Running mate choice shifts the battle of campaign ads
WASHINGTON
PRESIDENT BUSH and his top campaign officials made a few fakes, tossed a few light jabs at John Edwards, and professed all the false bravado they could muster in celebrating the brilliant, inspiring leadership of Dick Cheney.
At crunch time, however, they decided that attacking John Kerry once again as an out-of-touch Massachusetts liberal-weirdo was their only available political route. With inconsequential exceptions, a troubled and in-trouble president has spent four months and about $100 million focusing solely on his opponent, as if his own administration had never existed. At least for now, the broad public acceptance of Edwards as Kerry's running mate -- which they discovered in their research -- precluded a frontal assault.
John Kerry's campaign had the luxury of options, by contrast. Possessing its own research on the favorable reaction to Edwards's selection, the Kerry team could easily have decided to press the point in their television advertising targeted on the most closely contested states and try to drive the nice polling numbers further. The enormous volume of gushy press coverage made that option wasteful.
Instead, they did a little fake of their own. The TV commercial celebrating the new Democratic ticket got considerable news coverage and mostly a national buy on cable. However, the serious money on commercial stations in the battleground states went for six other commercials that will form Kerry's communications mix until the Democratic Convention opens. Two of them are familiar quickie bios of a presidential nominee still largely unknown outside the big media centers; the new wrinkle is that Edwards is shown briefly in each.
Two more are on domestic issues, using Kerry's voice -- one on jobs, the other on cutting middle-class taxes and health insurance premiums; each of these also includes glimpses of Edwards (a bit of prominence for some reason never given by the Bush people to Cheney).
And two more focus on security topics -- achieving independence from Middle Eastern oil imports and fighting the war on terrorism with stronger alliances and more effective homeland security measures. Interestingly, these messages leave the foreign policy novice Edwards out altogether.
The comparison with the latest Bush attack ad is astonishing. This one uses the historically lame theme of lousy Senate attendance during a campaign. And it misstates the issue on one example of a vote Kerry showed up for -- on a measure named after California murder victim Laci Peterson. Under the publicity-seeking cover of crime-fighting, the actual text of the measure makes it an additional federal crime if a pregnant woman loses her fetus if attacked on federal property; to call its reach tiny would be an overstatement. In the ad, this is called "protecting pregnant women." Kerry voted against the bill because it was another attempt to use "fetal rights" to chip some more at the constitutional structure that protects a woman's right to choose in abortion decisions.
The attack ad and the Kerry ads have one thing in common. In addition to being shown in the battleground states, they are up against each other for the first time in North Carolina -- where pre- and post-Edwards selection research shows that Kerry-Edwards and Bush-Cheney are as closely matched for now as they are in any other pivotal state.
The decisions by the two campaigns about how to spend gobs of money and which message to choose in July undercut the hoary notions that only presidential nominees matter to voters and that running mates at most have a limited, geographical impact. The reality is more complex; veeps influence the course of campaigns, sometimes heavily, sometimes hardly at all. An all-along-persuadable voter may not cite a veep as influencing his final choice, but the extent to which good or bad veeps have drawn his attention is part of the process that ends at the voting machine.
The focus on presidential succession after John Kennedy's murder and Richard Nixon's selection of the crudely corrupt Spiro T. Agnew has certainly increased the attention on veeps and for the most part increased their role in government. Their participation in nationally televised debated since 1976 has also changed the equation, as has the more recent trend toward pre-convention announcements. They can give a presidential nominee a boost (Dick Cheney, Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore); they can make his job tougher (Dan Quayle, Tom Eagleton in 1972, Bob Dole in 1976). The point is they are not irrelevant to the unfolding narrative; usually, they are very relevant to it.
For the moment, John Edwards is a net-positive for Kerry, which means he can reach out beyond the traditional Democratic world.
Dick Cheney is a net-negative for President Bush, which means that while you will see Edwards wooing businessmen and fellow Southerners and rural-ites, you won't see Cheney in Harlem or in TV ads. That may not mean everything, but it certainly means something.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.
