For those visiting Mars for the last year, let me let you in on a little secret: President Bush generates strong emotions in voters. You love him or you hate him, you are with him or against him, emotions that are probably too strong for his own political good--polarizing figures usually pay a price at the polls (witness Howard Dean). John Kerry, though, has the converse problem--he has yet to form any emotional connection with the electorate. Even many of his ardent supporters are more anti-Bush than pro-Kerry. Given that people vote more with their guts than their heads, politicians who seem distant usually pay a price at the polls.

Bush can't do much about his problem--he's too well defined (and too viscerally anti-intellectual and uninformed to evince subtlety). Kerry, however, can. But will he? In an election that will likely turn on turning out the base, it could mark the difference between victory and defeat.

As John Kerry closed his Seattle visit on May 27 with a speech on national security--intended to frame his broad differences of approach with the Bush doctrines of unilateral action and preemptive war--he thumped the podium for emphasis as his words crescendoed through a series of tightly constrained rhetorical climaxes. At times he cupped his hands in front of his sternum or made a double-fisted, thumbs-pointed-skyward gesture.

This body language was meant to evoke intensity and conviction but it was curiously formal--and studied--in a way that did not convey passion, but negated it. To be fair, the speech was intended as a highbrow foreign policy address, not as a rank-and-file rallying cry. It was not a speech, nor a delivery, geared to rousing the masses but to winning over elites. The invite-only audience applauded appreciatively but not lovingly.

The core of the speech--a call for "a new era of alliances" with allies, a military adapted to counter the terrorist threat, a reliance on economic and diplomatic, as well as military power to achieve American objectives, a sustained push to reduce our dependence on Mideast oil--was sensible enough, if cautiously conventional. It was, in essence, a rearticulation of mainstream American policy nostrums that Bush has uprooted with his far-right gunslinger's mentalité. Repudiating Bush's shortsighted assault on the primus inter pares principle ("first among equals," for those whose Latin is rusty), which has guided U.S. relations with the Western world since World War II, is central to Kerry's belief system.

Kerry criticized the Iraq war not in its essence as a massive strategic miscalculation, a foolishly mistaken war, but as a managerial blunder that might have succeeded, that might yet succeed, with the benefit of a more skilled administration.

I am a serious man, Kerry projected. I am sober, judicious, a man of intellectual depth and rigor, a man who can be trusted to understand the complexities of the world stage. Given Kerry's polling deficit on national security and terrorism, he is wise to project this kind of gravitas.

But is that enough? Those seeking the emotional mood of the Democratic electorate would have found it not in Seattle but the day before in New York, where Al Gore burned through a fire-and-brimstone excoriation of Bush for bringing America "humiliation in the eyes of the world," for being "the most dishonest president since Richard Nixon," for the "abuse of the truth that characterized the administration's march to war and the abuse of the trust that had been placed in President Bush by the American people in the aftermath of September 11." It was a beautiful speech, cogently argued, fundamentally moral, emotionally cathartic. And it was delivered with heartfelt passion. It was the long-overdue sounding of the Klaxon regarding Bush's evisceration of America's reputation in the world that Seattle liberals yearn for from Kerry.

But it was also utterly unpresidential, the speech of a noncandidate. Kerry would be pilloried by an American media that privileges cosseted notions of decorum over honesty if he said what Gore did (as, indeed, Gore was). Moreover, Bush looks like he's drowning himself without any push from Kerry. Still, Iraq will be the emotional linchpin of this election, and Kerry should take heed. With Bush now essentially pursuing a Kerry Lite policy there (in tandem with military capitulation to insurgents), a still-too-bloodless Kerry will likely need to find a way to capture a touch of Gore's fire--without burning his bridges with the center--if he hopes to win.

sandeep@thestranger.com