G.O.P. 'War Room' Tries to Counter the Democrats' Message
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: July 26, 2004 New York Times
BOSTON, July 26 - In case anyone missed the fact that Senator John Kerry was booed at Fenway Park on Sunday night or that Teresa Heinz Kerry told a newspaper reporter to "shove it,'' a few dozen Republicans made sure these tidbits were not lost in the Democrats' overflow of scripted e-mails and the happy on-message television chit-chat bubbling up from their convention.
The Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee have temporarily transplanted their ``war room'' from suburban Virginia headquarters to a small bunker just two blocks from the FleetCenter, where the Democrats are to nominate Mr. Kerry for president on Thursday night.
John Feehery, whose day job in Washington is spokesman for the Republican Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, is one of those encamped at the bunker here. He managed to get a credential that allowed him into the FleetCenter Monday afternoon and to circulate among the assembled news organizations, where he handed out a memorandum from himself that drew attention to various dents in the Kerry production. (Credentials cadged by the other side are by now a standard feature of war-room tactics; most emanate from lobbyists in Washington who like to play both sides.)
Mr. Feehery is only one soldier in the Republican field operation. Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, is overseeing about three-dozen people, a rotation of ``spinners'' like Ralph Reed and Mary Matalin, top Republican strategists, a regional desk focused on battleground states and a nerve center of high-speed computers monitoring and cataloguing all things Kerry. The effort here is coordinated with scores of surrogate speakers in the battleground states so that everyone is talking from the same page.
``The goal is to get into the stories,'' Mr. Gillespie said in an interview in his bare-bones bunker office. ``We know we're swimming upstream and that our quotes are going to be on the jump page. But we don't want to let charges go unanswered and we don't want to allow them to ditch the senator's record, because we believe it's important in the debate.''
It is the Republican view that Mr. Kerry's voting record in the Senate reveals him to be a liberal, partial to tax increases and weak on defense and that the convention is trying to conceal that, hence the new Republican Web site, ``DemsExtremeMakeover.com.''
But what makes the blood flow among Republican workers is something unexpected like Mrs. Heinz Kerry's remark. ``It was the most dramatic dichotomy between the Kerry campaign's assertions that they want to be positive and the reality,''one said.
The planting of the party flag in enemy territory began on a limited basis in 1984 at the Democratic convention in San Francisco, according to Rich Galen, a Republican strategist who is working out of the bunker here. It became more common in 1992 when the Clinton campaign branded the term war room and aggressively countered the first President Bush.
The evolving technology has changed the nature of these moveable war rooms, which are driven by the Internet, satellite feeds, surrogates, and talk radio but also, as Mr. Feehery demonstrated, on old-fashioned shoe leather.
``What's changed the dynamic is 24/7 cable news coverage,'' Mr. Gillespie said. ``The satellite feeds into battleground states is a little bit new.''
Mr. Gillespie plans to brief reporters every morning at 10 to dole out Republican spin to counter the Democratic spin. He is also importing different Republican officials all week to amplify the party line. On Monday, Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado, Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey of Massachusetts and Representative Henry Bonilla of Texas stood at his side for the briefing. Then they fanned out for multiple interviews.
Governor Owens, for one, sat in the bunker's television studio and conducted interviews via satellite with 10 television stations across the country and six radio stations. Six of the television interviewers were in Denver, where the governor lives and works, but the fact that he was in Boston, at the scene of the crime, so to speak, gave his interviews a dash of pizzazz. (It also spoke to the mounting concern among Republicans that Colorado could swing Democratic this year.)
It was not clear what bang the Republicans got for the buck. Governor Owens spent much of his interview time assuring his listeners, at least those in Colorado, that he would be back in the state Monday night, and got in only an occasional, mild poke at Mr. Kerry.
``Colorado is a battleground state,'' he said between interviews, explaining his style. ``I'm really not hard-edged when it comes to politics.''
Later in the week, as the Democrats build toward Mr. Kerry's nomination, the Republicans plan to import other marquee names, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and William Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts, who lost to Mr. Kerry in the last Senate election.
Mr. Gillespie said it was essential to provide the Republican point of view. But he acknowledged there was a point at which reporters might cease to toggle between the campaigns for comments and counter comments.
"You could go on exponentially,'' Mr. Gillespie said with a laugh. "It's like endless mirrors back to back.'' |
