AFTER a long day’s campaigning in Detroit, the last thing Senator John F Kerry needed last week was an encounter with an abusive talking toy. Yet the Democratic presidential challenger barely grimaced when a journalist dared him to match his political skills against an electronic “bullshit detector”.

The aisle of the senator’s campaign Boeing was suddenly filled with giggling as Kerry manfully submitted to a media prank. It was hardly the most revealing of exchanges; the machine bleeped “Bullshit!” every time Kerry spoke. But its message was not lost on everybody present.

After six months of being portrayed as arrogant, aloof and humourless, Kerry was keen to show that he knows how to take a joke. Long after his plane started taxiing for takeoff, the senator was still on his feet, chatting amiably and giving a worthy impression of an ordinary fellow having fun.

Despite opinion polls that show President George W Bush has benefited from a so-called “Reagan bounce” after the death of the popular former president, the elements of a successful White House challenge are beginning to fall into place for the Vietnam war hero leading the Democratic charge.

After a bruising start to a campaign overshadowed by the war in Iraq, the 60-year-old Massachusetts senator has begun to exploit falling confidence in Bush’s management of the war on terror. He is drawing large crowds, raising big money and has a united party behind him.

Yet questions fanned by an unprecedented $80m barrage of negative Republican television advertising linger over Kerry’s political appeal. After a week of debate about Reagan’s charisma and likely political legacy, Kerry is battling to persuade America that he is not, as one senior Republican claimed last week, the antithesis of Reagan sunniness, the “candidate of gloom and doom”.

On Wednesday Kerry flew to Columbus, Ohio, where Bush supporters did their best to disrupt a rainswept outdoor rally in a crucial industrial swing state.

As he addressed 3,000 supporters, Republican residents wheeled giant loudspeakers onto a nearby lawn and began to play the theme song from Flipper, the 1960s television series about a friendly dolphin.

There was nothing friendly about the Republicans’ intention to mock Kerry’s supposed record of flip-flopping on policy issues. The incident was part of a co-ordinated strategy of Republican ridicule, much of which has focused on Kerry’s family connections with France. Several leading conservatives refer to the senator as John François Kerry.

Yet the joke was on Bush last week as the Kerry campaign announced that it had trounced the president’s fundraising efforts for the third month in a row. The Democrats raised $26m in May, double Bush’s $13m. A single breakfast event for Kerry in Columbus secured $1m — more than twice the amount raised by Dick Cheney, Bush’s vice-president, when he visited the city the next day.

Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry’s campaign manager, said Bush aides had set out to “bury” Kerry with an avalanche of negative advertising. “I’m happy to report that 90 days later they failed,” she said.

Arriving at a Columbus community centre to meet working-class families, Kerry displayed both his strengths and failings as a presidential performer. Despite the muddled views he has expressed about Iraq, he has distilled his message into a simple but powerful complaint: “The United States should never go to war because it wants to; we should only go to war because we have to.”

He has also hit on an upbeat message for the economy. By pointing to former president Bill Clinton’s achievements in balancing the budget and creating millions of jobs, he deflects accusations that he is terminally pessimistic.

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