[Dialogue] THE ARCHITECTS OF DEFEAT

[Ed Reames]

To all:

See below column from the LA Times on 11 November. Good analysis of what 
went wrong with the Kerry campaign.

¡Pura Vida!

Ed Reames


THE ARCHITECTS OF DEFEAT

By Arianna Huffington

Twelve days before the election, James Carville stood in a Beverly Hills 
living room surrounded by two generations of Hollywood stars. After 
being introduced by Sen. John Kerry’s daughter, Alexandra, he told the 
room — confidently, almost cockily — that the election was in the bag.

“If we can’t win this damn election,” the advisor to the Kerry campaign 
said, “with a Democratic Party more unified than ever before, with us 
having raised as much money as the Republicans, with 55% of the country 
believing we’re heading in the wrong direction, with our candidate 
having won all three debates, and with our side being more passionate 
about the outcome than theirs — if we can’t win this one, then we can’t 
win shit! And we need to completely rethink the Democratic Party.”

Well, as it turns out, that’s exactly what should be done. But instead, 
Carville and his fellow architects of the Democratic defeat have spent 
the last week defending their campaign strategy, culminating on Monday 
morning with a breakfast for an elite core of Washington reporters.

At the breakfast, Carville, together with chief campaign strategist Bob 
Shrum and pollster Stan Greenberg, seemed intent on one thing — 
salvaging their reputations.

They blamed the public for not responding to John Kerry’s message on the 
economy, and they blamed the news media for distracting voters from this 
critical message with headlines from that pesky war in Iraq. “News 
events were driving this,” said Shrum. “The economy was not driving the 
news coverage.”

But shouldn’t it have been obvious that Iraq and the war on terror were 
the real story of this campaign? Only these Washington insiders, stuck 
in an anachronistic 1990s mind-set and re-fighting the ’92 election, 
could think that the economy would be the driving factor in a post-9/11 
world with Iraq in flames. That the campaign’s leadership failed to 
recognize that it was no longer “the economy, stupid,” was the tragic 
flaw of the race.

In conversations with Kerry insiders over the last nine months, I’ve 
heard a recurring theme: that it was Shrum and the Clintonistas 
(including Greenberg, Carville and senior advisor Joe Lockhart) who 
dominated the campaign in the last two months and who were convinced 
that this election was going to be won on domestic issues, like jobs and 
healthcare, and not on national security.

As Tom Vallely, the Vietnam War veteran whom Kerry tapped to lead the 
response to the Swift boat attacks, told me: “I kept telling Shrum that 
before you walk through the economy door, you’re going to have to walk 
through the terrorism/Iraq door. But, unfortunately, the Clinton team, 
though technically skillful, could not see reality — they could only see 
their version of reality. And that was always about pivoting to domestic 
issues. As for Shrum, he would grab on to anyone’s strategy; he had none 
of his own.”

Vallely, together with Kerry’s brother, Cam, and David Thorne, the 
senator’s closest friend and former brother-in-law, created the “Truth 
and Trust Team.” This informal group within the campaign pushed at every 
turn to aggressively take on President Bush’s greatest claim: his 
leadership on the war on terror.

“When Carville and Greenberg tell reporters that the campaign was 
missing a defining narrative,” Thorne told me this week, “they forget 
that they were the ones insisting we had to keep beating the 
domestic-issues drum. So we never defended John's character and focused 
on his leadership with the same singularity of purpose that the 
Republicans put on George Bush's leadership. A fallout of this was that 
the campaign had no memorable ads. In a post-election survey, the only 
three ads remembered by voters were all Republican ads — and that was 
after we spent over $100 million on advertising."

Cam Kerry agrees. “There is a very strong John Kerry narrative that is 
about leadership, character and trust. But it was never made central to 
the campaign,” he said. “Yet, at the end of the day, a presidential 
campaign — and this post-9/11 campaign in particular — is about these 
underlying attributes rather than about a laundry list of issues."

It was the “Truth and Trust Team” that fought to have Kerry give a major 
speech clarifying his position on Iraq, which he finally did, to great 
effect, at New York University on Sept. 20. “That was the turning 
point,” Thorne, who was responsible for the campaign’s wildly successful 
online operation, told me. “John broke through and found his voice 
again. But even after the speech the campaign kept returning to domestic 
issues, and in the end I was only able to get just over a million 
dollars for ads making our case.”

Despite a lot of talk about “moral values,” exit polls proved that Iraq 
and the war on terror together were the issues uppermost in people’s 
minds. And therefore as Thorne and Vallely, among others, kept arguing, 
if the president continued to hold a double-digit advantage on his 
leadership on the war on terror, he would win. But those in charge of 
the Kerry campaign ignored this giant, blood-red elephant standing in 
the middle of the room and allowed themselves to be mesmerized by 
polling and focus group data that convinced them the economy was the way 
to go.

“We kept coming back from the road,” said James Boyce, a Kerry family 
friend who traveled across the country with Cam Kerry, “and telling the 
Washington team that the questions we kept getting were more about 
safety and Iraq than healthcare. But they just didn’t want to hear it. 
Their minds were made up.”

Boyce, along with Cam Kerry, were instrumental in bringing to the 
campaign four of the more outspoken 9/11 widows, including Kristin 
Breitweiser, who had provided critical leadership in stopping the Bush 
administration from undermining the 9/11 Commission. "We told the 
campaign," Breitweiser told me, "that we would not come out and endorse 
Kerry unless he spoke out against the war in Iraq. It was quite a 
battle. In fact, I got into a fight with Mary Beth Cahill on the phone. 
I actually said to her: 'You're not getting it. This election is about 
national security.' I told her this in August. She didn't want to hear it."

The campaign’s regular foreign policy conference calls were another 
arena where this battle was fought, with Kerry foreign policy advisor 
Richard Holbrooke taking the lead against the candidate coming out with 
a decisive position on Iraq that diverged too far from the president’s. 
Former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart consistently argued against Holbrooke, 
and Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden expressed his disagreement with this 
ruffle-no-feathers approach directly to Kerry. But until the Sept. 20 
speech in New York, it was Holbrooke who prevailed — in no small part 
because his position dovetailed with the strategic direction embraced by 
Shrum and campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill.

Jamie Rubin, the Clinton State Department spokesman, had also argued 
that Kerry should stick close to the Bush position, and even told the 
Washington Post that Kerry, too, would probably have invaded Iraq. Kerry 
was reportedly apoplectic but did not ask for Rubin’s resignation, 
thereby letting the damage linger for two weeks before Rubin told Ron 
Brownstein of The Los Angeles Times that he was not speaking for the 
candidate.

Just how misguided the campaign’s leadership was can be seen in the 
battle that took place between Vernon Jordan, the campaign’s debate 
negotiator, and Cahill and Shrum. “They were so opposed,” someone close 
to the negotiations told me, “to Jordan’s accepting the first debate 
being all about foreign policy, in exchange for a third debate, that 
Jordan and Cahill had a knock down, drag out argument. It was so bad 
that Jordan had to send her flowers before they could make up.” It was a 
familiar strategic battle with Jordan siding with those who believed 
that unless Kerry could win on national security, he would not win period.

Behind the scenes, former President Clinton also kept up the drumbeat, 
telling Kerry in private conversations right to the end that he should 
focus on the economy rather than Iraq or the war on terror, and that he 
should come out in favor of all 11 state constitutional amendments 
banning gay marriage — a move that would have been a political disaster 
for a candidate who had already been painted as an unprincipled 
flip-flopper. Sure, Kerry spoke about Iraq here and there until the end 
of the race (how could he not?), but the vast majority of what came out 
of the campaign, including Kerry’s radio address 10 days before the 
election, was on domestic issues.

Another good illustration of how the clash played out was the flu 
vaccine shortage, which ended up being framed not as a national security 
issue (how can you trust this man to keep you safe against biological 
warfare when he can’t even handle getting you the flu vaccine?), but as 
a healthcare issue with the Bush campaign turning it into an attack on 
trial lawyers.

“This election was about security,” Gary Hart told me. But when he 
suggested that Kerry should talk about jobs and energy and other issues 
in the context of security, Hart said, he was “constantly confronted 
with focus group data, according to which the people wanted to hear a 
different message focused on the economy.”

The last few days of the campaign, in which national security dominated 
the headlines — with the 380 tons of missing explosives in Iraq, 
multiple deaths of U.S. soldiers, insurgents gaining ground and the 
reappearance of Osama bin Laden — show how Kerry could have pulled away 
from Bush if, early on, his campaign had built the frame into which all 
these events would have fit.

How the campaign handled the reappearance of Bin Laden the Friday before 
the election says it all. “Stan Greenberg was adamant,” a senior 
campaign strategist told me, “that Kerry should not even mention Osama. 
He insisted that because his polling showed Kerry had already won the 
election, he should not do anything that would endanger his position. We 
argued that since Osama dominated the news, it would be hard for us to 
get any other message through. So a compromise was reached, according to 
which Kerry issued a bland statesman-like statement about Osama 
(followed by stumping on the economy), and we dispatched Holbrooke to 
argue on TV that the reappearance of Bin Laden proved that the president 
had not made us safer.”

As at almost every other turn, the campaign had chosen caution over 
boldness. Why did these highly paid professionals make such amateurish 
mistakes? In the end, it was the old obsession with pleasing undecided 
voters (who, Greenberg argued right up until the election, would break 
for the challenger) and an addiction to polls and focus groups, which 
they invariably interpreted through their Clinton-era filters. It 
appears that you couldn’t teach these old Beltway dogs new tricks. It’s 
time for some fresh political puppies.