I love the sound of Oliphant whining on Sunday morning. His son works for Kerry and is part of Kerry's "old guard" who are getting kicked out of the way by the Clintonistas.
THOMAS OLIPHANT
Office politics
By Thomas Oliphant, Globe Columnist | September 19, 2004
WASHINGTON
JOHN KERRY gave a more than decent account of himself in Michigan last week in an important oration about the economy. But several new members of his campaign staff thought it more important to step all over his message and promote themselves as the new bosses of the effort.
Later in the week, Kerry was even more forceful and effective in Nevada as he discussed the murderous mess in Iraq. But again, his campaign's Narcissism Caucus got between Kerry and the public by spinning the political press into glowing accounts of their campaign coup.
All this madness began unfolding while the Bush campaign was revving up its attack machine in New York. Two of the original promoters of firings at the top included onetime Clinton advisers James Carville and Paul Begala, the latter having almost but not quite come aboard last spring. The effort reached its public peak when CNN anchor Judy Woodruff, without disclosing the basis for her question, confronted senior Kerry adviser Jeanne Shaheen with "reports" of a huge shakeup and asked her if the campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill and top consultant Bob Shrum were about to be fired.
Though she was ambushed that day at the end of August, Shaheen's quick-thinking answer -- there is no change -- has stood up ever since. According to Kerry, the boss of his campaign is Cahill, and she and Shrum (along with the partners in his firm, Tad Devine and Mike Donilan) supply its strategic direction.
That's not the story that surfaced this week from recent arrivals who claimed they had taken over Kerry's daily communication and organization and through them the campaign. All have Clinton backgrounds: Joe Lockhart was said by his colleagues to be boss of what Kerry says, Doug Sosnik was said to have taken over the targeting of resources at battleground states, Carville and Begala were said to be communicating directly with Kerry on strategy, and onetime Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg was said to be not only aboard but pushing a point shared within the group that the key to the election is regular attacks on President Bush without worrying about undecided or "swing" voters.
As a general rule in this sort of insider politics and journalism, the supposed new regime and its promoters are one and the same. That is why I have learned to suspect that those who leak the least are generally those who don't need to for personal promotion or who have a sharper focus on winning the election. In this case, that would be Cahill and Shrum and Co., along with two longtime Kerry advisers (John Sasso and Mike Whouly) who are famously averse to office gossip.
The new group, however, has gone after or sought to marginalize their colleagues and more prominent Kerry allies as well. Cahill gets the faint-praise insult as the person who only keeps the trains running on time. This year, the reclusive Shrum is everyone's favorite target, despite his status as one of the most important Democratic Party minds of the last 30 years with long, personal ties to both Kerry and Senator Edward Kennedy.
They have also taken shots at running mate John Edwards for the supposed sin of not being enough of an attack dog and focusing to much on the weird notion of using the Kerry-Edwards issues positions to persuade wavering voters.
And their view of Kennedy -- who helped right Kerry's floundering campaign last fall and sent his top aide, Cahill, to do the heavy lifting -- is that he was of importance in the primaries, not now. Kennedy has the odd notion that people should shut up about office politics and promote Kerry's election instead of their own positions.
There's the key -- and the rub. Last week's sophomoric behavior makes Kerry into a passive vehicle for the ambitions of others. It also directly interferes with the communication of his views. I understand he blew his stack when reports of the backstage shenanigans first surfaced last week; and I can understand why.
Even worse, the public pursuit of office politics insults the more than 50-million people with a direct stake in Kerry's election -- working families trying to stay afloat, National Guard families who have been without breadwinners for a year, elderly citizens sending too much of their money to drug companies.
They need to know what Kerry and Edwards will do to change their lives for the better, not who is running the campaign "war room." With the election literally up for grabs down the stretch, this ugly ball is now in Kerry's court. |
