HORSERACE - Election Analysis Part II: Bush and the Republicans
Note: Sorry this is a tad late. The Horserace Blogger needed to sleep in today!!!
As Bush-Cheney 2004 (BC04) was a reelection campaign, it had a fundamental advantage – it had the experience of four years ago upon which to draw. There were many lessons for them to have learned from Bush-Cheney 2000 (BC00). BC00 was run much the same that traditional Republican campaigns have been run. It was a top-down affair. BC00 did a masterful job of cultivating a good relationship with the media. Bush was decidedly chummy with his traveling press corps, and this chumminess engendered many a positive story – if you have any doubt, check out Alexandra Pelosi’s fantastic Journeys with George. It is important to remember that Bush was perceived differently that year. Bush and Rove worked very hard to cast Bush as a transcendent Republican, i.e. a Republican who could make peace with the Democrats, a Republican who could end the animosity that lingered after Clinton’s impeachment, a Republican who was not cast of Gingrich’s mold. Bush’s personality was perfectly suited to this task. He is, by all accounts, a very, very amiable fellow. A combination of Bush’s personality and the general theme of the campaign made this quite a smart strategy.
However, as it typical with the traditional GOP candidacy, they did not put as much effort into their ground game as the Democrats did. Traditionally, the GOP relied on weekend mailings and a few odd phone calls to get their people to the polls. This generally held them in good stead. This is usually effective – GOP base voters are much more enthusiastic about voting than their Democratic counterparts, and thus require less motivation on Election Day. Things broke down for BC00 when the DUI story broke the weekend before the election – the press relished this October Surprise and gave the governor hell for it. He who lives by the media spotlight dies by media spotlight. BC00’s major problem was that, because they were not focused on getting out their voters, ensuring that they arrive at the polls, the story hurt him with his conservative base, which was turned off by such a striking example of his raucous past. It might have cost him the popular vote – as I have noted elsewhere on this page, evangelical turnout in 2000 was (statistically) significantly lower relative to other groups.
Flash forward four years into the future, and we see BC04 doing everything it can to avoid such a debacle again. There were four primary tactics, all designed by Karl Rove, to avoid another depressed GOP turnout. The first was an unprecedented overhaul of the Republican Party’s get-out-the-vote effort, which party types took to calling “the 72-hour program.” Basically, the “program” was organized on a precinct-by-precinct level. It emphasized person-to-person communication in the weekend leading up to the election. GOP organizers canvassed precincts to determine who the Bush voters were in each area. Then, on Election Day, Republican poll watchers monitored who had and who had not voted. After a certain point, they would contact those who have not yet voted to get them to the polls. This is why, on election night, we saw the red counties become more red and the blue counties become less blue. This was particularly the case in places like Western Ohio and the Florida Panhandle. Bush netted thousands upon thousands of votes thanks to this program. In particularly, he netted thousands upon thousands of evangelical Christian votes. Bush, Rove and the Republicans were wise to develop the basics of this program in time for a trial-run in the 2002 midterm election. It was what brought Jeb such a convincing victory, and what swept Saxby Chambliss, Norm Coleman, Elizabeth Dole and Bob Ehrlich into office. By 2004, the program had been perfected.
Get-out-the-vote was not the only modification made by BC04. Another modification was in their communication’s division. Here, Karl Rove took a page from Mark Hanna’s book. Hanna was the Republican national chairman during the 1896 McKinley/Bryan campaign. It was Bryan’s idea to bring small, single-issue groups to McKinley’s house in Canton, OH – and for McKinley to give speeches to each group. It was an ingenious tactic that managed to counter the impassioned oratory of the “silver messiah,” William Jennings Bryan. Rove updated this tactic for the 21st century by bringing niche media organizations – specifically the media for Christian evangelicals, gun rights activists, and pro-life groups – directly to Bush. Ditto, incidentally for communicating to the spiritual leaders of black evangelicals. This was a fantastic way of getting the President’s message out to various groups, as it avoided the usually anti-Bush filter that comes with using “ABCCBSNBCCNN.”
Another page taken from Hanna’s book was the use of surrogates. I have never seen a campaign make such effective use of surrogate campaigners: Rudy Giuliani for the security moms, Ed Koch to security-focused Jews in South Florida, Rod Page and Lynn Swann to the black community, Zell Miller to skeptical Democrats, Mel Martinez to Hispanics, just to name a few. These surrogates frequently came in under the radar of the MSM, but the groups for whom the message was intended always made note.
The final link in the chain came with the promotion of specific issues at specific times. In particular, his immigrant amnesty program and his gay marriage amendment proposal were pitches to specific groups where BC04 thought electoral inroads were possible. This was a brilliant bit of politicking. BC04 was wise to promote both issues in the winter/spring, when swing voters who might be turned off by the initiatives were not really paying attention. The cultural right and the Hispanic community made note of the proposals, though, and remembered them throughout the course of the campaign – even as Bush no longer talked about them.
This four-pronged strategy was simply superb. Unsurprisingly, Bush made inroads all across the nation. He won the votes of more Democrats, more blacks, more Jews, more Catholics and Protestant evangelicals, than he did in 2000. More than this, though, he was able to appeal to each group without alienating or frustrating the others. Winning presidential coalitions are composed of sub-groups whose views are often irreconcilable. Thus, for instance, relatively secular “security moms” in the suburbs might be turned off by the gay marriage amendment (or perhaps Bush’s pro-life stand), while evangelicals might consider such a proposal a prerequisite for their vote. A good campaign manages to make a specific pitch to each subgroup, keeping them relatively separated from one another. If this is not done, if the campaign melds its message into a single pitch, it is possible for swing voters, or evangelicals, or (worse) both, to become turned off by the singular message. Because he was working on multiple levels of communication, Bush could play the security issue to the group where security was the top concern, and he could play the cultural conservative issue to the group where that was the top concern. This, incidentally, was something which Kerry never really mastered. For instance, he could never find a way to communicate his disgust of the Bush administration’s foreign policy to his leftist base and communicate his terror war credentials to swing voters. Ultimately, both the lefties and the swingers were turned off by him.
The only group among which Bush seems to have under-performed relative to 2000 was independent voters, who are most frequently affected by the mainstream media’s coverage. Bush’s strategy to focus on specific groups under the media’s radar affected his standing with independents because it angered the mainstream press, upon which independents generally rely. Never has a candidate suffered such negative press coverage as Bush suffered. One of the big reasons for this was, I think, that Bush did not play baseball with the press. BC04 reversed the strategy of BC00. Whereas the first campaign cultivated friendly relations with the media, most notably through frequent access to the candidate, BC04 was entirely unhelpful to the press. Bush himself was virtually inaccessible. The staff was tight-lipped and uncooperative – when asked a question, they routinely delivered talking points. This undoubtedly angered the “pressies,” who found good BC04 campaign stories hard to come by (the press, by the time the campaign had begun – was already a little annoyed because the Bush White House is virtually leak proof and Bush himself rarely makes himself available to the press). Thus, bad press followed. Thanks to KE04’s general incompetence, Kerry did not get good press until roughly October when McCurry and Lockhart joined their team. I believe it no coincidence that when KE04 started massaging the media, news cycle after news cycle was spun their way. You could even see this on Fox News. Carl Cameron’s reports from KE04 were simply more interesting, more engaging, more newsworthy than the reports coming from the BC04 correspondent.
Was this a mistake on BC04’s part? I am inclined to say yes, but with important caveats. One big difficulty that comes with any incumbent campaign is that the aura and mystique of the presidency must be preserved, as it is a campaign’s greatest weapon. Since Bush is such a friendly, warm, personable guy – frequent contact with the press might ultimately have harmed him, as it might have worn off the “POTUS mystique” that every incumbent enjoys. Now, do not get me wrong. I do not mean to say that Bush is naturally unpresidential. Far from it. In fact, the “POTUS mystique” exists purely in the public’s mind. Reagan was always Reagan. Truman was always Truman. Bush has always been Bush. However, once each man becomes the chief, he is viewed differently, and the way he is viewed is a natural asset for a reelection campaign. So, Bush’s separation from the press was not necessarily a foolish mistake. Another big problem for Bush was that the press – which is mostly old-school liberal – obviously does not like the Iraq war. They were much more hostile to Bush after the WMD case collapsed. Frequent contact with the press might actually have damaged Bush in the long run – at every point of access that the mainstream media had with Bush this year, they were obsessed with asking “Gotcha!” questions designed to put Bush on the spot. So, the essential idea of separating Bush from the press was sound.
This is not to say that it worked as well as it could have worked. It is not to say that some kind of compromise solution could not have been found, or at least a strategy developed to make BC04 competitive in the news cycle relative to KE04. I am not sure. One thing of which I am convinced though, is that the White House was extremely smart to avoid responding to Kerry and the Democrats early in the year. I know the skin of many a conservative was a-crawling in February. Conservatives were desperate for Bush to respond to the Democrats. But Bush was prudently quiet. Any response would have done nothing except elevate Kerry in the public’s mind. It would have transferred to Kerry a tiny bit of the “POTUS mystique,” as the public would realize that Kerry had tweaked the President. You will note that Bush, when he spoke of Kerry, rarely referred to him by name. Rather, he always called him “my opponent.” This was intentional. Calling Kerry by name might elevate his standing in the public.
There were some definite blunders by the campaign this year, most notably in the White House Communications Office. I think that it failed the president this year. Examples of this failure abound. For instance, they never developed a decent response to the issue of jobs – and thus enabled the media to turn at least two news cycles a month into, “Hey…did we mention lately that there haven’t been any jobs created?” Even when jobs were being created – as they were in March and April – the press still mentioned the previous months of relative joblessness. This was preposterous. The job growth statistic is, at best, a rough estimate that gets re-jiggered at least twice after it is first released, and it only measures growth of a certain type of job. You’ll note that a decent number of jobs per month is about 140,000 – and, despite the ups-and-downs of job month-by-month job growth, the economy has added, on average, 140,000 jobs per month in the last year. In other words, jobs should never have been such a salient issue this year – it was the fault, I think, of the White House Communications Office, which let the press turn the jobs statistic into a perpetual weapon against Bush.
This was not, unfortunately, the worst instance of White House incompetence. The worst came with the CBS memo scandal. Bloggers quickly determined that those memos were forged. But where was the White House on it? Those memos were, simply put, a smoking gun against Bush’s story. Thus, if you are Communications Director Dan Bartlett, and you believe that Bush has always told the truth about the national guard, would you not instantly be skeptical about those memos? Would your gut not first tell you, “If those memos say the President received assistance, they must be forgeries.” That was the gut reaction of the bloggers – that was why it was sniffed out so quickly. Is the White House Communications Office incompetent, or did they simply not believe the President? Either way they were a real hindrance to Bush’s reelection. Generally, if it were not for the hard work of the blogosphere in dissecting the CBS story (and, fyi newbies, I had absolutely nothing to do with that work – so I am taking no credit), it was quite possible that Bush would have lost.
They were similarly incompetent in this year’s first iteration of the National Guard story. They dumped hundreds of pages of document in the lap of the media without explaining any of them. It is difficult to do anything that angers the press more than an unexplained “document dump.” They hate having to figure stories out for themselves – particularly when they must derive the story from 30 year old, technical military documents and dental records!
Another mark against both the White House Communications Office as well as BC04 would have to be their reluctance to begin the campaign. Now, I am not suggesting that they should have sent Bush on the road in March, or even should have begun an active push in the media. As I said, it was prudent to keep him from diving into the muck with Kerry. However, they should have transitioned into “campaign mode” earlier. They should have been more conscious that the Democrats had begun their campaign, and thus more careful in their public comments and actions. Bush, for instance, seemed ill-prepared for his March press conference. That was where he made the mistake of saying that he could not think of any mistakes he had made. Around March was when one of Bush’s top economic advisors had commented that outsourcing was a good thing for the economy. In March, 1996, such gaffes by the Clinton administration would not have been all that costly, as the general campaign had not begun. However, given that the Democrats had stepped-up their process, the White House should have been more prepared.
This is not to say that BC04 did not have some notable successes in the media. Their convention was a true masterpiece. It rivaled Clinton/Gore 1992 for the way it communicated a message clearly, effectively and convincingly. The conventional wisdom after the Kerry convention was that there was no bounce to have. I knew at the time that this was a bunch of goobledygook. Conventions matter. A good convention is a requisite part of a good campaign, and Bush’s convention was a good convention, a very good convention. It did an excellent job of framing the debate for September. If Bush’s first debate performance had matched his convention speech, the last month of this campaign would have been a non-event.
In general, I must say that I think BC04 was a masterful organization. Bush’s campaign is the reason Bush won reelection. The president had made a conscious decision to spend his political capital on the Iraq war, rather than parlay it into his reelection bid. Note that this is the sign of a gutsy politician and a true leader; Clinton would never have risked his reelection on an issue of policy. At the same time, though, by March, 2004 Bush’s political capital was spent, which meant that this election was going to be a long, hard fight. Without a savvy campaign which motivated the base and drove the agenda, it is very possible that the Democrats could have taken advantage of the fact that Bush lacked a cache of political capital.
BC04 and KE04, for opposite reasons, are key indications of why campaigns matter. Good ones win elections. Bad ones lose them. BC04 was a good campaign, a great campaign. |
