Democratic Doldrums
How John Kerry has emerged from them before, and how he can do it again
by Harold Meyerson
The president, I suspect, is already descending. The Time and Newsweek polls, taken during (and, in the case of Newsweek, a few hours following) the Republican convention, had Bush bouncing up to an 11-point lead; the CNN/USA Today poll taken over the weekend had that lead down to 7 percent among likely voters and just 1 percent among registered voters.
Do I protest too much? Probably. From every available indicator, Bush has opened a lead in the aftermath of last week’s convention and last month’s Swift Boat attacks, with which the convention was clearly coordinated. The Swift Boat lies were intended to undermine John Kerry’s credibility as a leader; the main motif of the Republican convention was to extol Bush’s.
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Still, in the aftermath of the convention, Democrats are surely praying for something — to begin with, a little more clarity and focus from their nominee. August was a lousy month for John Kerry not just because he was slow in responding to the campaign of fabrications that cable TV reported as unchallenged fact. It’s not just that the Swift Boats took Kerry off-message in August; it’s that he had no clear message to begin with.
Losing the message in midstream, alas, is a long-established Democratic tradition. In 1988, the presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis was so flummoxed that just a few weeks before the November election, campaign managers spent a day in their headquarters writing the reasons to vote for Dukakis on pieces of butcher paper they’d hung on the walls. Al Gore’s campaign drifted aimlessly through the spring and summer of 2000, until pollster-strategist Stan Greenberg came onboard to give it a populist focus at the time of the national convention. The one clear exception to the rule of Democratic drift is Bill Clinton’s campaign of 1992, where the team of Greenberg, James Carville and Paul Begala came up with the centrist-populist “Putting People First” economic theme in late spring and stuck with it straight through November. But then, Bill Clinton has always been able to frame an issue to his maximum advantage (think of how “Save Social Security first” derailed the GOP’s tax cuts during his second term).
That’s clearly not a skill John Kerry possesses at the level of Clinton. When he’s off, he’s digressive, roundabout; his stump speeches sit there; his zingers don’t zing. When he’s on, however, he can be devastating, as Bill Weld — the onetime Massachusetts Republican governor who was favored to unseat Kerry in the 1996 U.S. Senate race — can readily attest. In their last two debates, Kerry pilloried Weld over his reluctance to name which programs he’d cut to pay for his tax-cut proposals, and over his support for a party then led by Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott. Those were the two positions Weld could not plausibly defend to Massachusetts voters, and they were the two issues Kerry hammered on repeatedly — coming from behind to defeat Weld by seven points.
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http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/42/powerlines-meyerson.php
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