Close Presidential Campaign Marked by Spin and Strangeness
October 20, 2004

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

The presidential debate season is in full swing. President Bush and John Kerry led off with their first debate from Arizona on Sept. 30. The vice presidential candidates, Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. John Kerry, had their one and only face-off last night (Oct. 5) from Cleveland, OH. Then the tops of the tickets will face each other again in two more debates, Oct. 9 and Oct. 13.

The debates were organized by the six-member Commission on Presidential Debates (three Democrats, three Republicans), which was set up by the two major parties when they got into a snit with the League of Women Voters some years ago. If the formats of each debate seem strange and poorly set up, you can blame the commission. You can also blame them for the fact that there are no minor party candidates to add some extra spice to the exchanges. But you can’t blame them for the spin that precedes and follows each debate.

Even before the debate series began, print journalists and columnists, and their broadcasting counterparts, told the candidates what they should say and the voters what they should hear. The process is followed, beginning immediately after each debate, with the so-called experts telling you what was said, why it was said, and what the voters should believe.

Not satisfied with just off-the-cuff spin, the partisans on all sides also spin the results of polling that precedes and follows each debate. These polls are compared with the constant polling that attempts to measure the voters’ mood at every given moment in time before the election, beginning before the Iowa caucuses last January. The polls are also part of the spin game, and so far the polling points to a close election.

Battleground States
If you happen to live in what many in politics and the media call “swing states” (also called “battleground states”) you have been subjected to more polling, more campaign advertising and more visits by the candidates than anyone else in the nation. And if you happen to be part of a key voter demographic that both parties are focusing on, you got an extra dose of everything.

Now before the campaign really got going, the pols and the pundits decided that there were 17 or 18 battleground states where the election would be decided. The others were all divided into Red and Blue states, conceded because of party registrations and previous presidential voting patterns to be firmly in either the Kerry or Bush camps. If you live in one of those states, you’re only getting presidential campaign light. You probably haven’t seen any ads and you probably haven’t seen any candidates up close and personal.

What you have seen if you are in a Red or Blue states is the campaign infantry going house to house—especially in the Democrat-leaning states—to get people registered, to push one candidate or another, and especially to ask for donations. Some call this appealing to each party’s base. That’s where a lot of small donations can add up to enough money to buy more ads in the battleground states. The appeals in this case are very simple—even primitive.

Because of past small donations in other campaigns, our household gets hit by both the Democrats and the Republicans. That means we get a lot of mail from the Democrats which all seems to have only one basic message: Defeat Bush! The Republicans on the other hand send us lots of “photos” of George and Laura Bush with exhortations to keep the current team in the White House. If you read through the small type from both campaigns, there may be some references to specific issues that should be of interest to voters, but only in general terms. Otherwise, the campaigns seem to boil down to two messages: Keep Bush or Dump Bush.

New Voters
If you or your children or grandchildren happen to be in college, you have noticed a lot more political proselytizing than usual there for votes. The Democrat “527” groups, largely funded by billionaire George Soros, who promised to use all of his wealth to defeat the Bush-Cheney ticket, have been registering large numbers of new voters on campuses across the country. So far, I haven’t seen much of polling that has focused on what may be a substantial new block of voters; some estimates expect at least a million first-time voters to come out from the campuses of America.

Again, this may not be a nationwide phenomenon. The new voters will be important to the Democrats only in the battleground states which are the ones that everyone feels could go closely either way. Some strategists in the Bush-Cheney campaign suspect that this is a sort of stealth campaign—largely under the media and public opinion research radars—that could make a huge different in the final outcome.

They are concerned also that the Democrats have organized so many lawyers in the battleground states with a plan to contest through the courts the close outcomes that are possible, just as they did in Florida in 2000. They have laid the groundwork for some of their court challenges by accusing the Republicans of secretly planning to block or not count the votes of minorities that they expect would support Kerry.

I haven’t seen anything about another curious Democrat ploy lately: the one to invite foreign observers to oversee out elections. There was quite a bit of press about that earlier this year, but that proposal is hardly discussed now. I would imagine the Democrats who are so worried about pleasing the international community must consider that part of their plan to find “new allies.”

Strange Campaign
In many respects this has been a strange election campaign. The Internet has played a bigger part than ever before. The web has provided alternative information in areas where the media has been especially slanted. The Internet for a while helped make the candidacy of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean viable. It has been used to raise millions, and it has been used by almost everyone with a special slant on the candidates, whether it’s the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth or the people who debunked the Dan Rather scam about Bush’s National Guard service.

It has been a campaign marked by an obvious Democrat strategy to hoodwink single-issue gun rights voters into believing that a man with a 20-year record of anti-gun votes in the Senate is a hunter who supports the Second Amendment.

We have explained Kerry’s record and the Democrats’ masquerade in these pages many times. Now others are telling the voters the truth.

The National Rifle Association has a great print ad out that depicts a prancing French poodle with a “Kerry” sweater with the headline: “This Dog Won’t Hunt.” They also have TV ads running; especially in battleground states where the right to keep and bear arms for defense as well as support is dearly held.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation has been running a nationwide “Vote Your Sport” campaign that also educates voters to the truth of the real Kerry-Edwards agenda.

Kerry has been trying to run from his devoutly anti-gun record for more than a year, but he may have taken some steps which will help voters to understand his true position better. When the Clinton gun and magazine ban expired—something he voted against last March—he went public with statements about his support for a renewed and expanded ban. Then he got photographed, not with a shotgun, but with Sarah Brady, who has been circling in the background all along.

To further seal the deal, the Brady Campaign and its “Million” March puppet have now issued a formal endorsement of Kerry.

I don’t know if the media will play down the Brady endorsement of Kerry as they have played down or completely ignored the endorsement of the Bush-Cheney slate by the National Fraternal Order of Police and the Uniformed Firefighters Association of New York, but they may try.

We’ll have to seen during the last few weeks of the campaign.