US: But for all the talk of jobs and wages, John Kerry had difficulty igniting even a sympathetic crowd in Atlantic City, reports Conor O'Clery
John Kerry raised $1 million at the New Jersey home of Jon Bon Jovi on Monday evening and announced that his next stop would be one of Atlantic City's casinos just down the coast.
"I know it makes a lot of you nervous," the Democratic challenger told guests at the rock musician's mansion, "but I promise I will not gamble with your money the way George Bush has gambled with the money of this country."
Mr Kerry arrived yesterday morning at Bally's Casino on the boardwalk to address a convention of the New Jersey AFL-CIO, the trade union umbrella group.
The Massachusetts senator arrived by helicopter, a measure of the high pitch his restless campaign has reached with four and a half months still to go before polling day.
As he waited off-stage in the casino ballroom, hundreds of New Jersey union officials passed a motion with a chorus of "Ayes" endorsing him for president. Bouncing to the microphone, Kerry responded, "That's my type of election folks."
Once considered aloof and detached, the four-term senator has laboured to develop the Clintonesque habit of making a wisecrack, thanking everyone in sight and shaking every hand he can see before starting a speech.
He re-worked an old campaign joke in Atlantic City, quipping "Jon Bon Jovi plays the guitar, I like to play the guitar. He wears a leather jacket, I wear a leather jacket. Jon Bon Jovi was one of the 50 most beautiful people in People magazine, and I like to read People magazine."
But nothing Kerry says is off-the-cuff. He reads from tele-prompters, aware after a couple of gaffes of the dangers of unscripted asides. He addresses well-wishers as "brother" but rarely engages in serious exchanges.
In between appearances, he spends hours honing his speeches and trying out new lines. Even so, he struggles to find empathy with his audience in large gatherings, and had difficulty igniting even this sympathetic crowd in Atlantic City.
His newest catch phrase, "Let America be America again", adopted after several attempts to strike an inspirational note like Ronald Reagan's "shining city on a hill", fell rather flat, as if the intellectual side of Kerry was only-too-aware of its banality.
The line comes from a 1938 poem by Langston Hughes that pleaded for fulfilment of the American Dream and for the freedom and equality which the US never quite achieves.
Recently Kerry has been strumming his guitar on the campaign plane and rehearsing "This Land is Your Land", as if to underline at some future event that his campaign is a protest against a presidency that has created a land where the rich get the breaks and the rest get squeezed.
Flanked by chefs, croupiers, waiters and cashiers from the casino's union branches yesterday, Kerry formally re-launched his presidential campaign, which was suspended for a week due to the death of Ronald Reagan.
With little space between himself and Mr Bush on Iraq, he intends to focus for the rest of June on the economy and attempt to convince voters that despite the positive economic news, it is President Bush who is "livin' on a prayer" as the Bon Jovi hit goes, and not John Kerry.
"More than a million Americans have lost their jobs and the new jobs that are finally being created pay an average of $9,000 less a year," Kerry said.
"As wages are going down - ha-ha, guess what - your costs, health care costs are going up 50 per cent, tuitions are going up 35 per cent, your bills are going up, gasoline prices are going up."
His litany of the downsides of the resurgent economy, which has created over a million new jobs in the last year, carries the risk that he will be depicted by Republicans as out of touch with reality and a purveyor of doom and gloom. Less than an hour after his speech President Bush responded, "I guess if you want to try to find something to be pessimistic about, you can find it, no matter how hard you look, you know?"
But Kerry's theme is striking a chord with voters who, in polls, say they do not yet see the benefits of economic improvements, and the New Jersey union officials gave him standing ovations for promising to stop the export of jobs and to put the elderly ahead of drug companies.
Yesterday's visit to New Jersey was an attempt to shore up the vote there after a poll showed Kerry and Bush neck and neck in what should be a safe state for the Democrats.
But the candidate will not be spending the Bon Jovi windfall in the Atlantic City casinos or even in New Jersey, a local party official told me.
"Our role," he said, "is to help him raise money so he can spend it elsewhere - like Ohio, where the election will be won or lost."