Shifting sands stymie Bush, Kerry campaigns
WASHINGTON -- President Bush's $10-million-per-week advertising blitz, intended to define John F. Kerry as a liberal who voted against defense and intelligence spending, was firing up some voters in swing states -- until the news coming out of the 9/11 Commission started to drown out Bush's ads.
Yesterday, the Bush campaign said it was pulling back some of the ads because voters are not as focused on the presidential race as they were a month ago.
Meanwhile, Kerry's long-awaited initiative on job creation, which was supposed to bond the patrician Massachusetts Democrat with blue-collar voters, has been doubly trumped: First, by surprisingly strong job growth in March, then by the explosion of fighting in Iraq.
The result is two candidates stymied in their early attempts to frame the 2004 presidential race to their advantage. In each case, the candidate found his carefully crafted playbook shredded by events beyond his control.
Now, supporters of both candidates agree, uncertainty surrounding all major issues -- Iraq, Al Qaeda, jobs, and energy prices -- has left Bush and Kerry standing flat-footed on shifting sands.
They could stay in that position for months, analysts say.
After a string of presidential elections heavily influenced by strategic maneuvers, from George H.W. Bush's "Willie Horton" attacks to George W. Bush's embrace of "compassionate conservatism," leaders of past campaigns increasingly believe this contest is going to be determined by events off the campaign trail.
The planned June 30 handover of power in Iraq, the possibility of another terrorist attack, an economy that seems capable of moving in either direction -- all could hold sway over the election, the analysts said.
No variables of this magnitude existed in the last two elections, 1996 and 2000, they said, and historians have to go back as far as 1980 to find an election stirred by such a potent mix of foreign and domestic challenges.
"Anyone who says they know what's going to happen in this race is not telling the truth," said William Carrick, a consultant to former House Speaker Richard A. Gephardt's presidential campaign.
Michael Corgan, a presidential historian at Boston University, put it this way: "The election is going to be determined by things we don't know yet -- how the handover of power in Iraq is going to work and how the economy is going to go."
Polls indicate that the race would be neck and neck, with independent Ralph Nader siphoning support from Kerry. In three-way matchups, Kerry leads by as many as 4 points in some surveys and Bush is up by as many as 2 points in others. The latest Associated Press poll indicated a dead heat, with Bush ahead by a statistically insignificant 45 percent, to 44 percent for Kerry.
Analysts from both parties attribute the current equilibrium to uncertainty about Kerry, prompted in part by Bush's ad blitz. But these factors are balanced against new doubts about Bush because of testimony before the 9/11 Commission and the surge in fighting in Iraq.
Since this was a period in which the Bush campaign had hoped to use its financial advantage to regain control of the race -- with Kerry working to raise money after a costly primary run -- analysts from both parties said Bush has suffered more from the news in the world.
To Republicans, the 9/11 Commission hearings have been an especially bitter pill because Bush and his advisers are largely responsible for delays that bumped the hearings into the election season. Their early objections to declassifying the President's Daily Briefing and allowing national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify in public only heightened the sense that the White House had something to hide.
For voters, any doubts about the administration's handling of warnings made before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, could erode Bush's central argument -- that he is the candidate best suited to fight terrorism.
"My position is it's a good commission to have, but it's not a good time that the report be given in the middle of a campaign," said Frank Donatelli, who was White House political director during the Reagan administration.
Donatelli, like most senior Republicans who were interviewed, acknowledged that the White House political team -- led by Karl Rove -- was off to a mixed start.
The Bush campaign team has had good and bad months, Donatelli said, adding, "I guess they've done OK since they got engaged, but there's a long way to go and a lot of developments that will frame the big issues of the campaign."
Rove is reputed to wield such influence in the White House that some Republicans are surprised that he has left so many variables unaccounted for in an election year. Some noted, for example, the Supreme Court fight over releasing records from Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force, which will be argued later this month.
The White House's refusal to release the energy records, starting more than a year ago, became a symbol of Cheney's alleged penchant for secrecy, drawing attention to his duck-hunting trip with Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia and his closeness to corporate leaders. All this helped drop Cheney's favorability rating to 35 percent, according to an ABC/
Still, some Bush backers note that the president remains neck and neck with Kerry, and that even bad news about national security could draw support to the president, whom voters considered much more likely than Kerry to "make tough decisions despite political pressure," according to an Annenberg Election Survey released Friday.
"These are the wrong issues for a liberal from Massachusetts to win on," said Ron Kaufman, a longtime Bay State resident and White House political director in the first Bush administration.
Kerry has fought back by displaying his own national security credentials, but his spokesman, Michael Meehan, acknowledged that recent weeks were supposed to have been devoted to his economic message.
Kerry crafted a plan to create tax incentives that discourage companies from moving jobs overseas and released it March 26, amid the maelstrom over former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke's testimony. Last week, Kerry unveiled his plan to cut the budget deficit in half, on a day when Iraqi insurgents took control of the centers of three cities.
