WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 (UPI) -- The traditional George Bush-Karl Rove political strategy of suppressing potential Democratic voter turnout with destructive personal attacks while mobilizing their own smaller but disciplined and motivated base has worked perfectly again.
It is still too soon to count Sen. John Kerry out of the presidential race, but unless he learns his needed lessons fast, he will be as dead a duck as his old Massachusetts boss Michael Dukakis.
August, as shrewd, immensely experienced columnist Robert Novak rightly observed, was the most disastrous month for any Democratic presidential candidate since Dukakis was eaten alive -- also in August -- by the current president's father and Rove mentor Lee Atwater 16 years ago.
Novak was not just whistling "Dixie." After all, President Bill Clinton handily won the 1992 and 1996 national campaigns for the Democrats against President George Herbert Walker Bush and Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas. And even Vice President Al Gore in a campaign filled with reversals and bungles in 2000 still polled half a million more votes than the current president.
Just as Dukakis didn't have a clue what hit him on the Willy Horton issue in August '88, Kerry and his supposedly street-smart team were pulverized on the Swift boats issue over the past month.
Kerry and his team, like Dukakis all those years ago, just didn't get it. He thought the voters wanted a positive, uplifting campaign that focused on the substantive issues because that was what his focus groups told him. But focus groups are always more thoughtful and intellectual than any average voter, be they conservative or liberal. Focus-group members know they are focus-group members and love to play up the idea that they are being responsible and statesmanlike. The graveyard of national political wanna-bes is filled with eager beaver former senators and governors who listened to their beloved focus groups.
Rove, like Atwater, knew better. He knew that however much voters tell every buzzing pollster who pesters them how much they love positive campaigning, what actually sways them to vote -- or even better from the GOP point of view, not to vote -- is the raw meat of negative smears.
Richard Nixon, the dark godfather of modern American campaigning, understood this as long ago as the 1940s when he demolished respected liberals to win his way first into the House of Representatives and then into the Senate while still in his 30s. Rove, like Atwater before him, glories in following Nixon's take-no-prisoners tradition.
In the 1972 presidential election, Nixon, who was a U.S. Navy officer in mostly safe Pacific billets in World War II, annihilated Sen. George McGovern, who had flown 50 highly decorated combat bomber missions over Nazi Germany. Kerry should therefore have known that heroic and decorated combat war service gets you nowhere in U.S. politics. Ferociously slandering and smearing your main opponent is what wins elections.
Like so many Democratic candidates since McGovern, Kerry played a clean game when his opponent didn't. He should not therefore be surprised that he is now losing according to most major opinion polls. U.S. national politics is not played according to Marquis of Queensberry rules.
On Tuesday Kerry finally started to give signs that he "got it." The Kerry campaign announced the addition of Joe Lockhart, Clinton's former communications director, and Joel Johnson, another Clinton veteran, to his team.
Lockhart was Clinton's chief spokesman and communications director during the impeachment battle of 1998. Not only was Clinton -- although impeached -- not convicted by the Senate, Democratic attacks on GOP congressional leaders and revelations at the time of indiscretions in the lives of prominent GOP leaders such as Reps. Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde threw the entire Republican drive into disarray. The Democrats even regained ground in the 1998 mid-term congressional elections: something that almost never happens six years into a two-term presidency.
Johnson, Clinton's former senior adviser for policy and communications, now becomes director of rapid response for the Kerry campaign.
Will it work? That depends on how far Lockhart and Johnson are willing to go and how far Kerry and his top advisers are willing to let them.
The precedent of the dirty, bruising 1998 political battles suggests that Kerry picked well if he wants to go down and dirty. But it has never been his personal style before. And as long as the dead hand of Bob Shrum, Kerry's top political strategist, remains on the campaign, the input of Lockhart and Johnson is likely to be marginalized or diluted into irrelevance.
The Labor Day weekend is coming up right after the Republican National Convention, and despite a shaky start this week by President Bush himself, the great GOP national political machine is now roaring along in full power.
First lady Laura Bush, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain of Arizona all stepped up to the podium at the convention in Madison Square Garden in Midtown Manhattan. They stayed on their chalk marks and read their encomiums to Bush perfectly.
With the exception of Laura Bush, the president has treated every one of those notables with mercilessly slanders, as he did to McCain in the 2000 Republican primary campaign, or humiliatingly cold-shouldered them, as he has Giuliani ever since he left office as mayor of New York City; or pursued policies on stem-cell research and other social issues that they have despised, as Schwarzenegger does.
But with the allure of a possible presidential nomination dangling before all of them in four years' time -- after all, a constitutional amendment may even be pushed through by then to allow the Austrian-born Schwarzenegger to run -- all three of them stepped up to the plate and batted their prime-time TV opportunities out of the ballpark for the president.
Kerry, whose Vietnam combat record really was impressive, has been mercilessly trashed. But Kerry and his campaign have not dreamed or dared so far to try and dish out the same treatment against the potentially far more vulnerable Vietnam-era war record of the president. Until they do, they will lose of a certainty.
For Kerry still appears to fail to understand that it does not matter how few people will vote for the president if attack politics discredit his own image so much that even fewer vote for him.
It does not matter how long the Massachusetts senator labors on issues like what he would do on Iraq, or on balancing the budget, or reversing the Bush tax cuts, or creating jobs or reforming healthcare or saving Social Security. None of that will matter if he does not demolish the president's image as a seasoned, decisive and reassuring leader as effectively the Bush-Rove attack dogs have already done to him.
That is what it is about. That is what it has always been about. Until Kerry "gets" that and unleashes his own Dogs of Political War, he will lose as surely as Dukakis did all those years ago.
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