Where Kerry Went Wrong

[Tommy Duncan]

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6039.../newsweek/ (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6039027/site/newsweek/)

Where Kerry Went Wrong

Kerry and Shrum got it backward. If they'd sliced up Bush this summer, they could have used the debates to seem presidential

By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek

Sept. 27 issue - After Labor Day, the political calendar goes into a time warp. Everything speeds up. With voters finally starting to pay attention, a week is about the equivalent of a normal month in political time. In late October the intensity can be so great that creative campaigns sometimes accomplish in a single day what it might once have taken three months to imprint on the minds of the voters. We don't know yet if we'll see such inventiveness this year, which means that for all of the weeping and moaning and rending of garments by despondent Democrats, we simply don't know if John Kerry is finished. We do know that his strategy so far, designed by Bob Shrum, lies in ruins, and for reasons that go far beyond the campaign's failure to respond quickly enough to the Swift Boat ads.

Shrum's grand plan wasn't complicated. He figured that with most voters believing the country is on the "wrong track," all that Kerry had to do was establish his credibility as a potential commander in chief and he would win—hence the "bio" convention. No need to respond directly to Bush ads sliming him for wanting to cut the same weapons systems that Bush's father cut. No need to explain how the Iraq war had been botched. No need to discredit Bush at all, because he was already thoroughly discredited.

Oh, well. The Shrum strategy was the product of short-term thinking (the assumption that Bush's unpopularity in the period of the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal would last until fall) and was reinforced by the sealed and often smug world of Democratic politics, where it was taken for granted that Bush was bad, bad, bad, and any reasonable person already knew why. Shrum correctly realized that a Michael Moore-style sledgehammer would do little to sway undecided voters who don't loathe Bush. But Shrum wrongly extrapolated from that point that Kerry had no need to indict Bush in easy-to-remember phrases that would stick. He once told me as much, and that name-calling wouldn't work in post-9/11 presidential politics.

That was wishful thinking. Politics has always been a contact sport where the winning team is the one that pins the kick me sign on the other guy. This is especially true in a race involving an incumbent. Focus groups always tell consultants that they're turned off by negative campaigning. It sounds good and makes them feel virtuous, but it's not true. Except in multicandidate races like the Democratic primaries, where voters can reject both the attacker and the attacked in favor of a third choice, the edge always goes to the predator over the victim. Americans like their candidates tough, especially during a war.

So Kerry and Shrum got the strategy exactly backward. If Kerry had used sticky language and cut-through-the-clutter ads to slice up Bush over the summer, he could have used the debates to seem positive and presidential. This is what Reagan did in 1980 against Jimmy Carter. He attacked him every day, then, with Carter discredited, left it to the debates for voters to say, "This other guy will do."

With his strategy in tatters, Kerry must now discredit Bush and simultaneously sell his own vision. This will be difficult for a candidate for whom straightforward English is often a second language. But it's hardly impossible, especially with Iraq melting down. The key is to focus less on the past—9/11 is Bush's ace in the hole—and more on the present and the future, with a focus on the visceral and personal: Where's bin Laden? We've got him neither dead nor alive. Will your sons and daughters be sent off to fight in a second Bush term? You've got health insurance now, but will you lose it soon? Nailing Bush means painting a big "F" for failure on his forehead for what's going on right now, then pivoting to explain in the simple terms that have eluded Kerry what he would do differently in the months ahead: Give reconstruction contracts to allies in exchange for helping us stabilize Iraq. Set a date certain for getting out of Iraq. Promise we'll never have another Iraq. Fight terrorism where it threatens us most, which is not in Iraq.

Can all of Kerry's qualifiers, gaffes and flip-flops on Iraq be finessed with a KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) strategy? Yep. That's the magic of general elections, where 50 million likely voters are just tuning in. With a few choice one-liners, the onus of responsibility can be placed back where it belongs—on Bush. Ripping off the GOP's 1994 "Contract With America" would also help. Voters needs to know four or five simple things that Kerry and the Democrats would do immediately. As the clock winds down, the odds against a Kerry victory grow longer every day. But a day can be enough in politics, for those who can fight and KISS at the same time.

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

[Tommy Duncan]

www.opinionjournal.com/di...=110005643 (http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110005643)

Dukakis II
A sequel to a Democratic horror show.

John Fund
The Wall Street Journal

Monday, September 20, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

Harold Meyerson, editor of the liberal magazine The American Prospect, tells a story of a friend of his who had a dream. He was walking through the headquarters of the Kerry campaign. Behind a door marked "Campaign Manager" he found Kerry manager Mary Beth Cahill. As he drew nearer, however, the woman suddenly ripped off her Cahill mask, behind which was . . . Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis's campaign manager! Mr. Meyerson's friend woke up screaming.

Lots of Democrats are having similar nightmares about 1988, when Mr. Dukakis, once ahead 17 points in the polls, lost by eight to George W. Bush's father.

Says one Democratic consultant: "I would have called you crazy if in 1989 you would have told me that a decade and a half later this party was going to nominate Dukakis's lieutenant governor--another aloof Massachusetts liberal who would overconfidently feel he would mop the floor with this clueless guy named Bush. But I fear I've seen this movie, and it's 'Groundhog Day.' "

Like Mr. Kerry, Mr. Dukakis was a liberal at heart, but both were perceived as moderates until the fall campaign. Reporters, most of whom supported both Democrats, did all that they could to prop up that image. The need to preserve a moderate image prompted both candidates to talk evasively about issues; in his convention speech Mr. Dukakis famously declared: "This election is not about ideology, it's about competence."

"That strategy ran into trouble when their opponents adopted the simple expedient of pointing out their liberalism using ads with specific, undisputable examples," concludes a study by Indiana University's Erik Rasmusen. "At that point, their advantage in the polls started evaporating."

Liberal journalists have started to pile on the Kerry campaign. "Kerry is Dukakis, after all," sighs Joe Klein of Time magazine. "Deadly dull, slow to respond, trapped in Democratic banality; he actually said he was for 'good jobs at good wages.' "

Craig Crawford, now with Congressional Quarterly and MSNBC, spent 1988 covering the Dukakis campaign. "Do I see parallels? I see only parallels." He notes that many of the same players he knew are back: Bob Shrum, a key adviser to Dukakis, is now Mr. Kerry's top strategist. A top Dukakis deputy, Tad Devine, is Mr. Shrum's deputy in the Kerry campaign. John Sasso, Mr. Dukakis's chief of staff, is Mr. Kerry's top aide on his campaign plane. Joe Lockhart, the former Clinton press secretary, got his start on the Dukakis press operation.

Mr. Crawford agrees that Mr. Kerry has shown the ability to come back from behind, as he did against Howard Dean this year and when he defeated the popular Gov. William Weld in 1996. "But Kerry has only run against Massachusetts Republicans, and the national kind are tougher and more conservative than he's used to," he points out. "I think he's a little shell shocked."

The election is not over, and foreign events or the debates could change the polls dramatically. But it's not too early to ask how Democrats wound up making many of the same mistakes that crippled the Dukakis effort. Leading Democrats agree on many of the problems plaguing the Kerry campaign:

• Bad campaign visuals. "I smell the same New England genius that I smelled in the Dukakis campaign in 1988,'' Gerald Austin, an Ohio political consultant, told the New York Times. "Where do they put him for photo opportunities? Snowboarding in Sun Valley, shooting skeet in the Ohio Valley, and windsurfing off that great working-class vacation paradise, Nantucket."

Others blame a chaotic staff structure with too many decision-makers and an indecisive candidate. Mr. Kerry is addicted to telephone conference calls in which he will sample the views of several aides, seem to come to a decision and then reverse or modify it after one-on-one conversations with others.

• Buying into a myth that Mr. Kerry couldn't be labeled another Massachusetts liberal. "He's a guy who actually shot communists and, when he was a district attorney, locked up murderers," says Rep. Barney Frank. But Mr. Kerry has a 20-year Senate record, one that at times has put him to the left of Ted Kennedy. Mr. Kerry doesn't like to talk about his Senate record, but that doesn't mean Republicans will ignore it.

• Losing control of the message. "If pitching is 75 percent of baseball, then 75 percent of election victory revolves around the definition of the campaign," Pat Caddell, the pollster for Jimmy Carter's 1976 and 1980 campaigns, once wrote. "He who sets the definition of the campaign usually wins."

Mr. Devine has admitted that the Dukakis campaign failed to "run a general election in broad thematic terms that are cultural and historical. But you get so wrapped up in what you're doing, sometimes you lose a lot of focus."

That is also what appears to have happened to Mr. Kerry. In August, 1988, Michael Dukakis repaired to the Tanglewood Festival in the Berkshires and failed to respond to attacks on his prison furlough program, centered on the murderer Willie Horton, who raped and brutalized a Maryland couple while out on weekend release. This year, Mr. Kerry hung out in Nantucket and allowed himself to be filmed windsurfing while the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth pounded him for nearly a month with little effective rebuttal. "The Bush people have a very effective message: the president is tough on terror and John Kerry is either too liberal or too indecisive to do the job. That's become the campaign backdrop," says GOP consultant Charlie Black.

Now some Democrats are overreacting in panic to Mr. Kerry's drop in the polls. Ms. Estrich, now a columnist and newspaper columnist, says the lesson of the Dukakis campaign she ran was that "the trouble with Democrats, traditionally, is that we're not mean enough." She laid out the alternative strategy: a "long and ugly road" to November." She suggested it was time to dig for Bush scandals, from his Air National Guard service (already done) to his prior drinking. "As Larry Flynt discovered, a million dollars loosens lips. Are there others to be loosened?"

As a desperation move, such talk no doubt as its appeal. In 1988, Donna Brazile, then an aide on the Dukakis campaign, lost her job after she openly accused George H.W. Bush of having an extramarital affair. The incident hurt Mr. Dukakis. This year similar tactics are unlikely to work. George W. Bush has a four-year record in office that can be judged for good or for ill. He is not a stranger to the American people, and his faults are not unknown.

Even if Democrats have nothing to do with kamikaze attacks on Mr. Bush, they could still be hurt by them. Mr. Caddell says that if the documents CBS News used to claim Mr. Bush shirked his duty in the Texas Air National Guard are proved to be forgeries, "it would be the end of the race." He explained to Fox News that Democrats "have gotten themselves so involved in this issue that if they're not authentic, they're going to be blamed for it. It's incredible to me that they've gotten in this. I'm trying to save my party, you know, by telling the truth."

No doubt few Democrats will agree, but Mr. Caddell's larger point--that the Democratic Party will have some soul-searching to do should Mr. Kerry lose--is clearly valid. A party that is so myopic as to repeat so many of the mistakes it made in an historic loss only a decade and a half ago is a party that needs to re-examine its relationship with the American people. Perhaps, following the lead of Britain's Labour Party, it needs to shrug off its most liberal elements and embrace truly centrist positions.

If they lose this November, Democrats may console themselves that a strong personality such as Hillary Clinton or John Edwards will rescue them in 2008. But they would be wise to conduct a far more thorough autopsy. After Mr. Dukakis's loss, the party turned to Bill Clinton in 1992, who campaigned as a "new Democrat" and won back the White House. But even running as a centrist, Mr. Clinton never won a majority of the popular vote. To win elections, especially in wartime, Democrats may actually have to change their spots.

[Yonivore]

Kerry didn't "go" wrong. He is wrong.

[Hook Dem]

Theres not enough bandwidth to show just how wrong he is!

[LandSharkII]

You've got that right!

[Tommy Duncan]

Regardless of the man's podiafetish he knows his politics...

www.thehill.com/morris/092204.aspx (http://www.thehill.com/morris/092204.aspx)

Kerry’s confused campaign

By Dick Morris
The Hill

The defects in Sen. John Kerry’s campaign do not all stem from a candidate and advisers who don’t know where they are going. A large part of the most directionless challenge to an incumbency in recent decades comes from the fundamental disagreement that Kerry voters have among themselves.

With his constituency almost evenly divided between hawks and doves, Kerry doesn’t know what to say or which way to turn. Since the only common denominator of his backers is their animosity toward Bush, the Massachusetts Democrat is stuck waging a negative campaign that wears out his welcome with swing voters.

This problem largely stems from the fact that Kerry’s candidacy came of age in March and April, the worst months for Bush’s war in Iraq. With maximum American casualties during the horrific months of early spring, Kerry sought to cast himself as having been misled into backing the war and disappointed in its progress.

But all that unites his supporters is their agreement with that negative critique of the past. As for the future, they are split down the middle, with half wanting to stress bringing the troops home as fast as possible and a bit more than a third, according to the latest Fox News poll, wanting America to stay long enough to finish the job.

On domestic issues, where Kerry’s voters at least agree with one another, he is undermined by Bush’s increasing economic success, robbing his challenger of his best issue. It is hard to base a campaign on economic disaster when the unemployment rate is near historic lows and rapidly dipping toward 5 percent.

Add to those elements the self-promotion of Kerry’s advisers who cannot keep their mouths shut and insist on grabbing the limelight from their candidate, and you have one of the worst-run campaigns since the time this same team made its national debut: The ill-fated campaign against Bush’s father by another liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, Gov. Mike Dukakis, in 1988.

The current mantra of the Kerry campaign is to go negative. Embracing the style of Harry Truman without his substance, the Democratic strategists (a term one uses loosely) have decided that voters want a combative, happy warrior on the stump. But attacking an incumbent president is like punching a pillow.

As Clinton-turned-Kerry advisers Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart should remember, it is very hard for a president’s adversaries to increase his negative ratings by attacking him. Once someone has served as president, voters tend to base their opinions of his tenure on their own observations rather than on partisan attacks. And his time before taking office — e.g. his military record — matters not at all.

But a challenger’s record and background are avidly followed by voters who need signals and signs to try to understand what kind of president this largely unknown candidate would make. They sift through all the stories and evidence to find clues in his past.

More than anything else, voters want to know what new directions a challenger to a sitting president offers. Bill Clinton gave them a bunch when he ran against George H.W. Bush in 1992: ending welfare “as we know it,” focusing on the economy “like a laser beam” and guaranteeing healthcare “to all Americans.” Ronald Reagan offered an equally specific and compelling alternative to Jimmy Carter in 1980.

But all Kerry provides is criticism and negatives about the Bush administration.

Each time he attacks Bush, he pushes himself down among the American voters and comes across as negative, whining and complaining.

How did the Democrats end up in such a mess? Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe is to blame. It was he who decided to frontload the primaries to produce an early winner. Kerry got the nomination without any real audition. There was never a chance to road-test his candidacy or even to refine his message on a national stage.

He was nominated because he was the un-Howard Dean and because the moderates — Dick Gephardt, John Edwards, Joe Lieberman and Wesley Clark — never got untracked. Had the process stretched over several months instead of a few weeks, the flaws in Kerry’s candidacy would have become obvious and he would have been forced, in the crucible of conflict, to elaborate a more coherent message. Now he only has seven weeks to get his act together.


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Morris is the author of Rewriting History, a rebuttal of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) memoir, Living History.

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© 2004 The Hill
733 Fifteenth Street, NW Suite 1140
Washington, DC 20005
202-628-8500 tel | 202-628-8503 fax

[Nbadan]

Even if Democrats have nothing to do with kamikaze attacks on Mr. Bush, they could still be hurt by them. Mr. Caddell says that if the documents CBS News used to claim Mr. Bush shirked his duty in the Texas Air National Guard are proved to be forgeries, "it would be the end of the race." He explained to Fox News that Democrats "have gotten themselves so involved in this issue that if they're not authentic, they're going to be blamed for it. It's incredible to me that they've gotten in this. I'm trying to save my party, you know, by telling the truth."

Eh? That's not what the latest polls are saying. The Democrats are still very much in it and with Kerry back on the attack, I have no doubt we will see marginal increases in Kerry's standing in important swing states soon. Remember, I think that all Kerry has to do is keep it close in the polls, then let the influx of new younger voters put it away for Kerry.

[Tommy Duncan]

Lay off the pipe. You know a campaign is in trouble when they start claiming (wishing) that new voters will win the election for them.

This may come as a shock to you but 'young people' have been participating in presidential elections for a long, long time. It's not a new phenomenon.

Also something you fail to grasp is that not every 'young person' is inclined to support Kerry, even in spite of the Demo's desperate attempt to scare them into voting for Kerry by claiming a military draft is on the way.

[LandSharkII]

You know a campaign is in trouble when they start claiming (wishing) that new voters will win the election for them.
That's true. I recall Tony Sanchez making the "new voters" claim two years ago en route to his landslide defeat at the hands of Gov. Rick Perry.

[Joe Chalupa]

I agree Kerry has not run a great campaign.