The Kerry campaign has recently hired some new guns in the fight to win the presidency. Old advisors of Clinton and others have convinced Kerry to adopt a new strategy for the home stretch.
This article outlines Kerry’s new strategy for winning the election…
The fact that Kerry has a host of new advisors was getting a lot of press for the past week or so. Now, it seems that these new people have urged Kerry to change his strategy in some important ways.
Kerry has unveiled his new plan of attack in a speech today.
It would appear that Bush is continuing his standard attacks that Kerry is a flip flopper and he is weak on defense.
It seems that this new strategy by Kerry will certainly shake things up. The rest of this campaign will be a much different battle due to this decision to take Bush on directly regarding Iraq.
To debate: Will this new strategy work? Is attacking Bush regarding Iraq going to resonate with voters? Could it backfire and end up costing Kerry votes?
Easily. It allows Bush to call attention to Kerry’s rather inconsistent statements and votes on the war. It also keeps the focus on defense and national security issues, where Bush has practically always enjoyed an advantage in polls.
It should be noted that in his speech today, Kerry specifically mentioned his vote on the war and defended it. From today’s story on WashingtonPost.com:
If this had been Kerry’s message from the start, and he had stuck with it, he’d be in a much better position today than he is now. All in all, it’s not that difficult to justify Kerry’s votes on Iraq. For example, on the $87 billion supplemental, he could have said he voted for a fiscally responsible package and rejected one that put the entire bill on the American people. Instead, he tried to do a soundbite (or something) and came off looking like a waffler.
It is a bit late in the game for Kerry to be reinventing his message. This feeds perfectly into Bush’s attacks that Kerry is a flip flopper that only tells people what he thinks they want to hear. Especially so considering that Kerry just recently said that he would still have voted to use force knowing everything we know today.
Also, I don’t know that American’s will embrace the new message even if they accept it as what Kerry really thinks. Most voters still trust Bush far more regarding issues of national security and Iraq, IMO. Attacking Bush directly on Iraq could be a turn off for voters.
Too little, too late. The damage is done. One reason Clinton won was that they never allowed an attack from the Republican Noise Machine (I’d do one of those cute “tm” thingys, but I don’t know how) go unanswered. Kerry’s campaign allowed the “flip-flop” dullard’s refrain to stick and the SBV’s thing was allowed to fester. Nothing they do now is going to help. Bush is going to have to beat himself (not bloody likely). None of the (even true) accusations are sticking, and he’s going to coast. It would take a shoe the size of Connecticut to drop to change the outcome of this election now.
But enough hand-wringing about the Dem’s bumbling. The fact of the matter is that the majority of this country are right-wing assholes, and they’re not about to experience any great moment of enlightenment anytime soon, so, Kerry will go to the Elba for shitty Dem candidates, along with Dukakis, McGovern, Mondale, Gore, et al. Bush’s cronies will act as though 53% of the vote is a mandate and start ramming home all the ugly Republican shit they were holding back until he got “re” elected.
I’ve been contemplating an OP along similar lines, but this one is close enough. FWIW, I was going to entitle my OP: “It’s the Iraq War, stupid!”
This strategy is essentially Kerry’s only chance. The question is whether his tactics in support of that strategy will work. The Iraq war was a mistake, and a good leader could shift public opinion in that direction fairly easily. He’s fighting a losing battle, though:
It’s a little late to be switching gears. Kerry has danced around quite a bit about the Iraq issue, and there isn’t much time to stake out new ground. But, better late than never.
The “I would still vot for the resolution even knowing everything I know now” (to paraphrase) is going to haunt him. People who could be led down the road of thinking the war was a mistkae will be brought back to that statement again and again by Bush.
Kerry needs to be NEGATIVE without being PESSIMSITIC. That is the key. It’s doable, but not easy, especially since Bush will be trying to paint him as pessimistic. I’m not sure if the “gloom and doom” ads on TV right now )the dark ones with gloomy piano music in the background) are Kerry’s or some 527 group’s, but that is a good example of what NOT to do.
The Iraq war is a* fait accompli*. He not only needs to convince people that the war was a bad idea, but that he’ll be able to deal with the current situation better than Bush. It doesn’t help that he voted against the $87B appropriations bill.
I don’t think he can pull it off. But he really doesn’t have a choice. He can try to push the deficit issue as well, linking it to Iraq, but deficits are pretty abstract things to a lot of voters. It also would have helped him if he had picked a VP with more foreign policy gravitas. Edwards is a nice guy and all, but he’s a lightweight in this area.
Should Kerry lose, historians will look back and say he lost because of his mishandlng of this issue. Nothing else.
Not really. The vast majority of Americans belong to the Apathy Party. They are annoyed by politics, and annoyed by their responsibility to deal with politics. The “right wing assholes” of whom you speak are inordinately powerful because they are motivated. Put simply, they vote, and they vote in lockstep.
Take, for instance, the recent “assault weapons” conniption fit. Some 68% of Americans favor some for of control for such weapons. Naturally, one would thing that such a dominant majority would be served by our Congresscritters. But the problem is that the people who favor gun control mean well, but mildly. They won’t organize a bloc of voters on the issue. But the NRA types are perfectly capable casting a vote based entirely on a candidates position on gun control.
This is one of the inherent weaknesses of representative democracy: the inordinate political power of the motivated fanatic. But finally, democracy hasn’t failed us, we have failed to deserve it.
I like your description better, elucidator. By my reckoning, there’s probably about a third “conservative”, a third “liberal” and the rest who really only care who the next person voted off the island is going to be, but vote Bush anyway or don’t vote. I don’t see much of an improvement anytime soon, since this situation favors those currently in power.
I’m a member of the NRA and I’ve always considered it a feature, not a bug.
Democracy may be “one man, one vote”, but that doesn’t take into account the varying degrees of importance an issue may have to different citizens. If an issue doesn’t affect me directly, I may have a vague preference for one side or the other. If it directly affects my way of life, livelihood or community, I may have very strong opinions on the issue and be willing to invest time, money, and my vote.
Let’s say that 70% of the population believes that ping-pong is a waste of time and morally suspect. The other 30% of the population are fanatical ping-pong players, who would be very unhappy if the game was banned. The National Ping-Pong Association is well organized and funded, and its members can be counted on to vote en masse against any candidate who supports restrictions or bans on ping-pong. It is political suicide for a candidate to advocate restrictions on ping-pong. I would argue that the system works and has produced the socially optimal result.
Except that it HAS BEEN Kerry’s message from the start. At least as far back as March/April 2003:
Of course, it wasn’t until later that the promised nuclear antrhax nerve gasses failed to materialize. But of course, it’s pretty easy to find any number of examples of Kerry criticizing the administration for deceiving the country on that point. Here’s one from January 25, 2004
So basically, while this may be a (very welcome, for my part) shift in emphasis by the candidate, it is certainly not a change in the substance of his position on the war against Iraq.
Say, on the other hand, that 5% of Americans love attending nude beaches, 10% of Americans despite the concept of nude beaches and believe that they are an affront to God’s law, and 85% of Americans think “sure, we should have nude beaches? Why not. I’m in favor people being able to do what they want. But I don’t really care”. If there’s a referendum on that issue, only the directly affected 15% show up to vote, and the measure is resoundingly defeated by a 2/3 majority. But in fact, 90% of the entire population basically supports the right to beach nudely.
Yup, anytime more people are not happy with something than are, I’d be hesitant to call that a “socially optimal result” unless I was Kim Jong Il or something…
Yes. Whatever the result, one group is going to be very unhappy. I would rather have it be 5% than 10%. It’s sort of like taking a large family to a movie, you can’t win .
Actually, Kerry even explained on the Senate floor in his original vote for the resolution authorizing force why he was voting for it. Rather it has been President Bush who has waffled on what that resolution actually meant:
So, Mr, President, which is it that John Kerry voted for: Did he vote “for the war” or did he vote “to keep the peace”? [Or were you simply lying about this “keep the peace” stuff from the beginning and there was really next to nothing that would have deterred you from going to war, as is now fairly obvious…and was suspected by many of us at the time?]
Well, if you look at the full context of his remarks, he said basically what you think he should have said. Unfortunately at the end he added that the soundbite that was really, really stupid from a political point-of-view!
I agree. I would only add that the Democrats too have a noise machine. Both sides make accusations against the other.
This is an excellent point. The SBV’s have beaten Kerry down so much that he hasn’t even been mentioning his Vietnam service. This was Kerry’s central focus of his campaign up until now. He would mention it multiple times in most of his speeches. However, last night on Letterman Kerry never mentioned it once.
The SBV’s have essentially taken on Kerry head on on his most central issue and won. Some people believe them, and some don’t, but the damage is done. What most people remember is that Kerry’s once shiny and noble war record is now muddy and tarnished.
I think there’s another factor that makes this new strategy a mistake.
Ten or twenty years ago, people watched hollywood movies just like they do now. However, nobody knew the box office reciepts of a move except those who work in the movie industry. Nowadays, everybody knows exactly how a movie does on it’s openning weekend and if that figure is a success or not. People have access to much more information and they use this additional information to make decisions.
Politics is much the same. The voters have access to more information and they are using it to make decisions. Karl Rove is a household name. When Kerry’s campaign hires a series of new advisors that used to work for Clinton, this is widely reported and talked about. The fact that Kerry takes on all of these new Clinton advisors and then makes major changes in his strategy makes him appear weak. It goes along with the notion that most people already have that he is a flip flopper who doesn’t take positions out of conviction, but because that’s what he thinks people want to hear.
Even if it was a good strategic move, any major changes in his battleplan will cost Kerry votes, because voters will see through him.
Why do people try to present their spin as analysis?
One might just as easily say that the fact that Kerry is shaking up his team shows that he demands results, not simply yes-men loyalty. Bush has not fired a single one of his perpetual screw-ups, but did push out the people who warned us early on about all the problems we’re having now.
What’s to see through? Kerry, unlike Bush, has not yet given us any reason to suspect he is not an honest man, nor that his public persona is in any way artificial or unreal.
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