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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
It's time for John Kerry to stop talking about being a fighter and start being one. Here's the best way to knock Bush out.
Mar 8, 2004 | John Kerry considers himself a fighter. Don't take my word for it, or even the testimony of his "band of brothers" from Vietnam. Few presidential candidates have ever touted their own battling spirit as freely as the Democrats' nominee to-be.
"I am a fighter," Kerry pronounced during his Super Tuesday victory speech. "And for more than 30 years I've been on the battle lines, on the front lines of the struggle for fairness and for mainstream American values." It was hardly the first time he has made such a claim. "I am a fighter," Kerry said during his Iowa victory speech in January. "I'm here to win -- not for me, but for America." In February, Kerry tested a variation of the theme: "I am a fighter, and I'm ready to fight back." And of course Kerry has three words for Republicans who want to debate defense policy. All together now: Bring ... it ... on.
Sooner or later, however, candidates must stop talking about fighting, and simply enter the fray. Election Day may be eight months away, but now that the Bush campaign has rolled out its first ad blitz, that time is now. With negative ads aimed at Kerry on the way, he will certainly have to defend himself. But there's more to fighting than self-defense. To win, Kerry also needs to go on the offensive. So let's accept Kerry's word that he is one combative politician, and ask: Exactly how should John Kerry battle George W. Bush?
Many Democrats whose memories extend to 1988 would begin by saying the senator must respond forcefully to GOP attacks. That, of course, was the subtext of Kerry's primary-season fighter talk. If you vote for me, Kerry was implying, I will not campaign like the last Massachusetts Democrat who ran for president against a Bush.
Indeed, when Michael Dukakis failed to respond to George Bush's constant allegations in 1988 that he was soft on crime and unpatriotic, and let Bush use "liberal" as a political epithet, it didn't just enable Bush to wipe out a deficit in the polls. The outcome of the race established the value of attack politics for future GOP strategists.
"The Republicans really only know one way to run a close campaign," says Dan Payne, a Boston-area Democratic media consultant who has crafted ads for both Dukakis and Kerry. "That doesn't mean it will work, but they'll keep trying."
True, Bush's first three television ads are mild-mannered spots meant to restore his tarnished image. But Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie began GOP testing of attacks on Kerry in February by calling him a "Massachusetts liberal" and reminded voters that Kerry served as Dukakis' lieutenant governor for two years. The phrase got little traction, though, and Kerry's war-hero status presents problems the GOP did not have 16 years ago.
"People are not going to look at Sen. Kerry and see Gov. Dukakis," says Mike Feldman, a Democratic consultant and member of Al Gore's campaign in 2000. "That playbook may have worked in 1988, but it's not going to work in 2004."
Indeed, George W. Bush himself was apparently displeased with the idea of simply calling Kerry "liberal." Bush, it seems, wants attacks on Kerry that link the L-word to specific issues. If so, he is showing a keen grasp of the dynamics of campaign attacks. (It is an area of family expertise, after all.) George Bush's 1988 attacks worked not simply because he repeatedly used "liberal" as an epithet, but because the Bush campaign also attacked Dukakis on issues where conservatives had long tried to stigmatize liberals. The disgraceful Willie Horton ads, for instance, fed the soft-on-crime stereotype that was more prominent in the 1980s.
It worked, too: According to the CBS/New York Times poll, 27 percent of registered voters in May 1988 considered Dukakis a liberal. By October, that number had risen to 42 percent. Among those who said the label mattered, three-quarters claimed it made them less likely to vote for Dukakis.
This year's RNC thus retooled its attacks to include 2004 issues, claiming Kerry was weak on defense because he had apparently voted against numerous weapons systems. In a different vein, Bush has begun claiming Kerry has flip-flopped on taxes, NAFTA, the Patriot Act and Iraq. This will be an ongoing theme, as Team Bush attempts to pin a supposed character flaw on Kerry early in the campaign, like it did in 2000 by claiming Al Gore was prone to exaggeration.
With this in mind, how effectively is the self-proclaimed fighter actually fighting back? The early evidence suggests mixed results. Kerry's best rhetorical punch came in the Los Angeles debate on Feb. 26, when he described his evolving position on Iraq by saying, "I do not regret my vote. I regret that we have a president of the United States who misled America and broke every promise he made to the United States Congress." It's a bold line that keeps Kerry away from his sometimes defensive and tedious habit of answering questions by justifying his Senate votes. Often, presidential politics is like a junior-high school argument: You can impress more people with a snappy comeback than drawn-out reasoning.
Kerry has struggled more to defend his defense votes, usually saying such charges are an affront to his patriotism. This confuses the issue a bit. Yes, the GOP has questioned Kerry's patriotism -- but mostly by referencing Kerry's anti-Vietnam protesting. In this case, Kerry should probably just say he's opposed to wasting taxpayer money on bad weapons systems, and perhaps mention that then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney boasted of budget cuts during the same time period.
Still, most of Kerry's counterpunching so far has naturally revolved around the L-word. Kerry has repeatedly insisted that rather than being a liberal, he has "mainstream values" while Bush is the "extremist" in this race. In the New York debate on Feb. 29, he told an insistent Elisabeth Bumiller it was "ridiculous" to call him a liberal based on the National Journal's limited voting-record data -- a far more assertive response than the Dukakis campaign ever devised, and one that some Democratic observers welcomed.
