The torrent of campaign postmortems has begun, and, predictably, the media are allowing the winners to write the history of the race. It happens after every campaign: The winning camp declares that the primary cause of victory was the incompetence of the losing side, the shortcomings of the losing candidate, or some combination of the two.
Exhibit A is Elisabeth Bumiller's lengthy front-page dissection of John Kerry's loss in Thursday's New York Times. Bumiller tells us that George W. Bush's advisers saw Kerry as a “dream opponent ... whose nuanced opinions on Iraq gave them an opening, day after day, to attack him as a flip-flopper.” She also describes Kerry's infamous line about his votes on the $87 billion supplemental as a gift to Bush. She catalogues a host of other Kerry failings, from his tendency toward caution to his inability to run a tight ship. And she quotes Karl Rove as saying that a key reason Bush won was that voters “had deep doubts about the other guy.”
Yet amazingly, the piece never once mentions the extensive and nefarious tactics the Bush campaign used to create those doubts -- and those tactics are central to the story of this race. The role of the Bush campaign in winning is invariably described in approving terms: Bumiller's piece describes Bush as charismatic and full of clarity and conviction, and she takes note of the tactical effectiveness of the ground game and the anti-gay ballot initiatives. There is no mention anywhere of the Bush campaign's relentless efforts to paint Kerry as weak and vacillating by lying about his record and mischaracterizing his remarks on the stump -- distortions that, inarguably, did far more violence to the truth than any similar ones coming from Kerry's side. This take asks us to believe that doubts about Kerry are the fault of nobody but himself; the Bush campaign was merely a passive beneficiary. Worse, it refuses to see campaigns in moral terms: It allows for no moral comparison between boosting evangelical turnout with crude anti-gay appeals and boosting turnout among African Americans by telling them that the right to vote is precious and mustn't be squandered.
To be fair to Bumiller, the conventions of political reporting today largely dictate that coverage remain resolutely amoral. And she buttresses her version of events by anonymously quoting Democrats who also found fault with Kerry in various ways, though their motives for Monday-morning sniping are somewhat less than pure. And I'm not saying that Kerry didn't make a bunch of missteps; of course he did.
But let's remember what actually happened here. The real story of this race is that on many levels, the Republicans ran a campaign that was sleazier, more ruthless, and more dishonest than anything in memory -- by far. The key Bush attacks on Kerry were, first, that he would allow the United States' own security decisions to be vetoed by other nations; and that he would hike taxes on the middle class and small businesses. Those contentions weren't mere rhetorical distortions; they were lies. The grotesque misrepresentation of Kerry's war record, courtesy of the Swift Boat veterans, was likewise based on lies. And the more general effort to paint Kerry as weak and vacillating relied on very deliberate efforts by the president and vice president to lie about Kerry's words on the stump. What all these assertions have in common is that they were not just false, but demonstrably false. Yet they either passed unchallenged by the media, or they were challenged too late -- after they'd succeeded in their objective of creating, as Rove innocently put it, “doubts about the other guy.” And the GOP got away with it, because they knew that they could count on political reporters to write about the campaign with the moral urgency of a sportswriter covering a baseball game in June. And that's exactly what happened.
Before the postmortems enshrine the Kerry-is-at-fault story line, it's also worth remembering that there's a simple reason winners invariably push the notion that the loser has no one to blame but himself for defeat: It absolves the winning side from blame for its own reliance on unsavory tactics to win. As obvious as this is, however, political reporters can always be counted on to play along, because there's one unassailable rule of post-campaign stories: To the victor goes the spin.
Greg Sargent is a contributing editor at New York magazine.
