Historic Bush Family-Style Politics; attack & smear

When Incumbents Attack
Of course George W. Bush is relentlessly attacking John Kerry -- he's got no other choice.
By Kenneth S. Baer
Web Exclusive: 08.19.04

On Monday, the Bush campaign released its latest campaign ad, called "Intel." Looking at its name, one would think the ad lays out the president's plans for intelligence reform or touts his administration's record on preventing terrorist attacks. But it doesn't.

Rather, the ad attacks John Kerry for allegedly missing 76 percent of the hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and proposing to slash the federal intelligence budget by $6 billion. It ends on a personal note, declaring that, "there's what Kerry says, and then there's what Kerry does."

This comes days after Swift Boat Veterans for Truth -- a technically independent group -- accused Kerry of lying to win medals in Vietnam in an ad that makes the infamous Willie Horton spot look like an ad for Snuggles detergent. Meanwhile this week on the stump, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney continued to deride Kerry as a flip-flopper, out of the mainstream, and clouded by his own convoluted positions. In Traverse City, Michigan, on Monday, Bush mocked Kerry for spending too much time in Hollywood, selecting a trial lawyer as his running-mate, wanting to raise taxes, not taking a firm stand on the diversion of Great Lakes water, changing his mind on the war on Iraq, "playing politics with the judicial system," and offering a "complicated" explanation about his vote against the $87 billion appropriation for Iraq. And that was just in one stump speech.

But it shouldn't come as a surprise. In the first five months of this year, according to a Washington Post analysis of media buys in the top 100 U.S. media markets, 75 percent of Bush's ads have been negative compared with just 27 percent of Kerry's. The President also has taken the extraordinary step of attacking his opponent directly from behind the presidential podium. All in all, President Bush has been waging one of the most negative, nastiest campaigns in a generation. And looking to the Republican convention starting at the end of this month, expect more of the same -- precisely because Bush has no other choice but to attack.

To understand why, think back about a quarter of a century to another president who also accepted his party's re-nomination in New York City: Jimmy Carter.

Like Carter, Bush is an embattled incumbent elected without a mandate and stuck trying to defend a failed presidency. Both presided over an economic downturn. (Granted, Carter's was more of a total meltdown, but Bush is the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a job loss on his watch.) Both contended with an energy crisis. Both were dragged down in a Mesopotamian morass: Bush in Iraq, Carter in Iran. And both faced an electorate that wanted them out of office. In June of 1980, Carter had a dismal 26 percent approval rating, and a Newsweek poll from two weeks ago found that only 43 percent of registered voters want to see Bush re-elected.

Faced with that situation (and I will admit that Bush is in a stronger position than Carter since he somehow still has credibility on fighting the war on terrorism), there's only one strategy for an incumbent president: attack. Since the American people seem to want to hire someone else for the job, the embattled incumbent has no choice but to convince them that the only other available candidate is totally unfit for the position. As seen in this week's "Intel" ad, Bush will do whatever it takes to keep Kerry from matching him on these scores. In response, Kerry needs to parry these attacks while showing that he has what it takes to be an effective commander-in-chief, and the mettle not just to defend America but to destroy terrorists. If Kerry does that, Bush will have nowhere to go except to where other embattled incumbents have gone before him -- retirement.

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Kenneth S. Baer, a former senior speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, runs Baer Communications, a Democratic consulting firm.