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Mon 8 Mar, 2004 10:41 am
(CBS) This Against the Grain commentary was written by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer. - 3/8/04
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An unexamined and unspoken assumption behind the vast majority of publicly perpetrated election analysis holds that the Republicans will have strategic and tactical superiority this year simply because Republicans are better at strategy and tactics than Democrats.
The most cynical strain of this thinking says that President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, is not the Boy Genius of his nickname, but an Evil Genius, pulling the strings of a puppet president happy to do anything to get re-elected. Together, they can conjure up Osama in October or make the market soar after Labor Day.
The milder manifestation simply observes that this Republican political team, which has won three elections together, has discipline, organization, pragmatism and oodles of money, whereas Democrats have disorganization, factions, wishful thinking and money trouble.
Well, guess what? It's beginning to look as if the vaunted Karl and George team has developed a serious case of tin ear syndrome. The evidence is mounting:
The campaign's first flight of ads was blasted as soon as it hit air by a barrage of political buckshot for using images of 9/11. Unions and victims, predictably, accused Bush-Cheney of exploitation and tastelessness. Their complaints were widely covered and gabbed about on cable news shows, talk radio and the Web, perhaps obliterating any good the ads may have done.
Many professional tacticians also think Bush's first volley should have been negative, defining John Kerry to an electorate that really doesn't know him well.
Campaign Counter-spin: We inoculated ourselves early. There was no way we weren't going to use the president's response to 9/11 as a cornerstone of our ads and campaign; the bloody convention is in New York after all. So now we've got the flap over with eight months before the election. The story has no legs and we can run any ad we want from now on. And there's plenty of time for negative ads, we were smart not to lead with them.
Attention to Bush's National Guard Service -- or lack thereof -- grew so hot and his poll numbers so cold that he did the unthinkable; he submitted to a Sunday morning network grilling. The act itself smelled of weakness and panic.
His performance got poor reviews, especially from Republicans. Conservative columnist and Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan wrote, "The president seemed tired, unsure and often bumbling. His answers were repetitive, and when he tried to clarify them he tended to make them worse. He did not seem prepared." Yeah, and his poll numbers haven't improved either.
Campaign Counter-spin: Again, the president inoculated himself from more trouble with the AWOL charges and he grabbed headlines from the John Kerry wins-a-week-machine for a couple of days.
In January, Vice President Cheney went off the reservation, as they say, and regurgitated his certainty that Iraq had al Qaeda ties and that the famous Iraqi trailers we found were mobile labs for banned weapons - two sensitive claims the administration has backed away from. This is the regime so famous for its message discipline?
Cheney's poll numbers were tanking too, feeding rumors he was going to be pulled from the ticket. So Cheney, like the boss, was sent out to do a round of interviews, except he faced only non-network broadcasters. So by early March, both the president and vice president have been sent out on dangerous clean-up missions.
Campaign Counter-spin: Our conservative base loves Cheney and he's staying on the ticket. Non-story.
Speaking of the conservative base, they're going nuts as they realize that their man is a gen-u-wine big-spending, big-government Texan. Since he unveiled yet another deficit-laden budget, the squawking from fiscal conservatives has gotten nasty. Normally friendly policy polemicists have been very critical, very publicly, including the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, The Wall Street Journal op-ed page, and the Club for Growth. The issue grew sharp, yellow election-day fangs when Alan Greenspan said that Social Security benefits may have to be cut to scale back the new deficits.
Campaign Counter-spin: Budget-schmudget.
The right flank was cranky enough over his deficits and liberalized immigration policy that Bush was forced to come out for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Conservatives might have gone loco if hadn't, but it's a risky move when it comes to courting independents, moderates and other hybrids. Polls show many do oppose gay marriage but they also oppose a constitutional amendment banning it. There's no evidence that this is an issue swing voters want their president swinging about.
Campaign Counter-spin: This is a great culture war wedge issue and if you'd get away from the left and right coasts, you'd say it makes Massachusetts John Kerry look like what Jeanne Kirkpatrick called a "San Francisco-style Democrat." And that's just fine by us.
The campaign still doesn't have a good story to peddle when it comes to the home front. The "war president" and "steady leadership in times of change" shtick is fine, but ministers to only half the worries, at best.
The prime legislative actions the president wants to take credit for are the No Child Left Behind education bill and extending prescription drug benefits to Medicare. Both are unpopular now. Towns and even a bunch of states are trying to opt out of the whole Left Behind scheme. And polls show voters disapprove of the Medicare changes so far.
Job anxiety remains high. "Outsourcing" jobs to India and other undeserving foreign locales is the hot button issue du jour. Unfortunately for Bush, his top economic adviser issued a report extolling the virtues of outsourcing. Talk about a tin ear!
Campaign Counter-spin: Two words: tax cuts. Democrats always want to get fancy with their economics. Let 'em. Here's what we do: promise to cut the voters taxes. It works in November.
All this adds up to a pretty good dumb streak. But it's only March. And Bush-Cheney '04 has not yet begun to spend.
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Dick Meyer, the Editorial Director of CBSNews.com, has covered politics and government in Washington for 20 years and has won the Investigative Reporters and Editors, Alfred I. Dupont, and Society of Professional Journalists awards for investigative journalism.
Bush's little wienie is up ready & bursting to bring it
March 8, 2004 - Washington Post
WHITE HOUSE LETTER
Bush Ready and Bursting to Bring It On
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON
A restless President Bush finally jumped into the political ring last week, happy that he had a Democratic target he could attack by name and enough money to start a $60 million advertising campaign, probably the most expensive in presidential history.
At the same time, Bush campaign officials were instructed not to refer publicly to Senator John Kerry as simply a "Massachusetts liberal," because it was an imprecise label that didn't tell people much, or so the thinking went. The preferred shorthand, campaign officials were told, was "the senator from Massachusetts who has a record of weakening national defense and raising taxes."
The two actions ?- the extent of the initial advertising buy and the early definition of Mr. Kerry ?- were pivotal. More revealing, Republican officials said that both were decreed by the president himself.
"I don't think there are any major decisions coming out of the campaign that he's not making," said one Republican official close to the re-election effort who did not want to be named for fear of angering Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, who is overseeing the campaign. "For example, this media buy wasn't decided by Karl. It was decided by the president. You don't have a situation where the president is removed, as maybe his father might have been."
Friends who have talked with the president in recent weeks say he is consumed by the campaign, the polls and Mr. Kerry.
"He knows his voting record cold," said the Republican close to the campaign. Mr. Bush talks to Mr. Rove daily, and sends messages through his political adviser to his campaign staff in Arlington, Va.
Of course, no one in Arlington is suggesting that Mr. Bush scored any knockout punches on the trail his first week, when he got into a public fight with some families of 9/11 victims over the appropriateness of using images of the smoldering World Trade Center, and a flag-draped body, in his advertisements. The families demanded that Mr. Bush pull the advertisements off the air, but he refused to back down.
Despite the bruising, White House officials described the president last week as in an unusually good mood, and revved up to engage politically after a protracted weigh-in on the sidelines of the primaries. Mr. Bush was remarkably acquiescent, they added, during the two to three hours of camera work it took to get his lead campaign commercial ready to broadcast; the 60-second spot, shot about three weeks ago, features Mr. Bush talking about his presidency as he sits next to his wife, Laura, at the White House.
"There were a lot of different takes," said one White House official. "He has an unbelievable level of patience for these things, and you wouldn't expect him to."
Mr. Bush was in an equally good mood at a $25,000-a-person fund-raiser for the Republican National Committee last Wednesday at the Bel Air home of A. Jerrold Perenchio, the chairman and chief executive of Univision Communications, the leading Spanish-language television network in the United States. Mr. Bush, who is aggressively trying to make inroads this year among Latino voters, greeted guests who included Nancy Reagan and Terry Semel, the chief executive of Yahoo, the Internet portal.
Mr. Bush was in such a good mood last week, Republicans said, that he took the unusual action of calling Mr. Kerry to congratulate him on Tuesday night, after the senator swept 9 of 10 states to become the presumptive Democratic nominee. The call was described by one Republican close to the White House as "pure Bush"; that is, it had the gentlemanly aura of good manners but was designed to knock Mr. Kerry slightly off balance and remind him that the man he would spend the next eight months attacking was the person on the other end of the line.
If the call did not have its desired effect ?- Mr. Kerry immediately went out and criticized Mr. Bush ?- it also caused no surprise at the White House. The Kerry campaign, the Republican said, "has excellent pitch, and when they go negative, they go negative in a way that really sticks." The Republican said he did not want to be named because "I don't want every reporter in America calling me every five minutes."
Finally, Mr. Bush may have been in a really good mood this past week because he ignored the annual Gridiron dinner, a 119-year tradition of Washington journalists, for a meeting with President Vicente Fox of Mexico at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Tex.
Mr. Bush, who intensely dislikes such formal inside-the-Beltway events, instead sent Vice President Dick Cheney, who joked that he had become alarmed earlier in the evening over some tightness in his chest, but "then I realized it's called laughing."
They think they have their finger on the pulse of America, but they do not. The spreading gay marriages proves it. Bush can't run on his record, because no matter how you slice it, it isn't all that hot. Nothing he accomplished is universally recognized as good. He can't attack Kerry because he supposedly brought honor and integrity to the White House. He can't exploit 9/11 like he thought he would be able to, so what does he have to run on? The war? That's not going so well either. He can't stand there and pronounce what a great leader he is, he needs to prove it, especially with Kerry likely to point out his many failures and abandonments of the American people. He and his corporate buddies don't seem to understand that they are hated and mistrusted by most Americans, and the more powerful the corporations get, the greater the distrust becomes. Bush is boxed into a corner. I can't see how he's going to get out of it. He would actually have to accomplish something great before November, and all he is floating now is a ban on gay marriages, which is attacking the 14th Amendment at least, if not the entire Bill of Rights. Republican ineptitude is their hallmark anyway. And Americans prefer strong leaders, not pronouncements without any evidence to back them up.
The Emporer
has no brains. Shrub is liked by many. Why? Many people relate to him because it makes them feel less dumb. How can we have a Pres. who is this stupid? Many Americans have a bias against people with high IQs. They don't like them because it makes them feel inferior. Shrub makes them feel comfy.
Now even the ignorant & stupid or a combo thereof are starting to understand that this shallow fool that is their Pres. is screwing them over. They don't like to be made fools of even from a guy they like. The Dems just need to stay on their toes and call this doofus on every stupid thing he has done and is doing. Kerry is no wimp and is calling Shrub and the gang of thieves out. Bring it on, Kerry.
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