Campaign Postmortem

Alex Sanders—the South Carolina judge, humorist, and politician, and a hero of mine—likes to say that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat that damned George Santayana quote over and over again.”

In that spirit—and without any earthly idea who will win the election—our time is probably best spent looking past the next four days, and on to the next four years. Despite the inevitable media group-think that will deify the victor’s electoral savvy and kick the loser’s reputation into the gutter, both George W. Bush and John Kerry ran campaigns from which politicians of both parties will draw important lessons:

1. Defend thyself. Despite the conventional wisdom that Democrats have finally learned to respond to the opposition—and despite specific promises from the candidate—for much of the spring and summer, John Kerry failed to rebut the Republican attacks that everyone knew were coming. Rather than decide—following Iowa and New Hampshire victories—to divert twenty percent of his campaign to general election research and planning, Kerry continued to focus exclusively on beating primary challengers he had already defeated. And when the inevitable March deluge of Bush-Cheney liberal/flip-flopper/weak-on-security ads swamped the airwaves, Kerry and company were caught unprepared—and are still forced to deal with those (mis)perceptions today.

2. Play nice. In the first debate, particularly while running an even-though-you-don’t-like-my-record-the-other-guy-will-murder-your-children campaign, President Bush should have known not to cede one of his biggest strengths: likeability. A tough comparative message delivered without the occasional Reaganesque wink, grin or chuckle can seem mean. That night, polling put Kerry’s “personal favorability” rating above Bush’s for the first time. And the president’s scowling, stammering arrogance—his shock and awe that someone in the same room would doubt his judgment—might also call into question the Republicans’ decision to shield Bush from anyone but his most devout supporters for the last four years.

3. Set the agenda, stupid. Mike Murphy—the Republican strategist who ran John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign—is famous for once advising a client to “make a charge and let the other guy spend a million dollars explaining it.” I cannot wait to see the Annenberg School of Communications study that follows this campaign, but I suspect it will show that the president’s political operation dictated the message of the day far more than Kerry’s. Unless bad international or economic news overshadowed the candidates (and luckily for the Democrats, that happened with abnormal frequency), it was almost always the Bush campaign making a charge and the Kerry campaign explaining it. Or it was the president’s people diverting reporters’ attention to tension within the Kerry campaign—which, shall we say, existed more often than not.

4. Give the voters a cookie. Another Murphyism. People should know what they would get from the candidates if they are elected. Beyond “steely, aggressive resolve in the war on terror,” voters have no idea what they will receive from President Bush except more of the same. Which leaves a huge opening for Kerry to argue, as he (finally) did about two weeks ago, that “a president must be able to do both: defend America and fight for the middle class.” And Kerry offers an array of concrete proposals on lowering health care costs, tightening homeland security and improving education that the voters can anticipate, as I do, with unrestrained glee.

5. The appearance of consistency matters. Kerry’s biggest Iraq problem wasn’t saying “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it,” it was voting against the $87 billion at all—despite legitimate concerns about how the money got spent. Newsweek magazine reported that Senator Hillary Clinton, among others, advised Kerry that he had to vote for funding the troops after voting to authorize the war. It wasn’t a national security issue; it was a character issue. And even though Bush was against the 9/11 commission before he was for it, and against the Homeland Security Department before he signed it into law, and against deficits before he created them, and against nation-building before he botched the rebuilding of two foreign countries, Kerry’s vote against the Iraqi reconstruction funding was too easy a target for Bush’s campaign.

6. Ignore the people. For the last two election cycles, Democrats have become slaves to that strange public opinion barometer known as the focus group. About a dozen supposedly representative citizens from supposedly representative places sit around a table and tell a pollster what they don’t like about the presidential candidates. And topping that list is always a gripe about “negativity.” To which the other average voters in the room will respond with nods and statements like “I want the candidates to talk about the important issues and not about why the other guy is so bad,” and “I don’t believe any of those negative ads”—which is unfortunate for three reasons. First, negative ads, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s book Everything You Think You Know About Politics And Why You’re Wrong, are usually more accurate and substantive than positive ones. Second, people actually do listen, and respond, to carefully crafted negativity—ardent Kerry supporters now believe he’s a flip-flopper even though that charge was invented by the Republicans last March. And third, idealistic (and self-righteous) focus groups led the Kerry campaign to believe that they could make a case for change without ever telling people what was wrong with the status quo. It took until September, after Kerry fell five points behind Bush, for the Democrats to realize their focus-group-approved mistake.

7. Don’t screw up the invasion and reconstruction of a foreign country. Enough said.

Brian M. Goldsmith ’05 is a government concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.