I think these guys watched "The War Room" quite a few times. I love the line I read on Cheney yesterday. "He puts the sword against your chest, and pushes slowly until it is in all the way to the hilt."
Campaign Mantra Is Rapid Response
Attacks Rebutted in Same News Cycle
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 20, 2004; Page A06
Last Sunday, President Bush's campaign strategists met outside the office to plot a preemptive strike against John F. Kerry before he addressed a veterans' group in West Virginia.
At 1 a.m. Tuesday, fueled by pizza from Bertucci's, the advertising team finished a spot accusing the Massachusetts senator of failing to support U.S. troops in Iraq by voting against an $87 billion military funding bill. Campaign manager Ken Mehlman briefed reporters in a conference call at 10:45 a.m. , half an hour before Kerry began speaking in Huntington.
At 1:22 p.m., Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter sent reporters an e-mail ripping "Bush-Cheney's latest misleading ad." Kerry defended himself by saying, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
On Thursday, the Bush camp added video of Kerry's awkward comment to the ad -- and boosted the buy from West Virginia stations to national cable networks -- prompting Cutter to accuse the president's team of "slash and burn politics."
Technology and the sheer acceleration of news coverage have combined to produce a presidential campaign that is faster and more frenetic than ever before, reducing response time to mere minutes. Although campaigns have been in rapid response mode since the days of Bill Clinton's 1992 war room, Bush and Kerry operatives now flood reporters with e-mail attacks and BlackBerry responses, arrange conference calls and wage a Web war complete with online video -- a far cry from the faxed statements of an earlier era.
The stakes are considerable. In a campaign that is striking for its early intensity and daily negativity, each side is trying to frame the debate -- Bush by painting Kerry as big on taxes and soft on defense, and Kerry by depicting the president as a failure on the economy and Iraq. Each newspaper headline, television sound bite or Internet posting burnishes or blemishes the candidates' image.
The failure to respond quickly, as Michael S. Dukakis learned against Bush's father in 1988, can be disastrous. Rapid response is especially important for Kerry, who currently has only a fraction of the opposition's $100 million war chest and faces an incumbent with an inherent ability to command media attention.
On the morning of March 11, Cutter went to Kerry's hideaway office in the Capitol and told him that Bush would be releasing his first attack ad later that day. She had already gotten word it would involve taxes and terrorism.
"I want you to preempt the ad and let them know you know it's coming," Cutter told him. Kerry agreed, adding: "I want to respond with an ad."
The senator soon told reporters that Bush was attacking because he had no record on which to run, and when the Bush commercial was released at 3 p.m., Kerry's staff gathered in a downtown conference room and hammered out a script in half an hour. Although the Kerry ad was not finished until 5 a.m. the next day, Cutter made sure reporters were read the script before they finished their stories.
"Why let them have the news cycle?" Cutter asked.
The next morning, the Bush camp e-mailed reporters a defense of its charges that Kerry had a $900 billion tax plan -- which the senator's counterattack spot called "misleading," as he has never proposed such a plan. An hour later, the Republican National Committee sent out an Associated Press story that raised questions about Kerry's budgetary math. The Bush team fired off a critique of Kerry's ad, as well.
The afternoon of March 12, the Kerry camp created a Web site called D'Bunker as a cyber clearinghouse for its responses. "Republicans Inventing Numbers to Distort Kerry's Tax Record," it read.
Bush's second attack ad was designed to steal the headlines from Kerry's West Virginia visit Tuesday -- and it worked.
"If John Kerry is going to give a series of speeches on veterans' issues, the right time for us to act is while he is giving those speeches, not two days afterward," said campaign press secretary Terry Holt. "It's extremely important to do it in the same news cycle so his words don't go unchallenged. He went from playing offense to playing defense in the space of minutes. Instead of attacking the president, he was defending his bad votes in supporting the troops."
But the Bush team was just beginning. Holt talked about the attack ad on CNN about 4 p.m., while Mehlman carried the message on CNN and MSNBC an hour later.
While Holt was heading to CNN and Fox News for evening appearances, an assistant sent him a BlackBerry message that Kerry had talked about voting both for and against the $87 billion. Holt ridiculed the comment on the air. The campaign also fed the quote to the White House, and Vice President Cheney used it as a punch line Wednesday -- prompting an e-mail blast from Cutter 90 minutes later saying Cheney "left his facts in secret undisclosed location."
What Kerry meant in West Virginia was that he had supported a measure to pay for the $87 billion in military operations by rescinding an equal amount from Bush's tax cuts. But such legislative nuances get lost in the political crossfire. "This president and his attack-dog vice president continue to distort the record of John Kerry," Cutter said Thursday.
The real-time thrusting and parrying extends well beyond the ad wars. Kerry aides, working their Democratic sources on Capitol Hill, discovered last week that Bush planned to nominate Nebraska executive Anthony F. Raimondo to head a new office to stem the loss of manufacturing jobs. After some quick research, Kerry aides leaked to reporters that the nomination was imminent and that Raimondo's company had opened a factory in China. Raimondo withdrew the next day amid unfavorable publicity.
When Cheney took a swipe at Kerry last week by saying that "indecision kills," Cutter got a copy of his remarks by e-mail. That night, Kerry replied that "bad, rushed decisions kill, too."
While each side has its own partisan network and tapes cable news programs around the clock, some moves are based on educated guesswork. The Bush team noted in its ad that the $87 billion funding bill included body armor for the troops in Iraq after figuring that Kerry would keep attacking the president for failing to provide such armor. The Kerry camp deduced the probable content of Bush's first attack ad, even before the contents leaked, because "they're a very predictable campaign," Cutter said. "We knew it would have something to do with taxing and spending, weak on defense, liberal."
From a vast maze of cubicles in a nondescript office park in Arlington, Holt's staff includes a rapid response unit that churns out releases dubbed "The Kerry Line."
The president's side has easy access to the airwaves, since top administration officials are much sought-after as newsmakers. Holt, who worked for former GOP House members Richard K. Armey (Tex.) and John R. Kasich (Ohio), as well as Rep. John A. Boehner (Ohio), has become a ubiquitous figure on cable talk shows.
But Cutter is trying to level the electronic playing field. From two luxurious floors on 15th Street N.W. recently vacated by a law firm, her staff has mounted a major booking effort. They have dispatched senior advisers Tad Devine and Michael Meehan, along with Democratic surrogates, to cable talk shows and demanded equal time on network morning and Sunday shows.
The tactics do not always work. When the administration blitzed last Sunday's shows with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, the Kerry camp tried unsuccessfully to get one of its foreign policy advisers, Richard C. Holbrooke, on to rebut them.
Cutter, a former spokeswoman for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and onetime Clinton White House official, recently debated Holt on CNN but admitted she is a reluctant television warrior. Because campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill also avoids television interviews, Cutter said, she fills in, because "we need to get more women out there."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company |
