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archived: 5 - 11 Sep, 2004 Back Next
"There is a tide
in the affairs of men,
--William Shakespeare The presidential campaign is on everybody’s lips. It does not matter whether you are in New York or Nacogdoches, Nairobi or Nepal, the battle for the American presidency is everywhere on our planet. There is a feeling that a tide of change is sweeping through the zeitgeist, and the battle for American power is reaching its zenith, perhaps, its final turning point. The last three weeks have gone badly for John Kerry and John Edwards. The modest but swelling tide of momentum that lifted them after their convention has ebbed. Their message of hope and change has been drowned out by the din of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT), a thinly disguised front group for the Bush-Cheney campaign who has cast shameful aspersions on John Kerry’s military record. True or untrue, these scurrilous attacks have had a stultifying effect on the American public and the world, as well. Returning home to Oxford after attending a rally with Diana Kerry in London, I ordered a sushi from a bar in the rail station. The manageress is an Afro-Caribbean of Jamaican extraction, and she told me that she did not like John Kerry. In less than one minute, I informed her that over ninety percent of Afro-Americans were supporting him, and she promised to contact her friends in New Jersey to get their take on the campaign. For a working class Jamaican in London to have gotten the message of the SBVT is an astonishing phenomenon. It is the result of mass communications and their skillful manipulation by the senior strategists of the Bush campaign, Karl Rove and his team of spin doctors. Their strategy is working. The message they have fabricated, “John Kerry is not what he seems to be,” is taking a severe toll on the two Johnny B. Goods. Those privileged few who read this column are like those privileged few who read a national newspaper or watch a quality news program or who read a quality news magazine. You readers are among a privileged media elite who garner your information directly from qualified sources of information. The average American is not in that category. Whether rich or poor, black or white, privileged or proletarian, the average American snatches a fleeting glimpse of Bill O’Reilly, Brit Hume or Sean Hannity on Fox News or catches a few lines from the rantings from Rush Limbaugh or G. Gordon Liddy, or reads a blurb in the New York Post or the Washington Times. In other words, the average American consumes daily doses of propaganda, not qualified commentary and analysis of current affairs. Gossip, hate-mongering, flag-draped pseudo-patriotism and the infinite coarseness of the eternal grapevine: these are the media motivating the mind of America, and unfortunately, nothing, not one single solitary thing can be done to change that ominous fact. People are not politically motivated out of rationality. They are driven to their political conclusions by the avalanche of irrational information constantly inundating them. Not the nuance, not the simile, not the metaphor and not the analogy, American minds are bludgeoned by the mediocrity of the Murdochean media into a state of quiet and sometimes deafening desperation. We are entering into one of the darkest phases of these disorienting times. Never in the history of America has our society been so riven by divisive social conflict. The battles between the South and the North during the Civil War; the clashes between the forces of social security and the laissez faire capitalists of the Great Depression and the extenuated siege between the advocates of civil rights and states rights in the sixties and seventies have been transformed, metamorphosed and transubstantiated into the current crisis that is raging across the fault line vividly dividing the opposition camps of compassionate conservativism (which is neoconservativism with its heart of crypto-fascism masked by an ostensibly human face) and its adversary, progressivism (which is liberalism with a warrior’s code of justice). But, if you are reading this, you already know all of that, for you understand the historical dimension of the current political conflict now unfolding before you. What is crucial at this juncture in this Gettysburg or Waterloo that is sweeping through the mind of America is to understand the tactical desperation of the two combatants. The presidential candidates, George Walker Bush and John Forbes Kerry, embody the potential of their diametrically opposed ideologies. While the combatants might seem like two sides of the same coin in many of the most fundamental respects, make no mistake about it – politically they are as different as chalk and cheese. And this palpable distinction is not merely a trick of blue smoke and mirrors, or only a product of their competitive ideologies, for it goes deeply into the hearts and minds and the characters of the two men who are now locked together in mortal combat. Bush is a bruising battle-hardened boxer. Like a political paluka, his face reveals the internal scars of the many blows to his head and body that he has suffered in the public arena. No president since Nixon has survived such a relentless barrage of negative news as Bush. But still he carries on, gamely getting back into the center of the ring and dishing out telling blows on his fresher but much less experienced opponent. Kerry is an unusual challenger. He is slow and ponderous to a fault. He is calculating, and he is cautious. To date in this presidential campaign, Kerry has been obsessed with defense. Bush has unleashed his worst barrage of body blows through the SBVT, and Kerry has attempted to block them without lashing back. It is as if Kerry has never heard of Vince Lombardi or his major contribution to intellectual history, “The best defense is a good offense.” The result of Kerry’s conscientiously defensive posturing is that the buzz of Kerry’s campaign being out of kilter after the withering SBVT attack is now everywhere. On the day after Bush’s stem-winding acceptance speech, Charlie Cook perspicaciously explained to those who would listen that Kerry’s campaign is undergoing the turmoil of tactical desperation. If Kerry makes a mistake in his footwork now, the internal disintegration of his campaign and its strategy will swiftly ensue. The situation is that bad. To hear Charlie Cook, it is actually worse. Based on his analysis of their relatively mediocre performance to date, Cook has advocated outsourcing strategy, messaging and crisis management to the Kerry campaign. To be sure, there are many steadier and more intelligently professional hands outside the Kerry campaign than inside of it. This is actually very good advice, and Kerry should listen to Cook. While confidence in Kerry has been shaken to the core, the public is more generous than the media elites, for they have given the candidate the benefit of the doubt and cast their eyes on his ring-fenced circle of advisors. At the center of this core of support, the public finds Bob Shrum. In late 2002, Shrum was deemed the kingmaker in this election, when he signed a contract with Kerry to aid him in his quest for the Democratic nomination. From that point, Kerry’s fortunes plummeted into the doldrums, while he and Shrum were swiftly outstripped by Howard Dean with his strident siren-song of criticism of Bush and his brilliantly aggressive revolution in American politics, the web-based presidential campaign. The decision that ultimately saved Kerry from the dynamite of Dean was not Shrum’s; it was Kerry’s. When his campaign was deep in the doldrums and falling farther behind Dean in the fundraising sweepstakes, Kerry was also sadly lagging behind Dean and Clark in the polls. In November of 2003, Kerry took a look around his campaign office, and he sacked his campaign manager and his chief fundraiser. Jim Jordan left Kerry’s staff, and Mary Beth Cahill arrived. This change brought new dynamism and a glimmer of hope to his campaign, but it produced no real money, the most essential ingredient in any political campaign undergoing a crisis of confidence. At what was to become the critical turning point in the battle for the Democratic nomination, John Kerry took the equally bold and unquestionably desperate decision to mortgage his ancestral home on Beacon Hill for the relatively modest sum for a presidential campaign of six million dollars. At that precise point, Dean’s momentum suffered a minor fluctuation that was not precipitated by Kerry, Shrum, Clark or Bush. That nanosecond gap in the attention span of the public swiftly became a gaping hole in time that was rapidly filled with a flood of images of a young John Kerry in his battle fatigues in Vietnam, and the rest is history. Kerry surged into the forefront of the collective consciousness, and he swept to a crushing string of victories in the primaries. When he was sorely tested, Kerry’s judgment and his timing were perfect. Now, he is facing the same intensity of crisis, but this time he is on the home stretch of his presidential Iliad. Charlie Cook has revealed that Kerry is being urged to sack his campaign team and bring in fresh blood that will reinvigorate his strategic messaging and crisis management. Cook sagely observes that Kerry’s political reflexes are slow. Citing earlier campaigns, Cook reminds us that Kerry always surrounds himself with a large circle of advisors, and he luxuriates in taking major decisions at a leisurely pace. In contrast, Cook points out that the circle surrounding Bush is much tighter, much more disciplined and much more responsive. Be that as it may, it is clear for everybody with a mind to see that Kerry is having problems making clear decisions. This is one of his final tests in his epic challenge for the presidency. Merely one of his final tests, for John Kerry is facing many tests over the next sixty days, not the least of which are the three presidential debates. Make no mistake about it, George Walker Bush is a formidable opponent in political debate. In 2000, Bush astonished and consternated all of us in the opposing camp by trouncing Albert Gore in the first two debates and fighting him to a standstill in the last one. Bush may not be a stunningly clever man, but he is wily, and he is sensitive, and he is a powerful communicator in the American context. He would be lost on the world stage, but in America, he is a colossus. Cast in the role of Ronald Reagan, George Bush is no Reagan, but he is a second string acolyte to the greatest actor ever to ascend to the presidency. Modest as Reagan’s thespian skills were in contrast to his Hollywood contemporaries, they were more than enough to demolish a string of worthy political opponents. His trusty political hatchet man, George Herbert Walker Bush, studied Reagan’s stagecraft well, and he has attempted to imbue them in his eldest son. George W. Bush is clearly modeled on the Reagan mold as the communicator president, the man with the plan, a visionary poet of American multidimensionality. That he has chosen to portray the president as a fundamentalist bigot, while Reagan was merely an exploiter of that old time religion, makes no difference. To return to the metaphor of the ring and boxing, Kerry has suffered so many blows to his face and his political torso in the past three weeks that he is now in danger of staggering onto his heels, losing his balance and toppling backward onto the canvas. He must now go down deeply within himself, down into those depths that are darker than darkness, into that abyss of blackness that is more enveloping and more disorienting than any place that he has ever known before, where he is more uncertain than when he invaded the jungles and rivers of the Mekong Delta, more abandoned than when he plumbed the depths of despair after the death of a loved one, more isolated than when he was lost in the labyrinths of self-doubt in the jungles of Vietnam where Kerry came to realize that the war he was fighting was based on the lies of American arrogance. Somewhere within himself, John Kerry must find the power and the energy to fight back, and he must fight back more furiously than he has ever fought in his life. Kerry’s initial responses to the SBVT attack were too weak, too defensive. They allowed the discourse on his Vietnam record to continue unabated. To win this contest, he must be strong, and he must be seen to be strong. He must land devastating blows directly on the face of his opponent. He cannot win this election by exhibiting a series poses that amount to nothing more than defensive posturing. Kerry will lose if he thinks that the American public will elect him their president if he merely outwits his opponent. Kerry must lay Bush out cold on a slab of canvas. He must defeat Bush, not merely survive Rocky-style to the fifteenth round to win a moral victory by not being knocked out of the ring by the heavyweight champion of the world, Apollo Creed. Kerry must KO George Walker Bush, and he must do it in at least three stages. Stage One – The Left Hook: Kerry must deliver a left hook from the campaign podiums that he will visit every day until the election. Kerry must seize every precious opportunity to excoriate Bush and everything he stands for. Stage Two – The Right Cross: Kerry must deliver a right cross through his media campaign by launching or authorizing a 527 organization to launch a series of searing attacks directly assaulting Bush’s personal and political integrity in every direct and un-nuanced way possible. Kerry’s media has been taking its share of knocks. People are saying that Kerry’s media is unfocused, fuzzy and ineffective. Basically, they are saying that the monumental sums of money Kerry has raised have been invested in a dubious excuse for a presidential campaign. Kerry needs a new media direction. For starters, Kerry must condemn Bush as a hypocrite for deserting his military obligation during Vietnam to campaign for an ultra-right-wing, pro-war redneck Republican in Alabama. Kerry must prosecute Bush for misleading America into the Iraq war, and he must demolish Bush for bankrupting America. Finally, Kerry must blame Bush for launching the Great Depression II, and he must use the paid media campaign to drive these essential messages home to the voters who are loath to read, to watch the news or to listen to radio beyond the rantings of Limbaugh and Oliver North. Stage Three – The Uppercut: Kerry absolutely must finish Bush off with a crippling uppercut in the three debates later this month. This is a more subtle part of the contest than the media campaign, but it will be just as challenging. In these debates, Kerry must be commanding but not caustic – which was Gore’s downfall. He should be superior but not arrogant – again, one of Gore’s egregious mistakes in 2000. If Kerry fails in any of these three final phases of this mortal combat, he will be toast. It should be noted that two of these phases are entirely his responsibility: his campaign performances and the debates. The media campaign is going to be more difficult for Kerry to shape and command. He needs the support of a team of advisors, not one single solitary and isolated media guru – for no single mind is capable of delivering the most effective campaign to a presidential candidate in 2004. Nor was the situation any different in 1968, when I first entered the realm of presidential political campaigning. In 1968, Hubert Humphrey used a team of five television producers who brought him back from the brink of despair to level-pegging with Nixon in what has been described as the greatest political comeback in American history. In 1968, the presidential election was stolen through the manipulation of the political machines in Chicago, just as the same had been true when JFK defeated Nixon in 1960. The Humphrey media campaign resonated with the public because it presented an avalanche of focused messaging from Shelby Storck’s mesmerizing thirty minute biography of Humphrey to Tony Schwartz’s penetrating thirty and sixty second commercials. Humphrey’s campaign was a masterpiece and a paragon of strategic genius crafted by the grand-master of political strategy, Joe Napolitan. Kerry should send his media team out search of a renewed strategy for its crucial messaging as we enter the Battle of Britain phases of combat in the air war. He should hire more television producers, while he still has the campaign budget to do so. The window of strategic opportunity for John Kerry is closing, and it is closing rapidly. Here is the timetable. Kerry has already launched his left hook by delivering searing assaults on Bush’s credibility from the campaign stump. Good, but it must get better, and it must get hotter. Sooner, not later. Kerry has salvaged his campaign, but only just in the nick of time. The arrival of Joe Lockhart, a combat veteran from the Clinton era, on Kerry’s campaign staff came not a moment too soon. (see link below) This week, Ben Barnes will deliver a damning indictment of Bush’s integrity on 60 Minutes when he reveals that he did, indeed, improperly pull political strings to prevent George W. Bush from seeing any active service in Vietnam. That will be the precise moment for Kerry to launch a meaningful media assault on Bush’s personal integrity. Ads as graphic as the SBVT series of talking heads should damn Bush for deserting his military obligations during wartime. The images of Bush alighting on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln to strut and prate about on the flight deck underneath the banner proclaiming, “Mission Accomplished,” should be used in a campaign commercial to bring the truth about George Bush’s military credentials home to the benumbed voting public. If Kerry fails to deliver this crucial right cross in this, his final phase of testing, his campaign will certainly die. The next flight of hard-hitting spots should launch by prime-time next Thursday night, the ninth of September. These two stages are both absolutely essential operations: left hook and right cross, campaign messaging and media strategy. Both are imperative before Kerry can move into position to deliver the coup de grace, the uppercut slamming Bush’s head back against his spinal column and breaking the supply of blood to his brain knocking him into a cold and unconscious heap of quivering flesh onto the canvas of political history in the debates scheduled to begin on the thirtieth of this month. Kerry must take one step at a time, and he must take all three steps with sure-footed confidence. In fact, his footwork is now the most crucial tactical objective of his strategic agenda. Kerry must maintain his balance. He must take root to the canvas, and at the same time, he must be light on his feet, shifting from back to front, from side to side in a seamless flow of steps moving from strength to strength. Nothing less than perfection will now do. There is no compromise with reality possible now. It is now do or die. To John Kerry – An exhortation The hopes and fears and dreams and desires of your planet are now upon you, John Kerry. Stand and deliver the head, the body and the mind of your opponent to the sands of time trickling out of the hourglasses of history. John Kerry, you must destroy him utterly and totally right now - or be damned. The time clock is ticking, and the world is waiting. John Kerry, You have until the autumnal equinox to set your end game in motion. From that date, you will either close to win, or you will dissipate and lose to find your place in history as the man who faltered and lost the last opportunity to prevent the brutal tyranny of America that Bush and Cheney will deliver in 2005 if they win this election. John Kerry: The lasers are shining directly on you. We are waiting. What is your response? SOURCES Kerry Team Needs Swifter Reactions, By Charlie Cook, September 2, 2004 Outraged Kerry takes the gloves off at last after Republican jibes Bush casts himself as the Lone Ranger, Sidney Blumenthal, Saturday, September 4, 2004 Despite the double-speak, Bush's message is clear: The Republicans' rhetoric show how nasty they can be, Martin Kettle in New York, September 4, 2004
Last Update: 03/23/2006 |
