from a leading Canadian newspaper...
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Down, dirty and politically deadly
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The dubious charges of Swift Boat Veterans are wounding John Kerry's presidential campaign. JOHN ALLEMANG looks behind the scenes to find out how U.S. parties, especially Republicans, get away with smear tactics that would sink a Canadian politician
By JOHN ALLEMANG
The Globe and Mail
UPDATED AT 12:13 PM EDT Saturday, Sep 4, 2004
As John Kerry is belatedly finding out, smear tactics work in American politics.
It shouldn't come as news to the Democrats, who watched Michael Dukakis go down in flames 16 years ago, thanks to a rampaging murderer named Willie Horton and a brilliant bit of character assassination orchestrated by Republican operatives who didn't think George Bush Sr.'s "kindler, gentler" rhetoric was a winning strategy.
And yet once again the partisans of the Grand Old Party have gone on the offensive with their skillful brand of attack advertising, while well-meaning Democrats look lost.
Back in 1988, the Democratic presidential candidate was alleged to have freed murderers from prison, dissed the Pledge of Allegiance, married a flag-burner and been the kind of mental case you wouldn't want in control of a nuclear arsenal -- an invalid, as Ronald Reagan joked in his conniving way.
In the 2004 election campaign, much-decorated Vietnam veteran John Kerry has been branded a liar and a traitor in ads run by a shadowy group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which has been linked to George W. Bush's campaign team.
They have charged that the wounds for which Mr. Kerry won his Purple Hearts were self-inflicted, that he wasn't in danger when he rescued a fellow soldier or under fire when he stormed an enemy position, and that generally speaking he is unfit for high office based on his 1971 criticism of the Vietnam War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
And even though the group's attacks lack credibility in any conventional sense -- i.e., they're at odds with official records, verifiable facts and past statements of some of the group's own members -- the smear has stuck.
"People retain negative information much longer and more vividly than positive information," says Dan Payne, a Democratic analyst who worked on previous Kerry campaigns.
That retention rate is proving crucial in a closely contested presidential campaign, where even a single state's all-or-nothing electoral-college votes could again make the difference between winning and losing.
Polls in much-coveted swing states where the Swift Boat ads have run show Republican numbers on the rise. Talk radio and cable TV keep the doubts about Mr. Kerry in circulation, and a presidential incumbent who avoided serving in Vietnam ends up looking like the stronger wartime leader at a time when national security is the dominant concern.
Of course, that's the point of the whole exercise. "People will tell you they hate negative advertising," says Michael Tomasky, executive editor of the monthly political journal American Prospect. "But they respond to it."
From a mild-mannered Canadian perspective, where depicting Jean Chrétien's facial paralysis in an unflattering way proved disastrous for Kim Campbell's Progressive Conservatives, the down-and-dirty U.S. style is way beyond the pale.
"It's definitely much stronger stuff, and people are hardened to this in the States," says Richard Mahoney, a former adviser to Prime Minister Paul Martin. "I find the Swift Boat attacks horrifying. Here you have a purely personal attack dealing with a matter that any reasonable person would say isn't relevant to Kerry's fitness for office."
But during U.S. presidential elections, in the wavering subconscious of a swing voter, passion may take the place of reason. A much better case can be made that George W. Bush and many in his inner circle dodged the war where John Kerry fought with medal-winning gallantry. And yet they've not only escaped the taint and shame that could stick to their long-ago behaviour, they've managed to glory in their own bellicosity.
Either uncommitted voters are on the whole an intellectually irrational bunch, or the Democrats are much worse at playing the smear game than the Republicans.
"The techniques that are being used are open to both sides," acknowledges Marvin Kalb, a lecturer at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "But the Republicans are better at using them."
In the modern, updated approach to political innuendo, those techniques are employed by supposedly non-aligned groups known as 527s, which gained prominence after the reform of U.S. campaign finance laws in 2003.
In theory, the two major political parties are no longer allowed to accept unlimited corporate donations known as "soft money," which was used to fund the more rabid, ideologically driven negative campaigns of the past. But a 527 political action committee is allowed to raise as much money as it wishes, provided that it does not advocate for or against a specific candidate.
Clearly the guidelines remain hazy, since Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is one such 527, and there is little doubt whom it's against -- or whom it's for.
Any illusion that the veterans are just a bunch of average-Joe, Legion Hall vets disappeared when The New York Times laid out their intimate relationship with well-connected Bush Republicans. For example, Bob J. Perry, who gave $200,000 to the group, is a long-time associate of Mr. Bush's chief strategist, Karl Rove, and first worked with him on a Texas Republican campaign in 1986.
The group's co-ordinator, Merrie Spaeth, is the widow of a man who ran on the 1994 Texas Republican ticket alongside Mr. Bush. She previously represented another ad-hoc interest group, Republicans for Clean Air, which launched attack ads against Mr. Bush's rival, John McCain, during their fight over the 2000 Republican nomination.
And the agency that made the veterans' first TV commercial? They're the creators of the famous tank ad that questioned Michael Dukakis's military prowess on behalf of the previously wimpy George Bush Sr.
The current Bush administration naturally has disclaimed any responsibility for the 527 group's campaign. But it can't fail to appreciate the remarkable overlap of ideological interests.
"With the 527s," Mr. Payne says, "the candidates no longer have to do any of their own heavy lifting. They can assume that third parties will trash the other candidate sufficiently, so that they don't have to tarnish themselves."
The Democrats could play dirty if they wanted, but there's a feeling among some analysts that the centrist party hierarchy is neither willing nor able.
Left-leaning groups such as MoveOn.org have, in fact, tried to draw attention to George Bush's checkered stint in the National Guard. Major contributors such as George Soros have given money to 527s critical of George Bush and Mr. Kerry's former campaign manager, as Republicans like to point out, now runs a group called Democratic Majority.
But none of these groups has managed to waylay the President to the degree that Swift Boat Veterans hurt the momentum of the Kerry campaign. And the mainstream media were slow (in election-campaign time, at least) to disprove the group's charges and figure out the hidden links between the veterans and their highly placed supporters.
"The old media did not step forward and discredit these charges fast enough," says Ralph Whitehead, who teaches journalism at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "They may have thought it was something small and localized and beneath contempt. But then suddenly, through talk radio and cable TV and bloggers, it takes on a life of its own and surpasses contempt."
The most effective character assassin for the Democrats has probably been filmmaker Michael Moore, and his efforts in Fahrenheit 9/11 have been successful more in spite of, than because of, the Democratic leadership.
"Either the Democrats are not as malevolent or they're not as competent," Mr. Tomasky says. "Dick Cheney had five student deferments during the Vietnam War, but I'll bet that only 3 per cent of the American populace knows that fact."
However, some analysts think that Mr. Kerry had it coming, that he erred in overemphasizing his military past to differentiate himself from Mr. Bush and reassure a nervous nation that a Democratic president could also fight terrorism.
"Regardless of who is behind this," says Stephen Hess, senior fellow emeritus of the Brookings Institution, "there are clearly a lot of veterans on the Swift Boats who hate John Kerry's guts. It might not have played out this importantly if he had not devised a campaign based on having a distinguished war record a long time ago."
That same straight-backed, salute-at-the-ready patriotic strategy may influence the Democrats' reluctant approach to the sleazier side of electioneering. The party under Mr. Kerry aspires to be part of the mainstream, and is afraid to be seen acting like the fringe group their enemies mock them for being.
Mr. Kerry won the Democratic nomination partly because he seem to rise above the fray; at the party convention, he refused to speak ill of Mr. Bush. Democrats who might be inclined to play dirty take their cue from his lead.
The ruling elite of the Republicans, on the other hand, despite the reassuring presence of an Arnold Schwarzenegger at their convention, represent a more extreme and energetic ideology that doesn't feel the same need to act nice.
"They have a vanguardist, revolutionary mentality," Mr. Tomasky says. "They do what they need to do to their enemies, to move them out of the way."
And maybe that's the way it always has been in U.S. presidential elections, give or take a thousand points of light and the occasional belief in a place called Hope.
"You go back to our founding fathers," Mr. Hess says, "and they were all a bunch of scoundrels, or at least had scoundrels supporting them. They took winning and losing very seriously, and they could be pretty loose with the facts. Compared to what was said about Thomas Jefferson, this stuff about Swift Boats is pretty thin gruel."
Ah yes, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence -- accused of being an atheist and an anarchist, and of encouraging murder, rape and incest when he wasn't fathering children with his slaves (true, but still . . .). At least no one said that he liked to brand his slaves with his initials, as Henry Clay's slime merchants claimed of James Polk in 1844.
Perhaps, appearances to the contrary, it really has become a kinder, gentler nation.
John Allemang is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail. |
