Truth - Al Franken [9]
How’m I going to get to my shitty apartment?
These dogs looked mean. And mangy. And hungry.
Street dogs. Los Angeles street dogs. I had thought they were a myth.
If I turned and ran, there was no way I could outrun them. I would be torn to shreds. But if I attacked them head-on, sure, I might win their respect, but still, I’d be torn to shreds. I didn’t think I was going to make it. But I did make a mental note that if I did make it, this would be a great sense memory of fear.
The fear saturated every cell of my body. My heart pounded. My lungs heaved. Even now, as I write, my eyebrows are twitching and my sweat glands are unleashing rivulets of liquid terror.
At that moment, I was a Bush voter.
As I remember back, I would have given anything for this fear to lift. If only the fear could be vanquished, I would have gladly voted against my own economic interests. To relieve the crushing fear, I would have voted to do away with my own reproductive rights. To escape the fear, I would have ignored not only my own health care needs, but those of my parents and my children. And their children. If only I could get past these dogs!
And that is almost literally the choice that Bush offered America’s voters on November 2, 2004: Vote Republican, or be ripped apart by dogs. Or to be precise, wolves. In the campaign’s final stretch, Bush unleashed an advertisement he had saved for the crucial moment—an ad that, according to his henchmen, was the ad that tested best of all, that convinced the most swing voters to vote their way. The ad, which played like a trailer for a horror movie, showed flashes of wolf fur and fangs amid the leafy shadows of a deep, dark forest. An ominously somber announcer voiced the script:
In an increasingly dangerous world . . .
Even after the first terrorist attack on America . . .
John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America’s intelligence operations by 6 billion dollars . . .
Cuts so deep they would have weakened America’s defenses.
And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.
At this point, a group of wolves lounging in a grassy clearing arose and began advancing toward the viewer.
And then the tagline:
I’m George W. Bush and I approve this message.
Scary.
The ad was dishonest. First of all, the “first terrorist attack on America” was left deliberately vague. Most viewers would think it was a reference to 9/11. Historians might have thought it was talking about the sinking of the Lusitania or the scalping of Goodie Pinkerton. In fact, the only thing the ad could possibly be referring to was the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1994, Kerry had introduced a deficit reduction package that included a onetime $1 billion cut in intelligence, to be followed by a four-year inflation-adjusted freeze.1 But in those days, everyone who was anyone on Capitol Hill was cutting intelligence spending. For example, the next year, Florida Republican Congressman Porter Goss cosponsored a bill cutting intelligence personnel by 20 percent over five years. But did Bush run negative ads against Porter Goss? No. He put him in charge of the CIA.
The advertisement’s power didn’t come from its (fake) facts. It came from its scary wolves. Some say the “Wolves” ad was modeled after Ronald Reagan’s “There’s a Bear in the Woods” spot. Perhaps. That was scary, too. But to me, it resonated with that night in Hollywood, thirty years before—and for millions of Americans, it resonated with the scary wolves of fairy tales like “Little Red Riding Hood” and “The Three Little Pigs.” As Karl Rove knew very well, many of the “security moms” to whom the ad was targeted had read these same stories to their children mere minutes before turning on the television. The implication was clear. Kerry was the pig who had built his house out of straw (intelligence cuts). While Bush was the smart pig who had built his house out of bricks (invading Iraq).
Fear was Bush’s ace in the hole. The Bush campaign wanted Americans to believe that if John Kerry was elected president, their families would be