Kerry’s own, heterosexual, marriage is sure to become campaign fodder as well. Teresa Heinz Kerry, commonly tagged “the $500 million ketchup heiress,” is routinely caricatured as an oddball, for her upbringing in Mozambique as the daughter of a Portuguese doctor and for her pronouncing her name Teh-ray-zuh. She also has a history of refreshing public candor. Yet in person, she comes across as surprisingly shy. Lately, T.H.K. has been campaigning mostly apart from J.F.K., but whenever they’re together, the senator instantly lights up. When Teresa chooses to ride in a separate car one night while Kerry is being interviewed, he looks bummed.

Kerry knows Teresa will be a Republican target. “They make fun of my wife at their peril,” he says, blue eyes flashing. “If the worst they can do is make fun of my wife because she happened to have had a husband who was killed in a plane crash and she inherited some money, I think they’re barking up the wrong tree. We’re gonna try to fight this race out on the issues: jobs, health care, education, children, the environment, our role in the world. I think Americans aren’t gonna stand for those things being sidelined.”

Max Cleland knows how rough the Republicans can play. He lost his 2002 Senate re-election bid when GOP operatives in Georgia questioned his patriotism. Cleland lost three limbs to a grenade attack in Vietnam. He’s told Kerry that he regrets not punching back sooner and harder. “They’re gonna try to make him look like the weirdest creature that ever came out of the lagoon,” Cleland says, sitting in his wheelchair after a Kerry rally, massaging the stump of his right arm. “They’ll try to slime John through the Internet.”

Cleland laughs ruefully, and within a week he’s proven prophetic, as Drudge floats the “intern issue.”

On Imus the next morning, Kerry shrugs off the rumors. Privately, a top Kerry aide is even more emphatic. “It’s bullshit. There’s no factual basis for it. It’s not true. Never has been, never will be.”

From Maine, Kerry jets to new York for a quick meeting with his finance team and a dinner with heavy-hitters. Only a handful of reporters are allowed to fly with Kerry while the rest—crankily—are sent ahead to Detroit. At the Hilton on Sixth Avenue, they’re kept in a hallway, craning their necks to see who’s there and spotting investment banker Steven Rattner, Infinity Broadcasting chairman John Sykes, hedge-fund manager Orin Kramer, real-estate developer Stephen Green (brother of mayoral candidate Mark Green), and, in a tuxedo, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Kerry raises over $750,000. “The Republicans will always have more money than us, and that will be a big hurdle,” a campaign strategist says later. “It’s a disadvantage, but it helps Kerry run as even more of an underdog against Bush.”

Back on the plane, the candidate is asleep before wheels-up. The next morning, though, he bounds into the pulpit at Detroit’s Second Ebenezer Baptist Church and is dropping his g’s as he tries to bond with the all-black parishioners. One hour north, in a banquet hall rented by the Macomb County Democratic Committee, the crowd is all-white and nearly all-union; here, Kerry introduces his biggest endorsement coup yet, the very pale union favorite Dick Gephardt, the Missouri congressman who had dropped out of the presidential contest two weeks earlier. Then it’s back on the bus for a trip to a raucous rally on a gleaming mock-factory floor at a community college in Flint, followed by a late-night flight to snowy Nashville.

The rallies are the show-biz, but it’s during the in-betweens—on the flights from city to city and at the hotel bars late at night—when Kerry aides sit and chat that the outlines of a strategy to beat Bush emerge. The campaign has just expanded its “opposition research” team to gather ammunition against Bush. Kerry will continue to pound the president over traditional domestic-policy issues, like job creation and health insurance, and hit Bush “early and hard” by calling out Karl Rove and RNC chairman Ed Gillespie by name as the masterminds of a Republican “smear machine.” The campaign is also paying careful attention to style, putting Kerry amid groups of ordinary people at every opportunity, contrasting his accessibility with Bush’s remoteness. Borrowing from Bill Clinton, Kerry talks to hundreds of small-town TV and newspaper reporters, trying to define his image before the Republicans do.

Kerry’s strategists know that Rove and company will try to tar the senator as another Massachusetts liberal, even further to the left than Ted Kennedy and Michael Dukakis, and they’ve got a plan to highlight Kerry’s more moderate views and votes. “It seems strange to say, but Howard Dean has helped us do our job,” says one senior strategist. “By running to the left of us, he made Kerry the defender of things like the middle-class tax cut.” And by jumping out to an early lead and forcing Kerry to come from behind in Iowa and New Hampshire, Dean, say Kerry’s strategists, did them two more favors: “Voters always like a candidate better when he’s earned it,” says one senior adviser. And the tough initial race served as a guard against Kerry’s tendency toward complacency.

“He’s best when he’s in a fight or a crisis,” says a top Kerry strategist, remembering how when Kerry was at his low point in November, he fired his campaign manager and brought in Mary Beth Cahill, a disciplined Massachusetts operative who transformed the organization and allowed Kerry to focus simply on being the candidate instead of making every decision. “Kerry is a guy who needs a lot of stimulus to get going. He windsurfs, he’s fought in a war. He needs the adrenaline.”

Another vivid lesson is being taken from Al Gore’s bitter defeat in 2000. “Kerry thinks the ultimate reason Gore lost is because people thought he was a fraud,” says the adviser. “Gore never figured out what he believed in. Kerry knows what he believes, and no one is more authentic.” So the campaign’s bus is named “The Real Deal Express,” and between now and November, Kerry will never go more than a few minutes without reference to his record as a Vietnam war hero. George Bush has tried to wrap himself in the American flag. Kerry, with the help of the “swift boat” crew members who appear at his rallies and in his commercials, will wrap himself in camo.