New
Battles: Underestimating the Swift Boat ads, the Kerry team suffered
from their slow response. Then Bill Clinton's former aides arrived and
staged a silent coup.
Charles Ommanney / Contact for Newsweek
Vanessa wanted her father to fight back
Newsweek
Nov.
15 issue - The attack of the Swift Boat vets did not catch the Kerry
campaign by surprise, not entirely at least. Kerry's operatives had
worried from the beginning that some right-wing group would try to use
his old Vietnam antiwar speeches against him. In the summer of 2003 the
Kerry campaign had quietly made some inquiries with C-Span, asking the
cable network not to release old videotapes of Kerry as an angry young
vet fulminating about war crimes and atrocities. Portions of his
sometimes overwrought testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee in 1971 could be twisted into an attack ad, the Kerryites
feared. They were told not to worry: the rules prohibited the use of
the tapes for political advertising. (When the Swift Boat vets made ads
attacking Kerry with images from his 1971 testimony, they used a
voice-over, an actor reading Kerry's words.)
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In
August, when the Swift Boat vets scheduled a press conference at the
National Press Club, the Kerry campaign dispatched Gen. Wesley Clark to
hold a counter-press conference. At the last minute the Swifties
canceled. A cheer went up at Kerry-Edwards headquarters on 15th Street
in Washington.
The cheers were premature.
The Swift Boat ads—a first round charging that Kerry had lied to win
his medals, then a second batch accusing him of betraying his mates by
calling them war criminals—were misleading, but they were very
effective. The Kerry high command failed to see the potential for
damage until it was too late.
HOW BUSH DID IT
NEWSWEEK's exclusive, behind-the-scenes account of the presidential campaign
To
respond to the ads would be to dignify them, argued both Bob Shrum and
Mary Beth Cahill. Mostly the ads were stirring up the Republican true
believers, not winning over the "persuadables," the undecided voters.
At least that's what most of Kerry's advisers wanted to believe. It
would be a mistake for him to hit back; the persuadables don't like
negative campaigning. Better to float above it all.
But
Kerry's chief pollster, Mark Mellman, wasn't so sure. He could see that
the Swift Boat ads were having an impact—not much at the very
beginning, but soon a measurable dent in Kerry's support. The
old-fashioned mainstream press was ignoring the claims of the Swifties,
but on Fox News, the "fair and balanced" cable network whose viewership
was rough 80 percent pro-Bush, the Swifties were getting plenty of air
time. And not just on Fox. Other cable networks, possibly trying to
catch up with their flag-waving (and higher-rated) competitor, had
jumped into the fray. The Swifties had bought only a few hundred
thousand dollars' worth of ads, but each played over and over—free—on
the cable channels, CNN and MSNBC as well as Fox. The Swift Boat
charges were the source of constant debate in the blogosphere, the new
online world of bloggers, the modern-day Internet pamphleteers whose
screeds were widely read—especially by the young bookers and producers
who set the agenda on cable TV.
With all
this churning in the new media, the story was bound to spill out into
the undecided electorate. Mellman could see it in the numbers. So, too,
could Kerry's old campaign manager, Jim Jordan. As an adviser to
America Coming Together, he saw lots of polling. He could see that in
West Virginia, a key battleground state, 65 percent of voters told one
survey that they had seen the group's first ad, which was
impossible—but they had clearly heard about it. A fairly small slice—16
percent—said the ad made them feel less favorable to Kerry. Jordan knew
that the real number was higher. People don't like to admit that
they're influenced by propaganda.
Kerry
himself was itching to hit back at the Swift Boat vets. He had been
warned by a McCain aide two years earlier to watch out for the
mudslingers on the Republican right. "They'll make it look like you
fought for the Viet Cong," said the McCain aide, recalling the dirty
tricks played on his own boss in the 2000 primaries. Kerry was furious
at former senator Bob Dole, who had gone on TV to say that not all the
Swift Boat veterans could be Republican liars. Kerry called his old
Senate colleague (and fellow Purple Heart recipient). "You can't say
this kind of stuff," Kerry lit into Dole, "and by the way, Bob, I bled
from every one of my wounds." Dole blathered that Kerry was a great
friend and that he admired him, but he didn't take back what he had
said. ("He's an attack dog rehabbed as a statesman, and then he allows
himself to be wheeled out for this," growled Shrum, in the midst of a
fulmination about "the Big Lie.")
Kerry
wanted to blister the Swift Boat vets in a speech he was scheduled to
give to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Aug. 18. "We need to get these
guys," he said. But at the last minute his handlers on the road were
ordered by headquarters in Washington to restrain the candidate. Cahill
and Shrum were worried that Kerry would seem too bitter and angry, the
way he had appeared when he sarcastically thanked "Good Morning
America's" Charlie Gibson, back in April, for doing the Republicans'
dirty work.
Charles Ommanney / Contact for Newsweek
Cleland wanted Bush to denounce the Swifties
Kerry's
running mate, John Edwards, also wanted to take a swipe at the
Swifties. Edwards was hardly an attacker in the Dole (or Cheney)
tradition of vice presidential hit men; his whole persona and appeal
were based on sunny optimism. But as early as Aug. 5, when the Swifties
were just getting traction, Edwards wanted to push back, hard. McCain
had just told the Associated Press that the Swift Boat ads were
"dishonest and dishonorable... the same kind of deal that was pulled on
me." Edwards wanted to begin a speech, "I join with Senator McCain in
calling on the president to condemn this dishonest and dishonorable
ad." But Kerry headquarters said no. Stephanie Cutter, the boss of the
Kerry communications shop, explained that the campaign didn't need to
give the Swift Boat vets any more attention than they were already
getting.
Edwards played along, but his
aides were indignant. They warned the veep candidate that the story was
already out of control and about to get worse. Historian Douglas
Brinkley, author of a wartime biography of Kerry, cautioned that
Kerry's diary included mention of a meeting with some North Vietnamese
terrorists in Paris. Edwards was flabbergasted. "Let me get this
straight," the senator said. "He met with terrorists? Oh, that's good."
