[Mb-civic] WORTHWHILE READ

Fri Nov 5 14:39:35 PST 2004

Anatomy of a Crushing Political Defeat

By Arianna Huffington, AlterNet
 Posted on November 4, 2004, Printed on November 5, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/20412/

This election was not stolen. It was lost by the Kerry campaign. The reason
it's so important to make this crystal clear  even as Kerry's concession
speech is still ringing in our ears  is that to the victors go not only the
spoils but the explanations. And the Republicans are framing their victory
as the triumph of conservative moral values and the wedge cultural issues
they exploited throughout the campaign.

But it wasn't gay marriage that did the Democrats in; it was the fatal
decision to make the pursuit of undecided voters the overarching strategy of
the Kerry campaign.

This meant that at every turn the campaign chose caution over boldness so as
not to offend the undecideds who, as a group, long to be soothed and
reassured rather than challenged and inspired.

The fixation on undecided voters turned a campaign that should have been
about big ideas, big decisions, and the very, very big differences between
the worldviews of John Kerry and George Bush  both on national security and
domestic priorities  into a narrow trench war fought over ludicrous
non-issues like whether Kerry had bled enough to warrant a Purple Heart.
This timid, spineless, walking-on-eggshells strategy  with no central theme
or moral vision  played right into the hands of the Bush-Cheney team's
portrayal of Kerry as an unprincipled, equivocating flip-flopper who, in a
time of war and national unease, stood for nothing other than his desire to
become president.

The Republicans spent a hundred million dollars selling this image of Kerry
to the public. But the public would not have bought it if the Kerry campaign
had run a bold, visionary race that at every moment and every corner
contradicted the caricature.

Kerry's advisors were so obsessed with not upsetting America's fence-sitting
voters they ended up driving the Kerry bandwagon straight over the edge of
the Grand Canyon, where the candidate proclaimed that even if he knew then
what we all know now  that there were no WMDs in Iraq  he still would have
voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

This equivocation was not an accidental slip. It was the result of a
strategic decision  once again geared to undecided voters  not to take a
decisive, contrary position on Iraq. In doing so, the Kerry camp failed to
recognize that this election was a referendum on the president's leadership
on the war on terror. (Jamie Rubin, who had been hired by the campaign as a
foreign-policy advisor, went so far as to tell the Washington Post that
Kerry, too, would likely have invaded Iraq.)

It was only after the polls started going south for Kerry, with the
president opening a double-digit lead according to some surveys, that his
campaign began to rethink this disastrous approach. The conventional wisdom
had it that it was the Swift Boat attacks that were responsible for Kerry's
late-summer drop in the polls but, in fact, it was the vacuum left by the
lack of a powerful opposing narrative to the president's message on the war
on terror  and whether Iraq was central to it  that allowed the attacks on
Kerry's leadership and war record to take root.

We got a hint of what might have been when Kerry temporarily put aside the
obsession with undecideds and gave a bold, unequivocal speech at New York
University on Sept. 20 eviscerating the president's position on Iraq. This
speech set the scene for Kerry's triumph in the first debate.

Once Kerry belatedly began taking on the president on the war on terror and
the war on Iraq  "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time"  he started to
prevail on what the president considered his unassailable turf.

You would have thought that keeping up this line of attack day in and day
out would have clearly emerged as the winning strategy  especially since
the morning papers and the nightly news were filled with stories on the
tragic events in Iraq, the CIA's no al Qaeda/Saddam link report, and the
Duelfer no-WMDs report.

Instead, those in charge of the Kerry campaign ignored this giant, blood-red
elephant standing in the middle of the room and allowed themselves to be
mesmerized by polling and focus group data that convinced them that domestic
issues like jobs and health care were the way to win.

The Clintonistas who were having a greater and greater sway over the
campaign  including Joe Lockhart, James Carville and the former president
himself  were convinced it was "the economy, stupid" all over again, which
dovetailed perfectly with the beliefs of chief strategist Bob Shrum and
campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill.

But what worked for Clinton in the '90s completely failed Kerry in 2004, at
a time of war, fear and anxiety about more terrorist attacks. And even when
it came to domestic issues, the message was tailored to the undecideds.
Bolder, more passionate language that Kerry had used during the primary 
like calling companies hiding their profits in tax shelters "the Benedict
Arnolds of corporate America"  was dropped for fear of scaring off
undecideds and Wall Street. Or was it Wall Street undecideds? ("This was
very unfortunate language," Roger Altman, Clinton's Deputy Treasury
Secretary told me during the campaign. "We've buried it." And indeed, the
phrase was quickly and quietly deleted from the Kerry Web site.) Sure, Kerry
spoke about Iraq until the end (how could he not?), but the majority of the
speeches, press releases and ads coming out of the campaign, including
Kerry's radio address to the nation 10 days before the election, were on
domestic issues.

The fact that Kerry lost in Ohio, which had seen 232,000 jobs evaporate and
114,000 people lose their health insurance during the Bush years, shows how
wrong was the polling data the campaign based its decisions on.

With Iraq burning, WMDs missing, jobs at Herbert Hoover-levels, flu shots
nowhere to be found, gas prices through the roof, and Osama bin Laden back
on the scene looking tanned, rested, and ready to rumble, this should have
been a can't-lose election for the Democrats. Especially since they were
more unified than ever before, had raised as much money as the Republicans,
and were appealing to a country where 55 percent of voters believed we were
headed in the wrong direction.

But lose it they did.

So the question inevitably becomes: What now?

Already there are those in the party convinced that, in the interest of
expediency, Democrats need to put forth more "centrist" candidates  i.e.
Republican-lite candidates  who can make inroads in the all-red middle of
the country.

I'm sorry to pour salt on raw wounds, but isn't that what Tom Daschle did?
He even ran ads showing himself hugging the president! But South Dakotans
refused to embrace this lily-livered tactic. Because, ultimately, copycat
candidates fail in the way "me-too" brands do.

Unless the Democratic Party wants to become a permanent minority party,
there is no alternative but to return to the idealism, boldness and
generosity of spirit that marked the presidencies of FDR and JFK and the
short-lived presidential campaign of Bobby Kennedy.

Otherwise, the Republicans will continue their winning ways, convincing tens
of millions of hard working Americans to vote for them even as they cut
their services and send their children off to die in an unjust war.

Democrats have a winning message. They just have to trust it enough to
deliver it. This time they clearly didn't.