Are We Experiencing DeJa Vu With Campaign Advisors?

[NEM]

In 2004, Senator John Kerry had Mary Beth Cahill as his campaign manager. Allegedly, she had done a lot of good work in campaigns of lesser importance and much was expected of her.

However, once the Presidental campaign kicked off between John Kerry and George W. Bush, Cahill settled into a very soft approach, not wanting to go into attack mode, and not willing to match dirt with the Republicans.

It was this soft approach that, in my opinion, cost John Kerry the election.

They had the weapons, they had the ammunition, but they never pulled the triggers.

Finally, as the campaign headed into its final weeks, the dumped Cahill and added the heavy hitters, like James Carville, Paul Begala, and others, to the campaign. But, it was too little, too late.

John Kerry's defeat showed, once again, that NICE GUYS FINISH LAST.

Now we are in a hot and heavy campaign, once again. We have Barack Obama, a NICE GUY and John McCain, a NOT SO NICE A GUY.

And it appears, to this observer that we are facing a repeat of the 2004 election.

We have what appears to be a repeat of the same course, being Mister Nice Guy, not wanting to get into the dirt, not wanting to attack the enemy with all of the ammunition, not PULLING THE TRIGGERS.

We have Anita Dunn -- senior advisor overseeing the campaign’s communications, research and policy departments sounding like a reincarnate of Mary Beth Cahill.

The biggest complaint that I have heard from Dems, and from those at the convention is that the campaign is far too soft in attacking John McCain. It is 2004 all over again.

I, for one, would like to take this moment to remind Senator Obama of 2004, and that NICE GUYS DO FINISH LAST.

If Anita Dunn is not willing to advise Barack Obama to get tough, to get into the dirt and aim it squarely at John McCain, 2008 will be no different than 2004. It is time for action, NOW, not LATER.

[blm]

1. BS. Begala and Carville never came into campaign - Carville SABOTAGED Ohio Dem voters to make sure

Bush took Ohio. And no one campaigned MORE for Bush than Bill Clinton did throughout his summer2004 book tour. Kerry didn't direct Clinton to do that and didn't direct Carville to sabotage Ohio Dem voters.

McAuliffe made sure that Kerry's winning campaign couldn't get all their votes counted, as he allowed RNC and GOP officials to spend their four years gaining control of every level of the election process where the votes are allowed, cast and counted. McAuliffe sat on his hands for four years and watched them do it.

Where do you come up with this FANTASY that Carville and Begala came in too late to save Kerry? What a bunch of MISDIRECTION to make the fascist enabling Clinton wing of the party look like they are needed.

And at least some of us paid attention to what was really happening in April2004, like historian Douglas Brinkley:

http://www.depauw.edu/news/index.asp?id=13354

And we watched with our own eyes and listened with our own ears as Clinton performed his summer 2004 Defense of Bush booktour:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/06/19/clinton.iraq/

And it was Woodward who wrote about the scene he WITNESSED on election night at the WH:
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2006/oct/07/did_carville_tip_bush_off_to_kerry_strategy_woodward

[NEM]

2. The fct is...

..Mary Beth Cahill was a wimp of a campaign manager, and in the final month she was removed from her position and others were brought into the campaign, including Carville and Begalla.

Unfortunately, they were too late to repair the damage done by Cahill.

This has nothing to do with the "Clintons" and all to do with weak choices as campaign managers or advisors.

One does not have to be a , so called, expert to see that this campaign is starting to look a lot like the Kerry campaign of 2004. It's time, as I said, to shit or get off the pot. McCain is ripe for the picking. THEY BETTER START PICKING BEFORE THE FRUIT DRIES UP.

Get rid of the wimpy assed Dunn.

[LittleClarkie]

10. The fact is that Carville did as much to sabotage as he did to help

and mostly he bitched to the press about how things weren't being done his way in campaign central.

Bill Clinton also suggested in one of those famous phone calls to Kerry during the last months of the campaign that Kerry had to find a way to support DOMA to win. I for one am glad he didn't follow Bubba's advice.

We have Newsweek as a source for our assertions. What source do you have for yours.

She wasn't PUBLICLY removed so much as she was put on a back burner and given less of a say, I think. But I'm pretty sure she was replaced ultimately by others, not Carville or Begalla. There was someone else who's name escapes me. Someone I think who ran the primary campaign or had something to do with it.

I'm sure Carville and Begalla would like you to THINK they were more involved. It seems to be their pattern that if the candidate they are associated with is winning, they grab credit, and if the candidate is losing they point blame.

[NEM]

13. The name escaped me too...but,

I think it was Joe something or other.

[blm]

11. YOU are WRONG and a revisionist. Fact is YOUR guys sabotaged 2004 INTENTIONALLY to protect 2008

for Hillary, from McAuliffe's refusal to secure election process during the 4 years after 2000s theft, to Bill's summer2004 DEFENSE OF BUSH booktour, to Carville's SABOTAGE of Ohio Dem voters on election night.

And Carville and Begala WERE THE DEM SPOKESPEOPLE on CNN nearly every day from 2000-2005..... How did they do?

[Doremus]

19. Bob Shrum was in there too.

The perpetual campaign consultant whose lifetime record includes exactly ZERO wins.

Kerry's was his last campaign, thank God.

[WeDidIt]

3. Thank you for your concern.

[GrizzlyMan]

4. Charlie Weis is the greatest football coach in history

[NEM]

14. Aha, so you know....

..of the world famous NEM???? :-) :-)

[TexasObserver]

5. NICE GUYS FINISH LAST

[Mass]

6. The fact that you need to rewrite history to make your point tells a lot.

Carville and Begala never worked on the Kerry campaign, and we certainly do not need them on this one. If they could just stay out of it, we would be better off.

BTW, it is the first night. So may be you should stop whining. Did you expect Michelle Obama to swear at McSame? Or Ted Kennedy who came here when he was sick.

[GrizzlyMan]

7. To offer context

This is the same person, who as the New England Patriots in the middle of winning back to back Super Bowls in 2003 and 2004, was the lone guy in the crowd (planet) saying "you're doing it wrong" to the coaching staff and players.

[sandnsea]

8. They can't see that their attacks on the campaign

is the main thing that is exactly the same. Idiots.

[NEM]

17. Maybe not in an official capacity...

..But in the late stages of the campaign, when Kerry tried to re shuffle things and begin to take a hard line approach, Carville and Begalla were amongst the faces that were brought in, unofficially, to attempt to right the sinking ship. Joe Lockhart was the guy.

Thats how I remember it.

[blm]

20. Baloney - you remember it the way you WANT to remember it. Carville and Begala were CNN pundits

and had full access to CNN that entire time - they did NOTHING to help Kerry's crewmates get airtime on CNN to rebut swifts, did they?

Carville and Begala didn't push the Kerry speech attacking swifts and Bush at Firefighters Convention, either did they?

Carville and Begala had ready made seats in front of microphones at CNN, and did either of them USE that access for Kerry's battle against the swifts or to clear the way for the HONEST swifts supporting Kerry with the truth?



>>>>>
(August 19, 2004 -- 01:26 PM EDT)

WELL, IT SEEMS there wasn't something in the air.

I didn't know the Kerry campaign was finally going to return fire today over this Swift Boat nonsense. But this morning, in a speech to the International Association of Fire Fighters in Boston, he responded squarely to the attacks. You can see complete text of the speech and the new response-ad they're running. But the key point is that he aimed his remarks at precisely the right target ...

Over the last week or so, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has been attacking me. Of course, this group isn?t interested in the truth ? and they?re not telling the truth. They didn?t even exist until I won the nomination for president.
<...>


This is a good thing -- and not simply because Kerry has to respond to the president's surrogates who are trying (and, to an extent, succeeding) in damaging his candidacy with scurrilous and discredited attacks.

There is a meta-debate going on here, one that I'm not sure even the practitioners fully articulate to themselves and one that I'm painfully aware the victims don't fully understand.

Let's call it the Republicans' Bitch-Slap theory of electoral politics.

It goes something like this.

On one level, of course, the aim behind these attacks is to cast suspicion upon Kerry's military service record and label him a liar. But that's only part of what's going on.

Consider for a moment what the big game is here. This is a battle between two candidates to demonstrate toughness on national security. Toughness is a unitary quality, really -- a personal, characterological quality rather than one rooted in policy or divisible in any real way. So both sides are trying to prove to undecided voters either that they're tougher than the other guy or at least tough enough for the job.

<…>

This meta-message behind the president's attacks on Kerry's war record is more consequential than many believe. So hitting back hard was critical on many levels.

more



Altercation Book Club: Lapdogs by Eric Boehlert
Relatively early on in the August coverage of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story, ABC's Nightline devoted an entire episode to the allegations and reported, "The Kerry campaign calls the charges wrong, offensive and politically motivated. And points to Naval records that seemingly contradict the charges." (Emphasis added.) Seemingly? A more accurate phrasing would have been that Navy records "completely" or "thoroughly" contradicted the Swifty. In late August, CNN's scrawl across the bottom of the screen read, "Several Vietnam veterans are backing Kerry's version of events." Again, a more factual phrasing would have been "Crewmembers have always backed Kerry's version of events." But that would have meant not only having to stand up a well-funded Republican campaign attack machine, but also casting doubt on television news' hottest political story of the summer.

When the discussion did occasionally turn to the facts behind the Swift Boat allegations, reporters and pundits seemed too spooked to address the obvious—that the charges made no sense and there was little credible evidence to support them.. Substituting as host of "Meet the Press," Andrea Mitchell on Aug. 15 pressed Boston Globe reporter Anne Kornblut about the facts surrounding Kerry's combat service: "Well, Anne, you've covered him for many years, John Kerry. What is the truth of his record?" Instead of mentioning some of the glaring inconsistencies in the Swifties' allegation, such as George Elliott and Adrian Lonsdale 's embarrassing flip-flops, Kornblut ducked the question, suggesting the truth was "subjective": "The truth of his record, the criticism that's coming from the Swift Boat ads, is that he betrayed his fellow veterans. Well, that's a subjective question, that he came back from the war and then protested it. So, I mean, that is truly something that's subjective." Ten days later Kornblut scored a sit-down interview with O'Neill. In her 1,200-word story she politely declined to press O'Neill about a single factual inconsistency surrounding the Swifties' allegations, thereby keeping her Globe readers in the dark about the Swift Boat farce. (It was not until Bush was safely re-elected that that Kornblut, appearing on MSNBC, conceded the Swift Boast ads were clearly inaccurate.)

Hosting an Aug. 28 discussion on CNBC with Newsweek's Jon Meacham and Time's Jay Carney, NBC's Tim Russert finally, after weeks of overheated Swifty coverage, got around to asking the pertinent question: "Based on everything you have heard, seen, reported, in terms of the actual charges, the content of the book, is there any validity to any of it?" Carney conceded the charges did not have any validity, but did it oh, so gently: "I think it's hard to say that any one of them is by any standard that we measure these things has been substantiated." Apparently Carney forgot to pass the word along to editors at Time magazine, which is read by significantly more news consumers than Russert's weekly cable chat show on CNBC. Because it wasn't until its Sept. 20 2004 issue, well after the Swift Boat controversy had peaked, that the Time news team managed enough courage to tentatively announce the charges levied against Kerry and his combat service were "reckless and unfair." (Better late than never; Time's competitor Newsweek waited until after the election to report the Swift Boat charges were "misleading," but "very effective.") But even then, Time didn't hold the Swifties responsible for their "reckless and unfair" charges. Instead, Time celebrated them. Typing up an election postscript in November, Time toasted the Swift Boat's O'Neill as one of the campaign's "Winners," while remaining dutifully silent about the group's fraudulent charges.

That kind of Beltway media group self-censorship was evident throughout the Swift Boat story, as the perimeters of acceptable reporting were quickly established. Witness the MSM reaction to Wayne Langhofer, Jim Russell and Robert Lambert. All three men served with Kerry in Vietnam and all three men were witnesses to the disputed March 13, 1969 event in which Kerry rescued Green Beret Jim Rassmann, winning a Bronze Star and his third Purple Heart. The Swifties, after 35 years of silence, insisted Kerry did nothing special that day, and that he certainly did not come under enemy fire when he plucked Rassmann out of the drink. Therefore, Kerry did not deserve his honors.

It's true every person on Kerry's boat, along with the thankful Rassmann, insisted they were under fire, and so did the official Navy citation for Kerry's Bronze Star. Still, Swifties held to their unlikely story, and the press pretended to be confused about the stand-off. Then during the last week in August three more eyewitnesses, all backing the Navy's version of events that there had been hostile gun fire, stepped forward. They were Langhofer, Russell and Lambert.

Russell wrote an indignant letter to his local Telluride Daily Planet to dispute the Swifties' claim: "Forever pictured in my mind since that day over 30 years ago John Kerry bending over his boat picking up one of the rangers that we were ferrying from out of the water. All the time we were taking small arms fire from the beach; although because of our fusillade into the jungle, I don't think it was very accurate, thank God. Anyone who doesn't think that we were being fired upon must have been on a different river."

The number of times Russell was subsequently mentioned on CNN: 1. On Fox News: 1. MSNBC: 0. ABC: 1. On CBS: 0. On NBC: 0.

Like Russell, Langhofer also remembered strong enemy gunfire that day. An Aug. 22 article in the Washington Post laid out the details: "Until now, eyewitness evidence supporting Kerry's version had come only from his own crewmen. But yesterday, The Post independently contacted a participant who has not spoken out so far in favor of either camp who remembers coming under enemy fire. “There was a lot of firing going on, and it came from both sides of the river,” said Wayne D. Langhofer, who manned a machine gun aboard PCF-43, the boat that was directly behind Kerry’s. Langhofer said he distinctly remembered the “clack, clack, clack” of enemy AK-47s, as well as muzzle flashes from the riverbanks." (For some strange reason the Post buried its Langhofer scoop in the 50th paragraph of the story.)

The number of times Langhofer was subsequently mentioned on CNN: 0. On Fox News: 0. On MSNBC: 0. On ABC: 0. CBS: 0. NBC: 0.

As for Lambert, The Nation magazine uncovered the official citation for the Bronze Medal he won that same day and it too reported the flotilla of five U.S. boats "came under small-arms and automatic weapons fire from the river banks."

The number of times Lambert was mentioned on. On Fox News: 1. On CNN: 0. On MSNBC: 0. ABC: 1 On CBS: 0. On NBC: 0.

Additionally, the Washington Post's Michael Dobbs, who served as the paper's point person on the Swifty scandal, was asked during an Aug. 30, 2004, online chat with readers why the paper hadn't reported more aggressively on the public statements of Langhofer, Russell and Lambert. Dobbs insisted, "I hope to return to this subject at some point to update readers." But he never did. Post readers, who were deluged with Swifty reporting, received just the sketchiest of facts about Langhofer, Russell and Lambert.

If that doesn't represent a concerted effort by the press to look the other way, than what does?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12799378/#060518

[Hawkowl]

9. Dukakis

It wasn't only Kerry who followed the "above the fray" approach. Dukakis blew an even larger lead than Kerry had. Blame it on the professional campaign advisors and pundits who keep pursuing this losing strategy of weakness and wimpiness. People want a strong leader. The vast majority of people do not evaluate policy differences they simply go with their gut, chimpanzee like instinct and vote for the toughest monkey running.

[MarjorieG]

12. Bush popularity, what the public didn't about Bush, all contributed to not changing during war/fear

[NEM]

15. Exactly....

You nailed it.

[blm]

21. Kerry hit his GOP opponent harder than ANY OTHER Dem nominee ever. THAT is why corpmedia refused

to broadcast it and few would even report it when it happened. And too many Dems were cowed by Bush at the time and did not want to back Kerry up on these hits.

Name ONE attack on an opponent that was harder ball than Kerry challenging Bush to stop hiding behind the lies of the swifts and come out and publicly DEBATE their services during Vietnam.


(August 19, 2004 -- 01:26 PM EDT)

WELL, IT SEEMS there wasn't something in the air.

I didn't know the Kerry campaign was finally going to return fire today over this Swift Boat nonsense. But this morning, in a speech to the International Association of Fire Fighters in Boston, he responded squarely to the attacks. You can see complete text of the speech and the new response-ad they're running. But the key point is that he aimed his remarks at precisely the right target ...

Over the last week or so, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has been attacking me. Of course, this group isn?t interested in the truth ? and they?re not telling the truth. They didn?t even exist until I won the nomination for president.
<...>


This is a good thing -- and not simply because Kerry has to respond to the president's surrogates who are trying (and, to an extent, succeeding) in damaging his candidacy with scurrilous and discredited attacks.

There is a meta-debate going on here, one that I'm not sure even the practitioners fully articulate to themselves and one that I'm painfully aware the victims don't fully understand.

Let's call it the Republicans' Bitch-Slap theory of electoral politics.

It goes something like this.

On one level, of course, the aim behind these attacks is to cast suspicion upon Kerry's military service record and label him a liar. But that's only part of what's going on.

Consider for a moment what the big game is here. This is a battle between two candidates to demonstrate toughness on national security. Toughness is a unitary quality, really -- a personal, characterological quality rather than one rooted in policy or divisible in any real way. So both sides are trying to prove to undecided voters either that they're tougher than the other guy or at least tough enough for the job.

<…>

This meta-message behind the president's attacks on Kerry's war record is more consequential than many believe. So hitting back hard was critical on many levels.

more



Altercation Book Club: Lapdogs by Eric Boehlert
Relatively early on in the August coverage of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story, ABC's Nightline devoted an entire episode to the allegations and reported, "The Kerry campaign calls the charges wrong, offensive and politically motivated. And points to Naval records that seemingly contradict the charges." (Emphasis added.) Seemingly? A more accurate phrasing would have been that Navy records "completely" or "thoroughly" contradicted the Swifty. In late August, CNN's scrawl across the bottom of the screen read, "Several Vietnam veterans are backing Kerry's version of events." Again, a more factual phrasing would have been "Crewmembers have always backed Kerry's version of events." But that would have meant not only having to stand up a well-funded Republican campaign attack machine, but also casting doubt on television news' hottest political story of the summer.

When the discussion did occasionally turn to the facts behind the Swift Boat allegations, reporters and pundits seemed too spooked to address the obvious—that the charges made no sense and there was little credible evidence to support them.. Substituting as host of "Meet the Press," Andrea Mitchell on Aug. 15 pressed Boston Globe reporter Anne Kornblut about the facts surrounding Kerry's combat service: "Well, Anne, you've covered him for many years, John Kerry. What is the truth of his record?" Instead of mentioning some of the glaring inconsistencies in the Swifties' allegation, such as George Elliott and Adrian Lonsdale 's embarrassing flip-flops, Kornblut ducked the question, suggesting the truth was "subjective": "The truth of his record, the criticism that's coming from the Swift Boat ads, is that he betrayed his fellow veterans. Well, that's a subjective question, that he came back from the war and then protested it. So, I mean, that is truly something that's subjective." Ten days later Kornblut scored a sit-down interview with O'Neill. In her 1,200-word story she politely declined to press O'Neill about a single factual inconsistency surrounding the Swifties' allegations, thereby keeping her Globe readers in the dark about the Swift Boat farce. (It was not until Bush was safely re-elected that that Kornblut, appearing on MSNBC, conceded the Swift Boast ads were clearly inaccurate.)

Hosting an Aug. 28 discussion on CNBC with Newsweek's Jon Meacham and Time's Jay Carney, NBC's Tim Russert finally, after weeks of overheated Swifty coverage, got around to asking the pertinent question: "Based on everything you have heard, seen, reported, in terms of the actual charges, the content of the book, is there any validity to any of it?" Carney conceded the charges did not have any validity, but did it oh, so gently: "I think it's hard to say that any one of them is by any standard that we measure these things has been substantiated." Apparently Carney forgot to pass the word along to editors at Time magazine, which is read by significantly more news consumers than Russert's weekly cable chat show on CNBC. Because it wasn't until its Sept. 20 2004 issue, well after the Swift Boat controversy had peaked, that the Time news team managed enough courage to tentatively announce the charges levied against Kerry and his combat service were "reckless and unfair." (Better late than never; Time's competitor Newsweek waited until after the election to report the Swift Boat charges were "misleading," but "very effective.") But even then, Time didn't hold the Swifties responsible for their "reckless and unfair" charges. Instead, Time celebrated them. Typing up an election postscript in November, Time toasted the Swift Boat's O'Neill as one of the campaign's "Winners," while remaining dutifully silent about the group's fraudulent charges.

That kind of Beltway media group self-censorship was evident throughout the Swift Boat story, as the perimeters of acceptable reporting were quickly established. Witness the MSM reaction to Wayne Langhofer, Jim Russell and Robert Lambert. All three men served with Kerry in Vietnam and all three men were witnesses to the disputed March 13, 1969 event in which Kerry rescued Green Beret Jim Rassmann, winning a Bronze Star and his third Purple Heart. The Swifties, after 35 years of silence, insisted Kerry did nothing special that day, and that he certainly did not come under enemy fire when he plucked Rassmann out of the drink. Therefore, Kerry did not deserve his honors.

It's true every person on Kerry's boat, along with the thankful Rassmann, insisted they were under fire, and so did the official Navy citation for Kerry's Bronze Star. Still, Swifties held to their unlikely story, and the press pretended to be confused about the stand-off. Then during the last week in August three more eyewitnesses, all backing the Navy's version of events that there had been hostile gun fire, stepped forward. They were Langhofer, Russell and Lambert.

Russell wrote an indignant letter to his local Telluride Daily Planet to dispute the Swifties' claim: "Forever pictured in my mind since that day over 30 years ago John Kerry bending over his boat picking up one of the rangers that we were ferrying from out of the water. All the time we were taking small arms fire from the beach; although because of our fusillade into the jungle, I don't think it was very accurate, thank God. Anyone who doesn't think that we were being fired upon must have been on a different river."

The number of times Russell was subsequently mentioned on CNN: 1. On Fox News: 1. MSNBC: 0. ABC: 1. On CBS: 0. On NBC: 0.

Like Russell, Langhofer also remembered strong enemy gunfire that day. An Aug. 22 article in the Washington Post laid out the details: "Until now, eyewitness evidence supporting Kerry's version had come only from his own crewmen. But yesterday, The Post independently contacted a participant who has not spoken out so far in favor of either camp who remembers coming under enemy fire. “There was a lot of firing going on, and it came from both sides of the river,” said Wayne D. Langhofer, who manned a machine gun aboard PCF-43, the boat that was directly behind Kerry’s. Langhofer said he distinctly remembered the “clack, clack, clack” of enemy AK-47s, as well as muzzle flashes from the riverbanks." (For some strange reason the Post buried its Langhofer scoop in the 50th paragraph of the story.)

The number of times Langhofer was subsequently mentioned on CNN: 0. On Fox News: 0. On MSNBC: 0. On ABC: 0. CBS: 0. NBC: 0.

As for Lambert, The Nation magazine uncovered the official citation for the Bronze Medal he won that same day and it too reported the flotilla of five U.S. boats "came under small-arms and automatic weapons fire from the river banks."

The number of times Lambert was mentioned on. On Fox News: 1. On CNN: 0. On MSNBC: 0. ABC: 1 On CBS: 0. On NBC: 0.

Additionally, the Washington Post's Michael Dobbs, who served as the paper's point person on the Swifty scandal, was asked during an Aug. 30, 2004, online chat with readers why the paper hadn't reported more aggressively on the public statements of Langhofer, Russell and Lambert. Dobbs insisted, "I hope to return to this subject at some point to update readers." But he never did. Post readers, who were deluged with Swifty reporting, received just the sketchiest of facts about Langhofer, Russell and Lambert.

If that doesn't represent a concerted effort by the press to look the other way, than what does?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12799378/#060518

[blondeatlast]

16. You are entitled to your opinion. nt

[NEM]

18. Thank you.

As are you.