More on the Bush Personal Attack Ad

"This is the stupidest, most self-destructive blunder I've witnessed in a presidential campaign. Worse than Michael Dukakis in the tank, worse than Walter Mondale saying he'd raise taxes, worse than any dumb thing Dan Quayle ever said. Both sides in this race knew the climate they were campaigning in. They knew people were tired of attack politics. They knew negative ads would backfire; John McCain proved it in South Carolina. They knew you could hit the opponent hard on issues but not on character. The Bush people knew where the line was, and they crossed it.

"Why is this mistake so terrible? Because the objective factors in the election—peace, prosperity, sharp declines in crime and welfare—have always favored Gore. Bush's only advantage lies in subjective factors: trustworthiness, decency, optimism, leadership. Now he's wrecked that advantage....I can understand the Republicans' error, to a point. They were getting killed on prescription drugs. They wanted to steer the campaign back to their strong suits: credibility and character. RNC operatives are quoted in the papers today confirming all this. They wanted to inoculate the public against Gore's upcoming ads by underscoring doubts about his trustworthiness. They thought this could be done without provoking a backlash, as long as the presentation was light and funny....But they miscalculated. They completely botched the delivery....

"This ad fails in all three respects. It's way too late. There's no context for a shot at Gore's credibility. Republicans are claiming today that the ad is substantive because it addresses Gore's pledge to launch his presidency with campaign reform. But that pledge is now two weeks old....Second, the messenger is wrong. The Bush team evidently thought it was safer to question Gore's credibility in a disembodied ad than in Bush's own words. They imagined that a harsh message in Bush's mouth would appear to chill his warmth. They got it backward. They needed Bush's warmth to soften the pitch. By detaching the message from any human presence—confining it to a TV set in an empty room—they made it cold and callous. And they hit the message way too hard. The words are as grating as the narrator's inflections: "There's Al Gore reinventing himself on television again. Like I'm not going to notice. … Really. … Yeah and I invented the remote control." That's not light humor. It's heavy-handed sarcasm.

"I'm sure the RNC focus-grouped this ad, as campaigns usually do, to make sure it would work and wouldn't backfire. But they missed the point....You can't focus-group the coverage, because it doesn't exist until you've aired the ad. In this case, the coverage is merciless. "Bush Approves New Attack Ad Mocking Gore," says the New York Times front page. "GOP Goes on Attack in New Ad," agrees the Washington Post. The ad's message is almost completely obscured. All that comes across is that it's "nasty" and that Bush, by endorsing it, violated his pledge to run a positive race.

"What a way to open the fall campaign. The media now get a four-day weekend to roast Bush for being the first candidate to go negative. He'll be asked about nothing else. What's he going to do? Walk away from the microphones? Deny responsibility? Yelp that he's only hitting back? There's no good answer. He missed his chance to head off this mess. No matter how many puerile, trigger-happy aides sit around the table, one person in a presidential campaign is supposed to have the maturity and good judgment to quash smartass ideas like this one: the candidate. Bush is the last candidate who can afford to flunk that test. And he just did." --William Saletan, Slate

Why Bush's Personal Attack on Gore Fails to Deliver.

"There are two stages to a Bush campaign—to any Bush campaign [,by any Bush]. In the first stage, good-guy candidate Bush calls for a positive campaign that doesn't tear anyone else down. He wants to "change the tone" supposedly set by his more negative opponent. In the second stage, which arrives when the thought occurs that Bush might lose, the campaign changes the tone itself by unleashing a sudden barrage of political nastiness. When people point out the contradiction, the candidate either pretends that the attacks on his opponent aren't happening, or that they're perfectly fair, or that he doesn't have anything to do with them. Sometimes this two-step, positive-to-negative transition works, sometimes it doesn't....Will it work for him against Al Gore?... I think the sudden escalation of negativity is likely to damage Bush much more than it hurts his opponent. Part of the reason is that Bush himself is being so gratuitously two-faced about it. Last week, Bush made the RNC pull an ad he deemed out of keeping with the campaign he wanted to run. Now he says boys will be boys....This is so transparently dishonest that I don't think Bush will get away with it.

"But the bigger problem is that the ad itself is so witless....Many viewers will respond to this obnoxious sarcasm the way I did, by thinking that the invisible housewife who yells at her television is a lot more annoying than Al Gore. The ad's complaint against Gore isn't even minimally coherent....The Bush campaign was clearly desperate to begin airing its precious footage of Gore with a Buddhist monk, which is Republican synecdoche for the vice president being a dirty rotten scoundrel. But in this context, it's neither amusing nor especially damning. The whole thing reeks of a bunch of Republican amateurs having too many beers.... They have crafted a spot that might appeal to those you might call Gore bores—people who already hate the vice president passionately. But their scorn is unlikely to persuade the audience they need to reach, which consists of people who are still on the fence." --Jacob Weisberg in Slate, 9/2/00

Bush Breaks Promise, Begins "Campaign of Personal Destruction" Against Gore.

While Bush was telling a high school audience in Kentucky yesterday that "politics doesn't have to be ugly and mean," thus renewing his pledge to stick to the high road, he already had approved a GOP-paid ad that is just that, giving a lie to what he told the students. After months of telling the voters that he detests those Washington, D.C. "campaigns of personal destruction" and, unlike his fight with McCain in the primaries, he would not go negative and he would stick to the issues, he decided to be the first to go negative and ignore the issues. As in the past, when Bush accuses his political opponent of doing something distasteful, it's often a prelude to Bush doing that very distasteful thing.

This time, after warning Gore not to go negative by getting into character assasination, Bush became the one to go negative. The reason is simple. Bush has failed to gain traction in the pre-Labor Day polls while sticking to the issues. In fact, this week he has been taken off his education message to answer reporters' questions about his tax cut plan and his medicaid record in Texas. His only recourse was to ignore the issues and personally attack Gore, gambling that such an attack wouldn't backfire with the voters. In short, while Bush has previously attacked Gore as being the kind of person who will do anything to win, it turns out that Bush is that very person. It's now clear that Bush will do anything to win. If Bush isn't leading in the polls by the end of the post-:Labor Day nose count, can we anticipate racist and religious attacks on Gore's character through radio ads by Bushies, which was what made John McCain so angry with Bush during the last days of the South Carolina primaries?

Last week Bush made a big deal out of pulling a GOP-paid ad attacking Gore for a pre-Monica statment he made about Clinton being truthful. The ad implied that the statement had been made post-Monica. This, of course, was the set-up, allowing Bush to imply that since he previously pulled an ad that distorted Gore's record, this one must be true. Not so. According to an analysis by Katherine Seelyee in today's NYT, "The statement that Mr. Gore 'raises campaign money at a Buddhist temple' is technically not correct because he did not actually ask for money at the temple, but that point has been lost....Perhaps the most striking aspect of the commercial is the sarcastic tone of the narrator. Analysts say sarcasm is a dangerous weapon in commercials because if no actual humor is evident, sarcasm can come across as petty and malicious and turn off swing voters."

Like the orchestrated Bush wedding video this past weekend, the ultimate purpose of the ad was to get Gore angry enough to respond in kind, giving Bush an opportunity to unleash the kind of vicious attack campaign that would allow him to muddy the waters and ignore the issues. He would call this "leadership." Gore has been wise not to get sucked in. He did allow Lieberman to voice disappointment in Bush: "Today, I'm sorry to say that Governor Bush's promise to change the tone of American politics has run into the reality of a troubled Bush-Cheney campaign.Because these new attack ads break his promise not to launch personal attacks in this campaign, and they drag us back to the worst politics of the past. It seems to me today that Governor Bush has, sadly, changed his tune about changing the tone." Bush spinners Mindy Tucker and Karen Hughes put a different slant on the ad, of course. Tucker told CNN that Gore has been attacking Bush's Texas record, so it was fair for Bush to attack Gore personally. Think about it. Hughes said the ad was meant to be "tongue in cheek," echoing the lament of the typical teen-ager caught in the act. "I was only kidding."

Talking about CNN, with Bush reporter Candy Crowley voicing her pro-Bush bias as being her imaginings of how the Bush camp would respond to a particular issue, "Senior Political Analyist" Bill Schneider so often shaving the dice in Bush's favor, Bernard Shaw playing the somnambulist, and a nonplussed Judy Woodruff smacking her lips, you know that Bush is in trouble when Schneider tells Shaw how it is, although the "Senior Political Analyist" does muddy the waters re his shifting use of the term "negative ad" during the following interview. ("In the black arts of politics, the rule of thumb is that it's not negative to argue about issues and records or claim distortion of same; it's when it gets purely personal that the word appropriately applies." Thomas Oliphant, BG) For the record, we believe that ads that are personal attacks on a candidate and not issues such as healthcare and vouchers are negative ads. Of course, ads filled with lies and obvious distortions of fact like the previously-mentioned attacks on McCain by the Bushies could be considerd negative ads as well, but at least they can be refuted with the facts. Character assasinations such as Bush's latest ad appeal to emotion, not fact. --Politex, 9/1/00

WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: OK. Well, we knew it had to happen; we just didn't know it had to happen now, before Labor Day, but it's happening. The first personal attack ad of the 2000 presidential campaign is all set to run as early as tomorrow.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SCHNEIDER (voice-over): The candidates promised it wouldn't happen.
GORE: I am not going to say a single, negative personal thing about my opponents. You will not hear that from me in this entire campaign.
SCHNEIDER: Well, as it happens, the Democratic Party is planning to run an ad attacking Bush's policy in Texas toward low-income children on Medicaid. Negative, yes. But the ad is not really personal. It attacks Bush's record. Governor Bush made a broader promise just this week in Pennsylvania, one that's central to his campaign.
BUSH: I am going to work to change the tone in Washington, D.C
. SCHNEIDER: But today, the Republican Party unveiled an ad that doesn't exactly elevate the tone of politics. It's negative and it's intensely personal.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, RNC AD)
ANNOUNCER: There's Al Gore, reinventing himself on television again, like I'm not going to notice.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SCHNEIDER: This week, when an on-line questioner asked Bush whether his campaign would run negative ads, his answer was a little, well, Clintonian.
BUSH: I guess it all depends on the definition of negative ads. I think comparative ads are fair.
SCHNEIDER: Nothing comparative about that ad.
BUSH: I think you can win a campaign without tearing someone -- personally attacking an opponent.
SCHNEIDER: Sounds pretty personal to scoff at Al Gore for "reinventing himself again" and "claiming credit for things he didn't even do." Republicans defend the ad by saying it's meant to be humorous, tongue in cheek. Yes, but it's also venom in tongue. By allowing the ad to run, Bush risks being called a hypocrite. Voters hate negative ads. By three to one, they say they have no place in a campaign. So why is Bush doing this? Because Gore has caught up with him and because Gore is most vulnerable, not on issues, but on character and trustworthiness. When Gore separated himself from President Clinton at the Democratic convention, his personal liabilities diminished. That's why Bush has to run negative ads. He's got to get Gore's negatives back up again
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