GOP's fierce attacks contrast with Democrats' restraint
BY STEVEN THOMMA
Knight Ridder Newspapers
NEW YORK - (KRT) - Republicans are going after John Kerry at their national convention with a vengeance.
While at least half of their convention is a respectful salute to President Bush, the other half is a take-no-prisoners broadside at the Democratic senator from Massachusetts that often is downright ridicule. The Republican criticism is designed to ensure that even those voters who don't buy Bush brand will find Kerry a distinctly unappealing alternative.
The blunt attack presents a stark contrast to the Democratic National Convention's ginger treatment of Bush. There, Kerry and his forces shied away from much direct criticism of the president, confident that nearly a year of describing him as a liar and a buffoon had already taken its toll. They were also fearful that more criticism might backfire, especially with swing voters who retain an affection for Bush despite misgivings about his policies.
Republicans this week had no such qualms, sometimes criticizing Kerry's voting record, sometimes lampooning him as a flip-flopper and always aiming to reinforce the thought that Kerry shouldn't be trusted to keep the country safe or steer its economy.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani mocked Kerry on Monday for his evolving positions on the Iraq war. He noted that Kerry voted to authorize the Iraq war, then started criticizing it when Democrats rallied behind anti-war candidate Howard Dean, then voted against spending $87 billion to support postwar needs in Iraq, including arming U.S. troops, but now says he supports it.
"At this rate, with 64 days left, he still has time to change his position four or five more times," Giuliani said to laughter.
Giuliani also gleefully turned one of Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards' signature lines against Kerry. Edwards routinely decries Bush policies that he says created "two Americas" divided by class, but Giuliani said the term "two Americas" must mean "one where John Kerry can vote for something and another one where he can vote against exactly the same thing."
Even Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele blasted Kerry for voting to cut intelligence spending, to oppose Al Gore's plan to reinvent and streamline government, and against the Defense of Marriage Act that President Clinton signed into law.
Of course, both parties desperately want to win, but the very different approaches they took at their conventions raises the question of why Democrats didn't criticize Bush more directly, and why Republicans attacked Kerry head-on.
For the Democrats, there were three main reasons why Kerry aides tempered most criticisms of Bush. First, they thought Bush already was vulnerable, thanks to setbacks in Iraq, net job losses during his presidency and a still shaky economic recovery, particularly in such battleground states as Ohio and Michigan.
Moreover, they had already spent the better part of a year criticizing him, first in the Democratic primary campaign when all candidates fired up anti-Bush rhetoric to compete with former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, then with a sometimes virulent anti-Bush ad campaign from allied groups such as MoveOn.org. One ad posted briefly on MoveOn's Web site compared Bush to Adolf Hitler.
Second, Bush remains personally popular with the American people. More than 2 out of 3 undecided voters like Bush as a person, according to a recent Zogby/Williams survey. That makes it risky to get too negative about his character.
Kerry at times seems haunted by the same fear that hurt Bob Dole in 1996 when he was the Republican candidate challenging Clinton. Dole was so afraid of being branded as mean-spirited (unlike Kerry, Dole already had that reputation) that he spent much of a faltering campaign refusing to give voters clear reasons to fire the incumbent.
Finally, Kerry has a difficult time going after Bush where he's most vulnerable - the war in Iraq. Likely voters who aren't yet firmly behind either Bush or Kerry rank Iraq as Bush's biggest failure. Yet Kerry cannot make a strong anti-war case against Bush because Kerry voted to authorize the war and recently said he would vote the same way today even knowing that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction.
Republicans believe they have more leeway to blast Kerry.
First, Kerry is at best unknown and at worst unliked. That makes him easier to criticize without fear of offending a voter who likes Kerry but whose vote is still up for grabs.
Only about 16 percent of persuadable voters like Kerry, according to the Zogby/Williams poll. A solid 52 percent don't like him and another 32 percent don't know him well enough to say.
Second, Kerry left his public record open for Bush to define. At his convention, Kerry focused largely on his record as a combat veteran in Vietnam, hoping to boost his standing as a potential commander in chief. He spent little time defining his record in the Senate, where he has spent almost 20 years.
"We've always said this is both about our record and our vision as well as a competing choice between the two of us, as reflected in his record and his vision and what that says," Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd said this week.
But Kerry's record on Vietnam has been criticized as well.
An independent group with Republican sympathies, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, went after Kerry's combat record, charging that he lied about his war record, claiming Purple Hearts for self-inflicted or minor wounds. (Official military records and investigations by several news organizations, including Knight Ridder, concluded that the facts support Kerry's version of events.) The group also put up ads charging that Kerry libeled fellow veterans with his protests against the war later.
At the Republican convention, several delegates made fun of Kerry's Purple Hearts, wearing plastic bandages with purple hearts on them to suggest that his wounds were superficial. Bush aides eventually asked the delegates to stop.
Ultimately, Bush might have no choice but to criticize his rival. As the sitting president, he's well known, his policies familiar. Polls show him receiving about half of the likely vote, and persuading the relatively few undecided voters to stick with him is difficult, given that they already know him well. Therefore, his next best tactic may be simply to hold his share and ensure that Kerry doesn't get the other half - plus one vote.
---
(The Zogby/Williams poll cited in graf 12 was of 501 persuadable voters and had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.) |
