They REALLY don't like the Ashley ad.
CAMPAIGN JOURNAL
Backward
by Ryan Lizza
- Ryan Lizza is a senior editor at TNR.
he long-established strategy of the Bushes is that the family takes the high road while underlings of untraceable affiliation do the dirty work. It was a third-party group, the National Security PAC, that ran the Willie Horton ads against Michael Dukakis in 1988. This year, the swift boat vets kneecapped John Kerry with their attacks on his Vietnam record. With the race extremely close, Democrats have been nervously waiting for some new Bush surrogate to join the fray in the campaign's final days. On October 19, the Progress for America Voter Fund, the best-funded Republican 527 organization, unveiled a new ad they plan to run in nine critical battleground states at a cost of $14 million, the largest ad buy of the entire campaign. What was the content of this new attack ad? A dewy-eyed President Bush is shown in a well-known photo embracing a young girl on the campaign trail in Ohio. "He's the most powerful man in the world, and all he wants to do is make sure I'm safe, that I'm OK," says 16-year-old Ashley Faulkner as an emotional score plays. John Kerry is never mentioned.
There's still plenty of time for some group to go nuclear with a new anti-Kerry ad. The Sinclair Broadcast Group airs portions of its documentary attacking Kerry for his role opposing the Vietnam War on October 22, to unknown effect. And, indeed, most of the ads run this year by Progress for America have been negative: "Would you trust Kerry against these fanatic killers?" one of their spots asks, as a rogues' gallery of Al Qaeda terrorists flashes on-screen. But the Faulkner ad, which is accompanied by a massive Internet ad campaign, is all sweetness and light, $14 million of argument-free television to remind swing-state voters that the president is a good hugger. The traditional Bush strategy has been turned on its head. Instead of outsourcing hit jobs and staying above the fray, the president and Dick Cheney are going medieval on John Kerry, while their best-funded allies try to mitigate the personal damage inevitably done when the top of a ticket goes on the warpath.
ush's strategy for the homestretch is fourfold. First, elevate the attacks on Kerry. This week, Bush and Cheney sounded like they had been trolling the far corners of right-wing websites for talking points. Ever since Kerry's debate performances undercut their character-based attack on him as a flip-flopper, BC'04 has moved to a sharp ideological attack. On October 25 in New Jersey, Bush delivered a greatest-hits version of his national security case against Kerry, recapping all the half-true claims he has made this year. He argued Kerry has a September 10 worldview by taking a Kerry quote out of context. He also again distorted what Kerry meant by his awkward "global test" phrase from the debates, as well as his recent comments to The New York Times about reaching a point when terrorism is just a "nuisance" rather than an existential threat. (Bush apparently favors the latter.) Bush argued that Kerry is against preemption, when in fact Kerry has always said that it is a tool available to all presidents. Bush claimed Kerry "believes that fighting [Musab Al] Zarqawi and other terrorists in Iraq is a diversion from the war on terror." Iraq, of course, was not a terrorist haven until after the invasion, and Kerry has consistently said that, now that it has become one, Al Qaeda must be defeated there. Having set up this straw man, Bush summarized Kerry's national security strategy as "giving up the fight."
As Bush continues to play the attack dog, Cheney's chief job seems to be to scare voters. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson had "Daisy." This year, Bush has Cheney. Before the war in Iraq, it was Cheney who said, "We believe [Saddam Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." In Ohio this week, Cheney returned to the theme. "The biggest threat we face now as a nation," he said, "is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever been used against us--with biological agents, or a nuclear weapon, or a chemical weapon of some kind, able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, not just three thousand. And that's the ultimate threat. And, for us to have a strategy that's capable of dealing with that threat and defeating it--you've got to get your mind around that concept."
esides the case against Kerry, there are three other parts of Bush's strategy in these final days. After getting knocked around by Kerry's attacks on Iraq just prior to, and during, the debates, Bush is returning to his convention theme, attempting to wrap himself in September 11. That's one reason he went to New Jersey to deliver his high-profile anti-Kerry speech this week. By going to New Jersey, where polls show the race to be tighter than the 16 points by which Gore won the state in 2000, Bush was also reviving Karl Rove's theory of the bandwagon effect. In 2000, Bush famously toured New Jersey and California in the closing days of the race because Rove believes some undecided voters will jump aboard whatever campaign looks like a winner at the end. In an e-mail to supporters, Bush strategist Matt Dowd also emphasized one recent poll that showed a majority of voters think Bush will win. The Bushies believe such sentiments can be self-fulfilling.
Since so much of Bush's current strategy is based on negative--often erroneous--attacks on Kerry, there are two other pieces to his endgame. One is to soften his image to counter the rising unfavorable ratings his attacks produce. This is being done by Laura Bush--whose speeches are testimonials about her husband rather than attacks on Kerry--and the huge positive advertising blitz by the Progress for America 527.
The final component of the strategy is unprecedented. One reason BC'04 risks using Bush to deliver its toughest attacks is that, at this point in the campaign, the volume of information bombarding voters is so overwhelming that it takes the power of words straight from the president's mouth to break through the clutter. But the White House has always relied on the press to convey Bush's message to readers and viewers in a relatively unmediated fashion. That has proved more difficult this year due to a surge in coverage that fact-checks what the candidates are saying. This development has hurt Bush more than Kerry because the president's strategy is to destroy his opponent's credibility, a tactic that, ironically enough, has relied disproportionately on false statements. The Bushies have become so frustrated by the fact-checking of the president's statements that a spokesman told The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, "The Bush campaign should be able to make an argument without having it reflexively dismissed as distorted or inaccurate by the biggest papers in the country."
In response to the media's new obsession with truth-squading the candidates, the Republican National Committee's opposition research department has started to do something remarkable: going negative on the press. "RNC Research Briefings," e-mailed to hundreds of reporters, now regularly target members of the media. On October 6, the RNC put "Hardball" host Chris Matthews, a former staffer for House Speaker Tip O'Neill, in its sights. "democrat chris matthews' selective 'analysis,'" read the headline on a three-page press release that accused Matthews of erroneously claiming Cheney had contradicted himself during the debate when he denied tying September 11 to Saddam Hussein. Accompanying the release, the RNC posted a video online attacking Matthews. A few days later, Republicans took issue with The New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller's accurate statement that, despite Bush's claims, Kerry "essentially voted for one large tax increase, the Clinton tax bill of 1993." "the new york times shades the truth," read the headline of a press release the RNC quickly put out. Next up was Ron Suskind, who wrote a critical piece in The New York Times Magazine. "liberal democrat suskind has creativity but not facts," the RNC noted. A few days later Paul Krugman became the RNC's target. In Suskind's and Krugman's cases, the oppo was unusually personal and included unflattering pictures of the men, the kind that candidates dig up of their opponents, not of journalists.
The fact that the RNC is now devoting a good deal of its time to attacking reporters speaks volumes about how much Bush is relying on negative, unchecked distortions to secure a second term. And that means that, in its own way, the Ashley Faulkner ad--with its warm and fuzzy image of Bush--ultimately leaves voters with as false an impression as the Willie Horton ad did in 1988. |
