Media Primary Begins for Democrats
Candidates' First Ads Stress Contrast With Bush, Empathy for Middle Class Voters
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 7, 2003; Page A05
John Edwards talks about hailing from a family of sharecroppers. Dick Gephardt says his father was a milkman.
Howard Dean says he's the man to stand up to President Bush, unlike many timid Democrats in Washington.
John Kerry talks about the courage of Americans -- while using a flag-bedecked backdrop that may remind viewers of his own courage in Vietnam.
The initial television ads of the Democratic presidential candidates, even at this early stage, shed considerable light on how they want to present themselves to primary voters in the only format they fully control. If you get just one chance to make a good first impression, these 30-second snapshots are an important clue to each man's media strategy.
Despite their stylistic differences, the commercials, running mainly in Iowa and New Hampshire, all trumpet the need for jobs and, almost as often, expanded health care -- an issue about which Democrats had been skittish since the Clinton health plan crashed and burned in 1994. The ads all strike an us-vs.-them tone in which the candidates sell themselves as champions of the middle class.
"I'm not sure how much it does with voters," said former Clinton White House spokesman Joe Lockhart. "But the unwritten rule is if you don't do well in the media primary, you may not get to the real primary. Obviously, Dean has passed the test, so he's in a different place than everyone else. But several of the others have to move numbers to keep reporters from dismissing them."
Republican media consultant Don Sipple agreed that "the shelf life of early advertising is very short. But these candidates need to show movement in key early states in order to raise money around the country."
Dean, the front-runner in polls in the early states, doesn't talk about his family or where he grew up (perhaps because a childhood in the Hamptons with a stockbroker father doesn't quite fit the log-cabin genre). Instead, he portrays himself as the anti-Bush, saying he wants "to change George Bush's reckless foreign policy, stand up for affordable health care and create new jobs. . . . Has anyone really stood up against George Bush and his policies? Don't you think it's time somebody did?"
In another ad, while standing in front of a tractor, Dean becomes the only candidate to mention Iraq in his commercials: "I opposed the war with Iraq when too many other Democrats supported it, because I want a foreign policy consistent with American values." Dean's antiwar stance helped fuel his surge in the polls.
The former Vermont governor, surrounded by children, recites some of his accomplishments in a third spot, trying to draw a contrast between him and his inside-the-Beltway opponents. "There are more than 9 million children in America without any health insurance, most from working families," the ad says. "Washington politicians talk about the problem, but a governor named Howard Dean did something about it, and today every child in Vermont has access to quality health care."
Kerry says nothing about himself in the three ads unveiled this week, taped at Iowa and New Hampshire speeches. But two of them mention "courage," which dovetails with the Vietnam-era photo of Kerry on his Web site, featuring the headline: "The courage to fight for America."
The colorful, fast-moving ads, which keep cutting to cheering crowds, hit the unemployment issue hard. "Three million jobs lost, too many of them in the heartland," Kerry says in one. "That is an astonishing failure. If I am president, I will roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy so we can invest in education, health care and the skills of our workers. We need to be on the side of America's middle class."
A second spot hints at the Bush administration's ties to big business, saying that Americans "can break the grip of special interests and bring back jobs and finally open up health care to all."
Edwards takes a far more biographical approach. Appearing in rolled-up shirtsleeves, the freshman senator opens one ad in his hometown of Robbins, N.C., "a place where values like hard work, family, faith and community mattered. And they still do. But today our small towns and rural areas are hurting, and Washington doesn't seem to care." He says he's got a "detailed plan" to boost jobs, schools and health care in rural America.
A second spot is from South Carolina, where Edwards was born, amid folks who "weren't famous and they sure weren't rich." Although he's a millionaire trial lawyer, the Edwards in these ads stresses his working-class roots, saying he "will never forget where I come from and who I'm fighting for."
Edwards also plays the class card against Bush, the son of a president and grandson of a senator. "My grandmother came from a family of sharecroppers," he says in a third ad. "My father worked in a cotton mill all his life, and I helped out there in the summers. . . . George Bush -- he comes from a very different place. He believes if we take care of folks at the top, that somehow the whole country will be lifted."
While Gephardt, a veteran House member from Missouri, is better known, he uses his first ad to cast himself not as a dull legislator but as the product of the working heartland who will "fight for America's middle class."
"President Bush and I see things very differently," says Gephardt, wearing a sports shirt and subtly invoking the privileged Bush family background. "My mother was a secretary, and my dad delivered milk door to door. They struggled so I could go to college."
Sipple, the GOP strategist, doesn't think much of biographical ads: "They're awful soft. Going straight to the issues is viewed as more relevant by voters."
Gephardt has produced one spot about his record, making him the only candidate to tout President Bill Clinton. The former House minority leader recalls his 1993 role in narrowly passing the Clinton economic plan (including tax increases, which are not mentioned). While "every Republican" opposed the plan, says the ad, flashing a black-and-white picture of former Georgia representative Newt Gingrich, "Democratic leader Dick Gephardt digs in and wins the fight in Congress by one vote," leading to "millions of new jobs."
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