Kerry as a Rich Target

Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, own five homes, including this house in Nantucket, Mass. Republicans are lampooning the couple's wealthy lifestyle. (Rob Benchley -- AP)

"Voters still want to hear from him" before accepting the Republican definition of Kerry and his values, the strategist said. "May is a big month for them [the Kerry campaign]. They should be spending like drunken sailors" on advertising to present a more appealing portrait of the candidate. The campaign has just launched ads presenting Kerry's biography.

Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter professed little concern about the effort to lampoon her candidate as pampered and privileged. She said most voters know "the Republican Party is historically the party of wealth. . . . The better question is who you are, what you fight for, what you stand for."

Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who for years has studied the ways the GOP often beats his party on cultural issues, said he is not so worried this time around.

The mockery of Kerry is "playing in the conservative conversation" where it is "motivating for their people to have a diminished view of Kerry," Greenberg said. But, he added, this theme is not likely to be important in moving independent voters. "There are big things going on in this election: the Iraq war, taxes. . . . It's hard to make [cultural elitism] a powerful issue."

In some years, however, this has been an important issue. In 1988, then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, with whom Kerry once served as lieutenant governor, was hurt badly on such issues. Unlike Kerry, Dukakis was not rich. Like him, nearly everything about his background and habits became fodder for opponents casting him as odd. George H.W. Bush, running that year, described his rival as "guided more by abstract theories and grids and graphs and computer printouts and the history of Swedish social planning." Country singer Loretta Lynn, traveling to campaign stops with Bush, noted: "Why, I can't even pronounce his name."

There has been an echo of this kind of down-home invective in the controversy over Kerry's statement that foreign leaders secretly back his candidacy. Pressed last Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" on where and when the leaders told him this, Kerry declined to say, but he noted: "You can go to New York City and you can be in a restaurant and you can meet a foreign leader."

This prompted House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) on Monday to sneer: "I don't know where John Kerry eats, or what restaurants he attends in New York City. But I tell you, at the Taste of Texas restaurant -- it's this great steakhouse in Houston, Texas -- the only foreign leader you meet there is called filet mignon."

Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University, noted that this brand of politics has a long pedigree. William Henry Harrison, the Whig Party candidate in 1840, was a Virginia-born aristocrat, but that did not prevent him from portraying Democratic incumbent Martin Van Buren as a pampered man given to fine china and perfumed wigs.

"There's all kinds of ways of saying someone's out of touch," Kazin said. "This is one of the oldest customs in American political rhetoric."