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 Posted: Tue Nov 30, 2004 7:33 pm Post subject: "One Virginian helped swing Kerry's defeat" |
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One Virginian helped swing Kerry's defeat
By Ed Lynch
ROANOKE.COM COLUMNIST
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
A few weeks ago in this space I commented on the unlikelihood of Virginia turning into a “swing state” in the 2004 election. Back in August, as the Democrats dreamed of a landslide, they even went so far as to send vice presidential candidate John Edwards to Roanoke. Even persistent polling data showing President George W. Bush with a comfortable lead in the state failed to kill the dream of a “blue” Virginia.
In the end, of course, Virginia stayed in the “red” Republican column. Although the election was closer here than anywhere else in the South except Florida, Bush did better in Virginia in 2004 than he did in 2000.
In the myriad analyses of Election 2004, there is one area of broad agreement: Kerry started to lose in August when thetelevision ads from the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” started appearing. The ads targeted Kerry’s Vietnam War record, and called attention to his actions after he returned from Vietnam. While the pundits disagree on what Kerry should have done about these ads when they appeared, they are in agreement that they became a weight around the Kerry campaign. Many of those who commented on the Swift Boat ads many not have known the key role that a Virginia political operative had in getting the ads on the air.
The 2004 Swift Boat story began at the National Press Club in May, when the anti-Kerry veterans held a press conference. Except for a short and snide article on the inside pages of the New York Times, the event was completely ignored by the mainstream media. If the media’s intention was to assist Kerry by ignoring his critics, the strategy backfired in an historic fashion.
Soon after the press conference, according to the conservative National Review, some of the Swift Boat veterans met with Chris LaCivita, whose political résumé includes running George Allen’s successful Senate campaign in 2000. LaCivita is a veteran himself, and the winner of a Purple Heart for wounds received in Kuwait in 1991. As he spoke to the Swift Boat veterans, frustrated by their lack of press coverage, LaCivita got the idea to turn the veterans’ story into a series of political ads. As he told National Review, “the mainstream media can ignore a press conference, but they can’t ignore an ad.”
He planned a series of ads in which the Swifties would speak directly to the camera. In July, about 30 of the veterans met at the Key Bridge Marriott in Rosslyn to talk about their first-hand knowledge of Kerry’s actual Vietnam activities. The following day, the first of the ads was recorded in Washington.
Since the Swift Boat Veterans had not planned for a national ad campaign, money was tight and the original ads ran only in medium-sized markets in Ohio, West Virginia and Wisconsin. (Even by the end of the campaign, the Swift Boat veterans spent less than $20 million of the nearly $1 billion spent on political advertising in 2004.) But LaCivita had made an additional contribution that helped insure that the Swift Boat ads would become a media phenomenon. He advised the group to buy time on national cable news channels, which is relatively inexpensive, but likely to attract the attention of the reporters and editors of those same cable stations.
LaCivita’s prediction came true as the ads became news stories in themselves. Indeed, late in the campaign, polls showed millions of Americans insisting they had seen the ads, even if they didn't live in any of the markets in which the ads actually ran.
The ads came out within days of John Kerry’s acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention in which he saluted and announced that he was “reporting for duty.” It would be hard to imagine a better prelude to the Swift Boat ads. Pundits will be arguing for years over whether the ad with John Kerry’s 1971 testimony was more or less effective than the testimony of the wives and widows of former POWs testifying to the pain that Kerry’s antiwar activities had caused their husbands. The last Swift Boat ad, which LaCivita also designed, featured a camera on wheels filming a long line of Swift Boat veterans, all of whom knew of Kerry’s Vietnam service and doubted his ability to be commander-in-chief.
In a relatively close election, any mistake or miscue naturally looms larger than it would in a less competitive contest. Many factors went into Kerry’s defeat, or Bush’s victory, depending on one’s point of view. But certainly the Swift Boat veterans, and the ads they ran on a shoestring budget, will always remain one of the enduring images of the 2004 presidential campaign. But for the sympathy and efforts of one Virginian, the ads might never have appeared.
So, in a way, perhaps Virginia was a “swing state” after all.
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