Bush's tactical victory (Keep Kerry talking about - past, not future)

[papau]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3626942.stm

Campaign column: Bush's tactical victory

By Tom Carver BBC correspondent in New York


George Bush is a master at disguising the punch. In 2000, he fooled Al Gore into underestimating his talent as a politician, causing Mr Gore to overreach. This time, he has forced John Kerry to have the wrong conversation with the voters. When he should have been telling the voters his plan for the future, Mr Kerry has been spending his time talking about the past, believing that Vietnam was the way to establish his credibility. Consequently, when the Republicans raised doubts about Mr Kerry's service in Vietnam last month, he had nothing to fall back on. <snip>


And in the absence of any detailed picture from Mr Kerry himself, Mr Bush filled in the blanks on Mr Kerry's political record sheet.

He criticised Mr Kerry for a policy of "expanding government", saying that Mr Kerry wanted more than two trillion dollars in new federal spending.

George Bush neatly glossed over the fact that he himself has expanded federal spending by 29% since coming to office and sent the budget plummeting into the red. <snip>


John Kerry is going to have to work very hard if he is going to push back the Republican momentum of the last month.

[Strawman]

1. Yeah, maybe, but I wonder how it could possibly have been different

If Kerry doesn't preempt the attacks by establishing his military cred, they would have hammered him anyway and he would have been forced to talk about the past. No matter what, I really think he was going to have to spend a ridiculous amount of political capital on Vietnam. If Kerry doesn't preempt it, we say "why didn't he get out in front of that." Kerry does preempt it and we say "why is he spending so much time on this and allowing Bush to define his agenda." The media just allows the Republican attack machine to spread too many lies without ever seriously being called out on them. They will throw shit after shit after shit until something sticks because they can. Plus they make a coordinated, well financed effort to smear and lie. They decide what the smear campaign is going to be in advance and then they find the "facts" to fit. They make sure they have enough talking points for all their lies for them to survive the first wave of counter attacks before the news cycle shifts to the next smear. Damned if I know what the perfect amount of balance is required to manage both refuting the Vietnam attacks and defining Kerry's aganda and record at once. We can't seem to "manage the news" as well as them because stories about unemployment and facts about the war and counter-terrorism aren't sexy enough to lead a news broadcast and their lies are. Who on TV besides Bill Moyers wants to talk about the real issues when there are juicy personal attacks in circulation that the uninformed average voter is more likely to tune in to watch? As a liberal, the very notion of managing the news seems very odd to me. Isn't the news based on factual events that "happen" that are then anaylzed and reacted to? Somehow, I don't think the conservatives view it that way. They've thrown out that rule book that I'm still playing by. Truth-value has no value to them. The news is entirely instrumental propaganda.

On the other hand, now that CBS has produced documents about Bush defying orders in the guard, there seems to be a much more urgency to question them and to get to the truth about those than there was during the swift boat controversy. I don't know. Right now it's like Kerry needs a knockout in the late rounds of a fight and he's got a biased referee working against him on top of that. It's like there is no room for error for the Kerry campaign and their dealings with the press and Bushco can do no wrong. Their people can't be that much better or more savvy with the media. It just suggests to me that the game is rigged or that they're playing by a different set of rules. And argumentatively and strategically, they're almost always on offense and we're always on defense. Frustrating. I don't have a simple remedy. At least not one that is morally acceptable.