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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The doom-and-gloom brigade is savaging Kerry because the race is still tied after Bush's horrible April. But the campaign has barely begun.
May 5, 2004 | With just months to go in an election that ought to be a referendum on President Bush, the New York Times runs a front-page story: The Democrats are in serious trouble. Although Bush's approval ratings are low, the presumptive Democratic nominee can't get any traction. His campaign "continues to confront a cloud of doubts and reservations," the Times says, and voters are complaining that he hasn't offered the country a clear vision for the future.
It may sound like the Times on John Kerry in 2004. In fact, it's the Times on Bill Clinton in 1992.
The media began making funeral plans for the Kerry campaign over the weekend, and the New York Times led the way with a gloomy front-pager by Adam Nagourney. As it turns out, the predictions of Kerry's demise were more replay than revelation. It's certainly true that Kerry has problems -- his campaign lacks the money, the organizational structure, and the message discipline of the well-oiled Bush-Cheney machine -- but we've heard this before.
The Times painted an equally dour assessment of Clinton's prospects in a front-page piece in April 1992 headlined "Clinton Dogged by Voter Doubt." The Times said then that unnamed "political professionals in the Democratic Party" were troubled that Clinton hadn't made a better impression on the nation's voters. Nagourney's piece Sunday reported that "Democratic Party officials" have similar worries about Kerry.
But there's a key difference here: In April 1992, the New York Times/CBS News poll showed Clinton trailing President George H.W. Bush, 49 percent to 40 percent, among registered voters. The latest New York Times/CBS News poll shows Kerry and President George W. Bush in a statistical dead heat.
Clinton beat Bush 43 percent to 37 percent in November 1992.
The Times does not stand alone in questioning the direction and momentum of the Kerry campaign. From pundits to pollsters to some party strategists, the reigning conventional wisdom suggests that Kerry should have a much more commanding position than he does right now. When talk show host Chris Matthews asked a dozen of his "regulars" who "won the week" last week, Bush or Kerry, the panel resoundingly concluded that Kerry lost big. "The Democrats better hope he's a slow starter," Sam Donaldson said on Matthews' show on Sunday. David Brooks opened his column on Tuesday with this stark assessment: "Democrats are anxious."
But Democratic strategists have a message for the nervous: Don't panic. Yes, the Kerry campaign has been slow to organize itself, to get campaign operations up and running in could-be-crucial states like Ohio and Arizona, to define Kerry and to set him apart from Bush on the critical question of Iraq, to respond to -- or to take the high road above -- the incessant smears from the White House and its waves of surrogate attackers. But the race is young, Democratic strategists say, and this Bush is as vulnerable as the last one was.
"I find all the moaning and carping going on right now kind of puzzling," says Paul Maslin, the veteran pollster who helped run Howard Dean's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. "I can't tell you how many calls I've gotten in the last 10 days saying that Kerry's campaign is for shit. And I'm trying to think, 'What's causing this?'"
What's causing it is the widespread perception that Kerry should be squashing Bush right now. Bush has just had the worst month of his presidency. His war on Iraq seems to have spiraled out of control: More than 130 U.S. troops -- and 10 times as many Iraqis -- were killed in April, and the United States has lost the support of Spain and several other coalition members. The bipartisan commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11 has raised questions about the administration's inattentiveness to warnings of terror, and revelations from Bob Woodward and others have made it clear that Bush was obsessed with ousting Saddam Hussein even as U.S. troops were being deployed in Afghanistan. Bush stumbled through a rare prime-time news conference, and allegations that the president was AWOL during Vietnam resurfaced among stories of Kerry's war heroism.
