[Dialogue] THE ARCHITECTS OF DEFEAT

[David Walters]

What really happened was that kery and his crew and Terry McCauliffe
and everry body on down sat by and let Karl Rove and Co. define who
Kerry was/is and who all Democrats are. KR also was allowed to
redefine moral values or at least reduce them down to aboartion, gay
marriage ans stem cell research. That what really happened. When
Kerry finally called in Carville and hos crew it was too late.

Karl Rove is a master at taking the stength of the other side and
restating it negatively as something  dirty or ugly.
The demand for the next four years is to defene in the publics
perception what the Republicans really are about. 

David Walters 

---- Original Message ----
From: popgoesweasel at coralpost.net
To: Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
Subject: RE: [Dialogue] THE ARCHITECTS OF DEFEAT
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 10:35:59 -0600

>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.
>
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