Text 4990, 348 rader
Skriven 2004-11-14 14:49:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: Kerry Campaign
======================
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/11/14/on_the_trail_of_ke
rrys_failed_dream?mode=PF


On the trail of Kerry's failed dream
Pair of wars dominated strategy before election
November 14, 2004

Written and reported by Nina J. Easton, Michael Kranish, Patrick Healy, 
Glen Johnson, Anne E. Kornblut, and Brian Mooney of the Globe staff.

On the afternoon of Aug. 9, John F. Kerry stood on the lip of the Grand 
Canyon, about to make one of the biggest mistakes of his three-year 
quest for the presidency. A stiff wind was blowing across the canyon, 
and Kerry, whose hearing was damaged by gun blasts in Vietnam, had 
trouble understanding some of the questions being thrown his way. But he 
pressed on, coughing from the pollen blowing on the breeze.

Would Kerry have voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, one 
reporter asked, even if he knew then that Iraq didn't have weapons of 
mass destruction? "Yes, I would have voted for the authority; I believe 
it's the right authority for a president to have," Kerry replied, as 
aides stood by, dumbfounded.

Kerry's answer ricocheted around the political world. Faced with the 
revelation that almost all the prewar arguments for invading Iraq were 
wrong -- the existence of weapons of mass destruction, close links to Al 
Qaeda -- President Bush had nonetheless insisted that he would do 
nothing differently. And he had been challenging Kerry to do the same, 
hoping to catch the Democrat changing his position on the unpopular war.

The senator explained to aides that part of the question had been lost 
in the wind; he thought he was answering a variation on the same basic 
query he'd been asked countless times: Was it right to give Bush the 
authority to go to war against Iraq? Kerry had simply given his standard 
"yes," with the proviso that he would have "done this very differently 
from the way President Bush has" -- yet the misunderstanding now muddied 
Kerry's message.

Worried advisers briefly considered issuing a clarification, but feared 
it might further feed Republican efforts to portray Kerry as a "flip-
flopper."

Meanwhile, back in Washington, the Bush campaign pounced: Kerry now 
agrees with the president! Bush media strategist Mark McKinnon crowed 
about Kerry's "forced error," while the president repeated Kerry's 
answer over and over on the campaign trail and the GOP later advertised 
the Democrat's varied Iraq statements. "How can John Kerry protect us," 
the narrator in those ads intoned, "when he doesn't even know where he 
stands?"

Now, as Kerry campaign strategists try to fathom his Nov. 2 loss, one 
word emerges out of the rubble: war. History suggested the difficulties 
of beating a wartime president, even one with a job approval rating 
under 50 percent. But Kerry's own tortured relationship to war, dating 
to his youth, enabled the GOP to portray him as weak and inconsistent.

On Vietnam, Kerry had been both war hero and antiwar protester: Angry 
veterans were able to turn those contrasting roles into an attack on the 
candidate's character with a $25 million dollar ad campaign in swing 
states.

On Iraq, Kerry broke from a Senate record of opposing controversial 
military interventions -- in the 1980s, he fought President Reagan's 
involvement in Central America; in 1991 he voted against the Persian 
Gulf War -- to support a 2002 resolution authorizing Bush to use force 
against Saddam Hussein. But afterward he criticized the invasion and 
voted against a bill funding troops there.

Kerry was his own handler on Iraq, aides said, and he seemed to draw on 
his Vietnam experience. "He had a deep, personal aversion to saying 
plainly that Iraq was a mistake and [that] he would not have gone to 
war," said one adviser, explaining that Kerry was concerned about the 
impact on troops in the field. "Coming to grips with that truth, I think 
that was probably his biggest problem."

The senator firmly believed he was being consistent -- voting yes on the 
resolution to give the president the clout to resume inspections, but 
warning Bush not to move hastily. At one point, when aides tried to coax 
him into a simpler message, he spread papers on the floor to show how 
the fine points of his arguments fit.

"John got caught with his legalistic and logical mind wanting to make 
consistency matter, and not let them say [he's] a flip-flopper," said 
Kerry's longtime friend David Thorne.

Even as aides fretted that Kerry had not found his voice on the issue, 
they continued to hope that his hybrid position -- maintaining vigilance 
in a post-9/11 world, but planning more carefully than Bush -- would 
capture the mood of the country. They were buoyed by the fact that 
voters in the primaries, when Kerry was also attacked for inconsistency, 
suddenly moved to his side, as if they had understood him all along.

They hoped it would happen again.

But every time Kerry tried to raise the level of attack on Bush over 
Iraq, he found himself trapped by his own previous vote for the war and 
the Republicans' relentless depictions of him as inconsistent. "John's 
complexity hurt him," said his former Yale roommate Daniel Barbiero.

By the time a new team of battle-tested advisers persuaded Kerry to 
speak in clear, simple terms -- calling Bush's Iraq policy "a colossal 
failure" -- the dynamics of the campaign were already set.

Bush's critics depict him as simplistic and stubborn. But on Election 
Day, it became clear that a majority of Americans took comfort in the 
president's clipped certainty in the face of dangerous times and moral 
flux. When voters left the polls that Tuesday, they gave the president a 
3.5 million lead in the popular vote.

"If there was one most important basis by which Bush won and Kerry lost, 
it was that Kerry was not seen as a strong enough leader," said Andrew 
Kohut, president of Pew Research Center. "Not too many people were 
concerned about Kerry being too liberal or seeing Kerry as a tax-and-
spend Democrat. But they were concerned about him as a person who 
changed his mind too much."

By mid-March, two weeks after Super Tuesday, as Kerry took a 
snowboarding break at his wife's Sun Valley, Idaho, getaway, Bush was 
already on the attack, saturating the springtime airwaves with $70 
million worth of advertising.

A defining moment
On March 18, Bush's media advisers sat inside the campaign's glassy 
corporate office building in Arlington, Va., counting their good 
fortunes. The president's strategists had intended to pursue a tried-and-
true strategy: Define your opponent and do it early. Now Kerry himself 
had handed them the words to do just that.

Bush had learned in his only losing campaign -- a 1978 US House race in 
West Texas, where he was labeled a liberal Eastern elitist -- that it 
was political death to let your opponents define you first. So in the 
ensuing years he had turned that same strategy against his foes. In the 
case of Kerry, Bush readily agreed to a plan to define the senator as a 
flip-flopper weak on defense.

A Bush campaign negative ad, released March 16, criticized Kerry for 
voting against an $87 billion bill to fund US troops in Iraq. The ad 
depicted Kerry voting no on "body armor for troops in combat," on 
"higher pay," on "better healthcare for reservists and their families."

Kerry's 2002 vote authorizing the use of force against Iraq had been 
cast with one eye on the upcoming presidential election; one faction of 
advisers argued he couldn't beat Bush otherwise. And Kerry's own past 
suggested the dangers of running as an antiwar candidate: As one of 
them, he suffered a devastating defeat for a US House seat in 1972, the 
same year President Nixon, despite Vietnam, won by a landslide.

Kerry's 2003 vote against the $87 billion to fund US troops in Iraq was 
likewise cast in the context of a presidential race. At the time, his 
primary opponent, Governor Howard Dean of Vermont, was enjoying a 
surprise surge, thanks to energized antiwar Democrats. At first, Kerry 
was willing to support the $87 billion, provided it was paid for by 
eliminating Bush's tax cut for the rich. When that provision failed, 
Kerry voted against it.

That vote provided ready ammunition for a GOP assault. Nicolle Devenish, 
communications director for the Bush-Cheney campaign, said the idea for 
their first attack ad grew out of a breakfast strategy session at 
political adviser Karl Rove's Washington, D.C., home. In early March, 
knowing that Kerry planned to surround himself with his "band of 
brothers" from Vietnam and to speak to veterans in West Virginia, "we 
decided to bracket him for voting against men and women in the 
military," Devenish said.

At that same West Virginia event, Kerry stepped into quicksand when, 
unsolicited, he decided to respond to the GOP attack ad and explain his 
vote. The words he chose would ring throughout the campaign.

"This is very important," he said. "I actually did vote for the $87 
billion, before I voted against it."

Watching on television from Bush headquarters, McKinnon jumped out of 
his chair. "I just knew, immediately," recalled the onetime Democrat who 
switched sides after personally bonding with then-Texas Governor George 
W. Bush. "There was a buzz in the whole place. We knew immediately that 
it was a big deal.

"We kind of set the trap [with the original ad], and then he walked 
right into it."

If the Republicans had successfully written the first chapter of Kerry's 
general election campaign, another group of foes --swift boat veterans 
from Vietnam -- were conspiring to write the second.

Swift boat veterans attack
On April 4, a group of 10 Vietnam veterans crammed into a second-floor 
conference room in Dallas and began plotting the downfall of John Kerry. 
The room was decorated with Parisian watercolors of ostriches and 
kittens, a design favored by the host of this meeting, Merrie Spaeth, a 
public relations executive who had once been director of media relations 
for Reagan.

The original seeds of this meeting lay not with Spaeth, but with two 
Vietnam veterans whose relationships with Kerry dated back three 
decades: The first was John O'Neill, a Nixon White House ally who had 
famously debated Kerry over the Vietnam War on "The Dick Cavett Show" in 
1971. The second was Roy Hoffmann, one of Kerry's former commanding 
officers.

O'Neill, who had donated a kidney to his ailing wife, was at a Texas 
hospital in early February when he saw campaign footage of Kerry on 
television and decided the Democrat had to be stopped. He began calling 
veterans who might also be offended by the prospect of a man who once 
accused soldiers of "atrocities" becoming the nation's commander in 
chief. The veterans discussed vague plans to publicize Kerry's antiwar 
activities.

O'Neill had not served with Kerry, so his knowledge of the candidate's 
combat action was limited. But Hoffmann had -- and was still steaming 
over his portrayal in a Kerry-approved biography, "Tour of Duty," by 
Douglas Brinkley. The book compared Hoffmann to the Robert Duvall 
character in the movie "Apocalypse Now," who said he loved "the smell of 
napalm in the morning." Brinkley wrote that swift boat veterans had 
described Hoffmann as "hotheaded, bloodthirsty, and egomaniacal."

Kerry had tried to head off Hoffmann's anger by calling and offering to 
ask Brinkley to change the offending passages. But Hoffmann would not be 
swayed. Mutual disdain for Kerry eventually brought Hoffmann and O'Neill 
together, and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that would later 
blindside the Democrat's campaign, was born.

The April 4 meeting in Dallas stretched to 12 hours, according to 
accounts from three people who were there, as the group ate barbecue and 
Tex-Mex and planned a news conference to denounce Kerry as "unfit for 
command." At one point, the veterans pulled out checkbooks and agreed to 
donate the first $60,000, with O'Neill offering $25,000. This seemed 
like a huge sum to many of them, but Spaeth said she told them they 
could collect much more through a fund-raising appeal -- an effort that 
netted $20 million.

The group debated strategy: Should it focus on Kerry's assertions that 
US soldiers had committed atrocities? Or should it go after his combat 
record, raising questions about whether he deserved his medals and three 
Purple Hearts?

Spaeth and others believed the group should focus its attacks on Kerry's 
antiwar efforts. Michael Bernique, who had gone on missions with Kerry, 
argued that he had acted courageously in combat. But others were adamant 
about going after his combat record.

O'Neill and Hoffmann had heard reports questioning whether Kerry 
deserved his first Purple Heart, given for a wound that Kerry's 
commanding officer had compared to a rose-thorn prick. They also 
entertained suspicions from veterans about Kerry's medals -- one a 
Bronze Star, the other a Silver Star. "We got very disquieting e-mails 
about what he had done in Vietnam," O'Neill said.

The O'Neill faction also argued that poking holes in Kerry's combat 
record would attract fresh media attention.

When the group decided to focus on Kerry's combat record as well as his 
antiwar activities, Bernique and several others objected and dropped 
out.

Kerry knew he needed to extend an olive branch to the many veterans 
still enraged over his 1971 assertions that fellow soldiers participated 
in mutilations, gang rapes, and the burning of villages. In April, Kerry 
went on NBC's "Meet the Press" and confessed that his accusations had 
been "a little bit over the top."

But if Kerry thought his mea culpa could tamp down 33-year-old flames of 
anger, he was wrong. On May 4, the swift boat vets convened a news 
conference in Washington to question Kerry's fitness as commander in 
chief. "This is not a political issue," said Hoffmann. "It is a matter 
of his judgment, truthfulness, reliability, loyalty, and trust -- all 
absolute tenets of command."

A phalanx of television cameras recorded the event, but the news 
conference didn't attract nearly as much publicity as the group hoped. 
What helped Kerry most was a change in headlines: The veterans' attack 
on Kerry was overshadowed by an unfolding scandal in a Baghdad prison 
that was about to knock the Bush campaign off course.

The failure of the swift boat veterans to gain traction lulled the Kerry 
campaign into a false sense of security. In fact, O'Neill was quietly 
preparing for a more intensive assault.

Opportunities missed
The Abu Ghraib prison scandal suddenly put Bush back on the defensive.

Images of American soldiers laughing as naked Iraqi prisoners were tied, 
hooded, attached to electrodes, and forced into sexual positions 
unleashed a wave of anti-American fervor abroad and self-doubt at home. 
A year and a half earlier, some officials had predicted America would be 
greeted as a liberator of Iraq. Now, US troops were gaining a reputation 
as occupiers, and a handful were grossly abusive.

Bush expressed his "deep disgust." The White House tried to distance the 
president from the scandal, but the furor mounted with each shocking 
revelation.

A black mood settled on Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters. For weeks, 
Republicans had been riding high, churning out negative ads morphing 
Kerry into a liberal loser, a second coming of the failed Michael S. 
Dukakis.

They could control the image-making. They couldn't control events. And 
the war in Iraq, already taking a toll on the president's popularity, 
now threatened his reelection. "You sort of see the campaign going down 
in flames," McKinnon recalled.

McKinnon called this period "Black May."

But the Kerry campaign wasn't firing on all cylinders either. The prison 
scandal, a spike in American casualties in Iraq, and the public 
investigation into the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks hurt Bush, but didn't 
necessarily help Kerry. Still largely unknown outside Massachusetts, the 
Democratic candidate was having trouble getting his message across.

This might have been an ideal time to hit Bush hard. Instead, the 
candidate proceeded on a deliberate course, crafted by media adviser Bob 
Shrum and campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill, to raise money, broadcast 
policy proposals. and advertise Kerry's life story. In early May, the 
campaign announced a $25 million, mostly biographical advertising buy -- 
the largest single buy to that date by either side.

Kerry's appearances focused on domestic issues, largely because campaign-
organized focus groups rated healthcare and the economy as top concerns. 
At one campaign stop, Kerry even refused to answer whether the prison 
scandal should force Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to resign, 
saying "I've already commented."

When Kerry finally started giving foreign policy speeches by the end of 
May, his words had a term paper quality. He would lay out "four 
imperatives" and insist that in the war on terror "we need to be clear 
about our purposes and our principles." Bush, meanwhile, was casting the 
campaign as a "choice between an America that leads the world with 
strength and confidence or an America that is uncertain in the face of 
danger."

If the Kerry team expected to sit back and let headlines sink the 
president, they were wrong. In June the bad news out of Iraq began to 
ebb, and Bush advisers realized the president's poll numbers had not 
dropped as badly as they expected. "We suddenly realized how resilient 
the president was," McKinnon said. "We took the toughest hit possible, 
and yet we found ourselves in June still beating Kerry."

During this period, Kerry himself expressed concern that his campaign 
message lacked spark. He called Paul Begala, the consultant who had 
helped steer Bill Clinton to victory and now cohosted the CNN show 
"Crossfire."


cont...

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