Coaching Team Kerry (a heads up on Shrum & attack ads)

[papau]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/?040920on_onlineonly01

Coaching Team Kerry
summary tktkt
Posted 2004-09-13
This week in the magazine, Ken Auletta writes about Robert Shrum, John Kerry’s senior adviser, and whether he’s up to the job of taking on Bush. Here, with The New Yorker’s Matt Dellinger, Auletta discusses Kerry, his team, and the role of the media in the Presidential race.

MATT DELLINGER: How has the Kerry campaign performed, in your opinion, and what has Bob Shrum’s role been?

KEN AULETTA: Shrum’s brilliant strategy in the primary season a year ago was that, in the post-9/11 world, the public would tire of negative campaigning, and that Kerry was the only candidate who had the potential to unite all these Democratic parties, and the only candidate, or one of the only candidates, with a war record that would potentially immunize him against charges that he was soft on defense or too liberal. He fought back those people in the Kerry campaign who wanted to attack Howard Dean, who wanted to go after him more aggressively, saying that if they did that they’d diminish Kerry’s stature, and they would polarize the Party and make it tougher for Kerry to emerge as the winner. He was proved right in that strategic choice. But where he’s probably wrong, I think, is that he’s done what generals often do: he’s repeated the same strategy for one war without realizing there’s a different war. When the Swift-boat attacks came, in early August, the Kerry campaign waited before fully responding to them. Shrum’s philosophy was that, post-9/11, people didn’t have the kind of tolerance for negative personal attacks. That has been proved false, because Kerry’s poll numbers, as they related to that topic, dropped. I think the Kerry camp misunderstood the nature of the modern campaign, where you have the Internet dovetailing with twenty-four-hour cable news, creating this kind of echo chamber.

So a candidate today has to shape his message for the media as much as for the voter. What does the modern campaign you’re talking about require?

Well, the modern campaign suggests that attacks—even though the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth spent only a few hundred thousand dollars on their ads—are magnified because they run on TV. The ads fell right into the trap of the press’s bias for conflict. The press then repeated them, and suddenly we saw that the ads that had been on only a few cable channels was on the network news, and everyone in America was seeing them. So sixty per cent of the public knew about the Swift-boat ads, even though it was a very small media buy in just a few states. That’s an example of how the press magnifies attacks in the modern age.<snip>