former Clinton speechwriter. Kerry, often writing in the morning or aboard his campaign plane, would literally cut out sections he liked and paste them into his working draft, a top aide said.

Kerry seemed focused on sharing more of himself in this speech, the aide said. He talked with brother Cameron about childhood memories, and read from journals he has kept over the years. Kerry would read parts of the speech to staff, but most of his practice time was before his wife or daughters.

The day before Kerry arrived here in Boston, one senior adviser said the speech was mostly done, except for the inevitable final tweaking, and described it as quite personal in tone. "It's not a heavy, policy-laden speech," the adviser said, asking not to be identified so as to talk more openly about the process of preparing the speech. "It's not a laundry list" such as the one former vice president Al Gore did in 2000.

Unlike the last two men to win the White House, Kerry prepares to accept his party's presidential nomination without having found the shorthand phrase -- such as Clinton's "New Democrat" or Bush's "compassionate conservatism" -- to capture what his candidacy is about.

But some veterans of the 1992 campaign said Kerry's challenge is far easier than what Clinton faced in his acceptance speech. "We forget this now, but he went into the convention with most people only knowing about Gennifer Flowers or draft dodging, and most people before the convention assumed he was a rich kid whose daddy bought him out of the draft," Democratic strategist Mandy Grunwald said.

"We had to undo things," she added. "With Kerry, he needs to deepen impressions and give people a fuller sense of who he is. There's more a lack of information, not misinformation."

Grunwald likened Kerry's challenge to what faced Ronald Reagan in 1980, which was to reassure voters ready to change presidents that they could entrust the White House to him. "This country wants change, but they're not sure about John Kerry," she said. But, one Democrat noted, unlike Reagan, it is not clear Kerry has a black-and-white set of beliefs he can communicate to voters even if they are willing to give him a serious look.

Andrei Cherney, former director of speechwriting for the Kerry campaign, agreed that Kerry is in a position familiar to many challengers. "People know a little about him -- some details of his biography," he said. "This is the time where he is going to have to both tell his story, tell the country his vision and connect the two."