Me#1You#10
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Joined: 06 May 2004
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 Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2005 8:18 am Post subject: "UPI White House watch" |
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Nice observations from a UPI analyst...too bad AP doesn't get the picture yet. (emphasis mine)
| Quote: | UPI White House watch
By Peter Roff
UPI Senior Political Analyst
Washington, DC, Apr. 1 (UPI) -- When George W. Bush uttered the words "so help me God" after taking the presidential oath of office on Jan. 20, 2005, he set into motion a series of events that will culminate in the presidential election of 2008.
Not quite the equivalent of the Indianapolis Speedway announcer's command, "Gentlemen. Start your engines!" it's a signal to anyone who might next want the job that the time to start campaigning is at hand.
The race for the White House, as C-SPAN brilliantly documents every four years with a series of telecasts under that name, is a lengthy process that begins in earnest in Iowa farmhouses and New Hampshire meeting halls about a year before the balloting begins.
Even before that, though, comes the planning and pre-planning period. This is the phase in the life of a campaign that used to be devoted to developing the story the candidate wanted to tell the voters concerning where he had been and where he wanted to take the nation.
It's different now. Since the 1992 Clinton primary campaign -- remember Gennifer Flowers? -- or maybe even back as far as the short-lived 1988 presidential campaign of former Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., who dared the media to follow him around so they could see for themselves he was not cheating on his wife, the rules and the needs of the candidates have changed.
In the modern presidential campaign, candidates and their chief aides spend an inordinate amount of time talking among themselves about what they don't want the voters to know rather than developing an issue matrix that can explain their vision for a better America.
Some, obviously, do it better than others. Maybe George W. Bush can be faulted for not thinking seriously enough about some of the issues that almost tripped him up in both his presidential runs. Having twice been through the mill while campaigning for election as governor of Texas, he can perhaps be excused for thinking that what had not come up before would never come up.
He and his top aides were unable, unlike some other politicos caught in the glare of the klieg lights, to get away with the "asked and answered defense" when seeking to deflect embarrassing or uncomfortable questions, Bush's disciplined answers did help minimize his potential exposure.
Sen. John F. Kerry, on the other hand, never really seemed to understand what hit him. He still doesn't, as evidenced by the fact that as late as two months ago he promised NBC's Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" he would sign the relevant Pentagon papers releasing all his military records.
He has yet to do so. This from a man for is planning on running for president again -- at least as long the ketchup money doesn't run out -- and who just doesn't seem to get it.
In the final analysis, Kerry's lionization at the hands of historian Douglas Brinkley and others who made him out to be some sort of modern-day Audie Murphy where his brief tour of duty in Vietnam was concerned turned out to have worked against him at least as much as it may have helped.
There are few people in the public eye who could live up to the kind of heroic image Brinkley and others created. Maybe the late Joe Foss, a Medal of Honor recipient and former South Dakota governor could. Maybe Gen. Dwight Eisenhower could.
Most, however, fall far short of the myth when the rubber hits the road. Consider former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., who also earned a Medal of Honor and who left part of one leg behind in Vietnam. He was universally considered a hero until one of his former comrades in arms accused him of being a war criminal almost 30 years later. That's never going away.
Kerry, the one from Massachusetts, was also hampered by the fact that, once he won the Democrat nomination for U.S. Senate in 1984, never again had a really tough race -- not even against former GOP Gov. William Weld in 1996. Kerry never had to run the gauntlet Bush did and was never adequately prepared for the kind of scrutiny presidential candidates get from a hostile national media -- even from the reporters who wanted Bush to lose.
When the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth pulled up alongside and, using their own money and the alternate media, made their case Kerry's record was not all it was cracked up to be, they easily torpedoed him amidships.
Kerry may not have learned much from this. Other Democrats have. Ann Lewis, the veteran party activist and master spinner who now runs Friends of Hillary, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign committee, is getting ready for a similar assault -- either when Senator Clinton, D-N.Y., runs for re-election to the Senate in 2006 or when she runs for president in 2008 as most people expect her to.
Lewis recently e-mailed a pitch for funds that accused Clinton's critics of preparing, as The New York Times put it, "an advertising campaign against her similar to the one orchestrated by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth."
Clinton has of course long believed, and to some degree understandably, that a vast, right-wing conspiracy to destroy her husband's presidency existed and has now turned its sights on her. This is certainly one theme of the fundraising message, which says, "Help us show the right wing that we will be ready and able to fight back."
In political campaigning, it is a common tactic to identify a so-called devil -- Sen. Ted Kennedy, Hillary, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Rev. Jerry Falwell are commonly used for this purpose by their political or ideological opponents -- against whom a candidate can portray themselves as the white knight on the charger. Rarely, however, has it been done as effectively and as amorphously as it has been by the Clintons in their attack on the "conspiracy" that, because it has neither a name nor face, can exist in perpetuity.
What the pitch also suggests is that, even before the issues of the next campaign are determined or tested, the damage control is being planned. This is a feature of presidential campaigning that is, regrettably, here to stay.
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(Please send comments to nationaldesk@upi.com.)
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