When Tina Brown has doubts...........
"You don't have to fall in love," Hillary Rodham Clinton reportedly reproved a top Democratic fundraiser who was recently moaning about Kerry's lackluster performance as a candidate. "You just have to fall in line."
Taking the GOP Bait, Hook, Line and Stinker
By Tina Brown
Washington Post
There was a surreal moment at a serious Manhattan dinner party Tuesday night when 12 power players who had all been talking at once about the mess in Iraq suddenly fell silent to listen to the waiter. He dove in shortly after he had served the coconut cake with lemon dessert -- perhaps to give moral support to the only Republican present, who was beginning to flag. Or perhaps he just thought it might be helpful for the guests to hear from one of the Ordinary Americans whose unhappiness with the status quo they are in the habit of earnestly invoking.
"I'm from the suburbs," he announced, "and I'm voting for Bush."
All eyes turned to him. "It might seem odd that a savvy New Yorker like me is voting for a guy in a cowboy hat," he went on, as he recklessly doled out ice cream to a network anchor, "but what we want is stability. This Kerry guy -- he's all over the place."
Huh? Stability? What about all the mayhem in Iraq? His intervention immediately brought the table back from a troubled analysis of American options in Iraq to how the medals debacle is affecting perceptions of Kerry. It was as if the waiter was a plant from the Bush campaign, diverting attention at a critical moment, just as he was supposed to.
The Republican attack machine -- again -- has made the right calculation: Hit 'em with trivia. Bait the hook with the absurd "issue" of whether it was medals or ribbons that Kerry hurled over the wall when he was a 27-year-old hothead. Then watch the media bite -- they'll do it every time -- and let Kerry rise to it and blow it. Presto, a thrice-wounded, decorated war hero running against a president who went missing from the National Guard is suddenly muddying up his own record on the morning talk shows. Shades of 2000, when Bush jokily bowled oranges down the aisle of his campaign plane while Gore argued about whether he did or didn't say he invented the Internet.
The blueprint for what's happening now is all up there on the screen in the unapologetically partisan documentary "Bush's Brain," about the president's political strategist Karl Rove, which opens at the Tribeca Film Festival next week. It tracks the techniques of Rove from his earliest days running Republican campaigns in Texas, using interviews on camera and off by two Texas journalists, Wayne Slater, senior political writer for the Dallas Morning News, and James Moore, TV reporter and producer.
"When I watch Kerry trying to swat away the issue of ribbons and medals I see Karl as the Oz figure all over again," Slater told me on the phone. "Rove's technique is always to go for a candidate's strength, not his weakness. In Texas, when Bush was running against Governor Ann Richards, her strength was her tolerance, her inclusiveness. She had brought a lot of women and minorities into government. So suddenly in conservative East Texas there was a whispering campaign about why she had hired so many lesbians and homosexuals. It's the same with Kerry. The war record is his strength -- so instead of leaving it alone, Rove just goes right at it."
It's spooky to see it working, both in the polls and anecdotally. In the past 10 days, Democrats in New York have been distracted for the first time from focusing their wrath on Bush to dumping it on Kerry. Even among heavy donors there has been a wave of buyer's remorse.
"You don't have to fall in love," Hillary Rodham Clinton reportedly reproved a top Democratic fundraiser who was recently moaning about Kerry's lackluster performance as a candidate. "You just have to fall in line."
New York Dems, having raised a staggering $9 million for Kerry on his last swing through town, now want to see their money in motion. They're vexed with the campaign's sluggish response to attack. They want Kerry to quit being his own surrogate on the talk shows. They want Max Cleland, John Glenn and Bob Kerrey to do the talking about the medals -- like how he earned them in the first place. Get his old Vietnam buddies to do a commando raid on the Bush-Cheney mud machine! Get those guys to travel with him all the time in a pack in sweaty old uniforms! Democrats long to bring on a new attack dog with unimpeachable Q ratings. Unleash the scimitar chin of Eliot Spitzer!
Insiders ask whether Kerry was right to turn down an invitation to meet with Tony Blair (a real foreign leader in a real New York restaurant) in favor of trolling for swing votes in Pennsylvania. By missing the Blair photo op, Kerry booted away a presidential moment with a global player.
Micropolitics vs. macroimagery: That's the Kerry dilemma. There's a terror among the macroschool that Kerry will choose a running mate for reasons of geography rather than imagery and wind up in dullsville. A veep groundswell is building again for John Edwards. So what if he doesn't deliver a state? He has charisma. He's a jury-pleaser. He'll stay cool under fire. Choose him right now to change the subject!
Most of all there is a sense in New York that what Democrats need is someone as dark and devilish as Karl Rove to go after Bush. It's a nostalgic experience for some to dip into George Stephanopoulos's 1999 memoir of his Clinton years, "All Too Human." There's not just a sentimental longing for George in the war room but for the villain of the book -- brilliant, conniving, unscrupulous Dick Morris.
" 'This is the moment to strike and watch the poll numbers go UP!' " Stephanopoulos quotes Morris. "On that last phrase, Morris threw his hands high above his head while wiggling his fingers and standing on the tips of his toes -- a political shaman casting a spell, enraptured by his own ecstatic dance." Bring back Morris? |
