Truth - Al Franken [42]
Whew. They’ve left. Off to dinner at the French Embassy. I’m glad they didn’t look over my shoulder and read the “I am Bush’s bitch” line. I want that to be a surprise.
The point is, every good candidate should have a positive agenda. But you also have to fight back. Let me illustrate what I’m saying with a hip cultural reference. As anyone who has seen The Karate Kid knows, being a sweet friendly heartthrob like Ralph Macchio isn’t enough if you want to win the other guy’s girl (Electoral College—played here by the beautiful Elisabeth Shue). If you want to kiss Elisabeth Shue, you have to know the Way of the Fist: Strike First. Strike Hard. No Mercy.
Wait, that’s the bad guy’s formula. That’s Rove. What you really have to know is what Mr. Miyagi told Daniel-san: “Man who catch fly with chopstick accomplish anything.” I think that means you have to be incredibly nimble.
Also, you have to know the crane kick. And that’s where Kerry came up short. In politics, you can never turn the other cheek. Especially when you’re fighting the Christian right.
Nothing demonstrates the “viciousness gap” between the Bush and the Kerry campaigns better than their respective national conventions.
In Boston, the Democrats made the horrible mistake of responding to a very ironic attack from the Bush team, the claim that Democrats had nothing to offer but “partisan anger.” Instead of hitting back with the obvious countercharge that, no, it’s Republicans who were the party of partisan anger, the Democrats decided to internalize the message of their abuser and try to be nicer.
The Republicans, on the other hand, ran a convention so partisan and angry that its fundamental dishonesty passed nearly unremarked.
Even though Democrats almost to a man believed that President Bush was an unrivaled horror show who was driving the nation off a cliff, it was easy to watch the Democratic Convention and conclude that the Democrats thought everything was hunky-dory in America, and that their only motivation was the sunny belief that their nominee could do an even better job than the incumbent.
This was no accident. In fact, it was the result of uncharacteristic message discipline on the part of the Democrats. Below the stage at Boston’s Fleet Center, an elite team of wordsmiths had the thankless job of “cleansing” the speeches before they reached the teleprompter. Here’s how someone who worked in the speechwriting office described it to me, on the condition that I not reveal his or her name:
One of our primary responsibilities was to take out negative comments. We were very concerned about casting the party in a positive light. If there was a line like “Bush has overseen a cataclysmic downturn in the economy and is running the country into the ground,” we would have to change it to something like “Kerry will strengthen our economy and put the country on the right track.” We’d flip all of the attacks into positive messages. Specifically, we didn’t mention George Bush by name. I’d be surprised if there were a single speech that went into the teleprompter that had the President’s name in it. Some speakers said it, but they were going off-message. We weren’t even allowed to say “White House.” I remember somebody asking about that, and being told to write “some in Washington.”
I asked him or her (okay, it’s a “him”) how he felt when he saw the unflaggingly venomous Republican Convention.
Boy, I hope we didn’t fuck up. That was my reaction.
But fuck up they had. After the Democratic Convention, Kerry’s standing in the polls went up by 4 percent, the smallest post-convention bounce in the history of the Newsweek poll. Compare that to Bush’s bounce of 13 percent.
Part of the difference was that, as I definitively proved previously, the Republican Convention left the voting public literally terror-stricken. But fear was only half the equation. At the same time they were being scared witless, they were being told that Kerry wanted to gut the military and give the enemy (the French) command over whatever