story taken from washingtondispatch.com
MoveOn.org: John Kerry’s Enemy Within
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TWD editorial by CK Rairden
April 5, 2004
In theory, Richard Clarke should have helped democratic presidential candidate John Kerry while he stumbled down the slopes in Idaho while on an ill-timed vacation. Clarke’s dramatic appearance on 60 Minutes, and then his testimony at the 9/11 commission attempted to portray President Bush as completely inept before, during and after the attacks against America on 9/11. The elite media touted Clarke as a wonderful non-partisan whistleblower, a genuine American hero. Richard Clarke basked in the limelight eating up his 15 minutes of fame.
But there was one problem, a majority of the American voter viewed Clarke as nothing more than a political opportunist with a book to sell. And that caused another Kerry stumble, this time in the polls.
In a recent LA Times poll, nearly 60 percent of respondents agreed that Clarke's new book was politically motivated and designed to influence the election. To make matters worse more polling data emerged after Clarke’s appearances and none of it was good for Kerry. The CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll that had Kerry with a 12-point lead in February now has President Bush leading his democratic challenger by 4 points. The Bush ad campaign has given the president a 16-point positive swing in barely over a month.
Enter MoveOn.org.
The liberal activist group (often referred to as a "527" after the section of the tax code that governs them) fired up the money machine and made an ad buy in some of the battleground states using Richard Clarke’s own words from his 60-Minutes infomercial hawking his book from three weeks ago. For those of you that aren’t in those states, the ad runs like this.
Narrator: George Bush shamelessly exploited 9/11 in his campaign commercials.
Now, Richard Clarke, his former counterterrorism chief, said:
Richard Clarke‘s own voice:
I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored terrorism for months when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11.
Narrator: George Bush. A failure of leadership.
Using Richard Clarke as a tool for MoveOn.org was not only a poor choice for attacking President Bush, but also portrayed Clarke as nothing more than a partisan hack. The Clarke voice combined with MoveOn.org’s name reeks of a partisan hatchet job on the president. It furthers the idea in many voters’ minds that the 9/11 commission is deteriorating into nothing more than a political witch-hunt, and instead of finding answers is looking to assign blame.
Clarke recognized this immediately and according to the AP “instructed his attorney to ask the MoveOn.org Voter Fund to stop broadcasting the ad.” Clarke went on to say that the ad was created without his knowledge or permission. "I just don't want to be used,” Clarke told The Associated Press. “I don't want to be part of what looks like a political TV ad. I'm trying hard to make this not a partisan thing.” While the believability of that Clarke statement is suspect, in reality Clarke didn’t have to; MoveOn.org just did that for him.
Add to that, Clarke’s request to pull the ad was denied by the activist group.
The McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform laws keep MoveOn.org from coordinating directly with John Kerry's campaign for president. So in theory, the only ads they can run are negative spots against the president. And negative ads do work, when they are done in the right way. But it’s now apparent that the leaders of the activist group aren’t getting that done. Their ads to date paint a dark story of America as a downtrodden country. They’re not really negative as much as they are depressing. That ad strategy is a flawed one.
Depressing ads won’t work.
The Bush campaign is off a banner month of March where despite Clarke’s allegations the campaign team stayed on message with an aggressive ad campaign in the battleground states where they defined John Kerry as an indecisive tax raising New England liberal. The ads were effective and the label has stuck. The Bush team, even when going negative kept the spots lively and at times humorous. The result has been tremendous for Mr. Bush, with many “swing states” polls moving quickly toward the president. The USA Today noted this in a column by Richard Benedetto, “Before the ads began running, 60% rated Kerry favorably and 26% unfavorably. Now, 53% view him favorably and 36% unfavorably. In "battleground" states where the ads have run - states where polls and historic trends indicate the race will be close - Kerry has gone from a 28-point lead to a six-point deficit.” That’s a 34-point swing in one month.
A closer look reveals that with that swing, Bush leads Kerry in the Electoral College at this time 287-251 according to a combination of state polls and 2000 results. And that’s putting Florida in the Kerry column. There is a lesson in these numbers for Kerry. He must begin to run his own aggressive ad campaign and mount some sort of offense. Kerry’s manta of “Bring it On” combined with the highly partisan “Move On” is tired and will cost him swing votes. He cannot allow MoveOn.org and other satellite 527’s to be the only ads in these critical swing states running dark, depressing ads. All that will do is rally the partisans to Bush’s defense and increase the likelihood that they will turn out in November. Kerry’s month-long virtual vacation from the campaign was a mistake. Though indirectly--it has put the 527’s in charge of his campaign ads by proxy. And they are no match for the Bush team. While it’s obvious MoveOn.org desperately wants Mr. Bush out of the White House, in reality they are hurting Kerry by helping to rally the Bush voter base.
MoveOn.org has become Kerry’s enemy within.