When I met with George W. Bush's campaign spokesman, Terry Holt, in January, he couldn't stop talking about the importance of grass-roots organizing and running a person-to-person campaign that focused on getting people talking to people in their neighborhoods. I thought this sounded a lot like the sort of thing that Howard Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi, was wont to say, and I told Holt this. Replied Holt, “He's right.”
It seemed a peculiar reply for a campaign at pains to mock and differentiate itself from Dean in every possible way, and I chalked it up to the Bushies' expectation that they would face Dean in November. But, strangely, the Bush campaign's praise for Trippi and public commitment to running a mirror-image, volunteer-heavy grass-roots campaign didn't end when Dean lost the nominating contest. At a mid-March George Washington University conference on the politics and the Internet, Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman was effusive about the Deanies. “Joe Trippi and Mathew Gross provided an incredible example and an incredible lesson for everyone watching,” said Mehlman in a keynote address. “Give them both a round of applause.” It was one of the odder minor moments of the political season.
On April 29, Bush volunteers will stage another one. That night, the Bush campaign will sponsor a nationwide “Party for the President” that functionally reproduces the Dean campaign's September 29 “largest conference call in the world,” as Trippi described it at the time. It will be a night of house parties, aka low-dollar fund-raisers that gin up the base. Not only will the Bush backers party at home like the Deaniacs, they'll get a conference call, too. “For parties with 5 or more guests who RSVP at GeorgeWBush.com, National "Party for the President" Day will include an exclusive conference call with Vice President Dick Cheney,” the campaign recently wrote supporters.
Indeed, while the many personal similarities between Bush and Dean were well noted during Dean's run -- both are prep-school graduates; both come from patrician, East Coast families; both went to Yale; neither served in Vietnam -- what's more interesting than the personal comparisons are the political and tactical ones. The similarities are more than superficial, and they are united in importance by the fact that the central opponent for both men is (or was) the same person: John Kerry.
Herewith, then, some of the key ones:
1. The first and most obvious is a personality trait: stubbornness. Both Bush and Dean have used this to their advantage in creating images of themselves as decisive leaders who don't bend to the will of polls (or, in Bush's case, international opinion). But as much as this trait worked for Dean early on, it later backfired, creating an inflexible campaign that couldn't respond to a changing environment as quickly and skillfully as it needed to. Bush's inflexibility has had more dire consequences for the nation and the world, of course, because of his greater authority as the president, but his campaign has managed to be more adept -- so far.
2. The war in Iraq is also the signature issue for both candidates. Yet it has never been the single most important issue for the majority of the voters, who tend to be concerned with more mundane and locally felt matters, and the electoral importance of this ongoing fact cannot be underestimated. A majority of Iowa caucus-goers agreed with Dean's stance opposing Bush's intervention in Iraq, but they caucused for Kerry, who supported the war, both because they felt more comfortable with his economic proposals and because their No. 1 issue was jobs and the economy.
A similar dynamic may be at work with Bush. Polls show that in the past few weeks, public support for his handling of the Iraq War has plummeted, yet he has risen in the polls overall and now leads Kerry by narrow margins. A large measure of this is doubtless due to Bush's $50 million pummeling of Kerry on economic issues -- particularly gasoline and other taxes -- and general matters of trust over the past month. These ads have wiped out Kerry's polling advantage on the economy and most other domestic issues. And just as Dean found that there is little electoral -- as opposed to rhetorical and financial -- traction to be gained from chaos in Iraq, Kerry may soon find that media focus on negative events there does not track with the likely impact of those events in the voting booth. The home front matters most.
Further, the upsurge in focus on Iraq has wiped Kerry off the front pages and cable shows, making any talk about middle-class economic indicators seem off topic.
3. That means that, once again, the media are caught playing catch-up when the polls don't show the outcomes that pundits predict. Pundits and opinion writers declared the Dean campaign over on multiple occasions and found themselves continually surprised by Dean's Lazarus-like ability to recover from events that should have significantly damaged his candidacy. Similarly, many pundits and pollsters have declared themselves surprised that the bad-news month Bush just had hasn't had the anticipated effect of sinking him in the polls. However, as Dean learned, lots of things don't matter until they do. Which is to say that every gaffe and awkward moment from which Dean recovered helped create a broader narrative about him and his candidacy that eventually caught up with him.
Bush, whose gaffes are as common as Dean's were, though of a different kind, has aggressively moved to counter the natural narrative of his presidency as illustrated by facts on the ground with a strong counter-narrative through advertising. Nonetheless, foiled crises that once seemed evidence of Dean's strength slowly sowed doubts in voters' minds that reached a tipping point after the capture of Saddam Hussein. The Bush campaign has not yet reached a tipping point, but the same dynamic may yet apply when Kerry finally does give the campaign his all.
4. As noted, the Bush campaign, like the Dean campaign, has been deeply committed to fund raising from as many people as possible -- and not just in large sums. As of the end of the last quarter, it had raised money from an impressive 833,000 contributors. And the average contribution in March was $92, according to the Bush campaign, which is shockingly low considering the large number of high-dollar contributions and the fact that the campaign also raised $26.1 million that month. Where the Dean campaign and the Bush campaign have diverged is in the importance of online fund raising: Bush has raised only $5.8 million of his $186 million online, which is a pittance, percentage-wise, compared with Dean. However, both Dean and Bush have played to their parties' bases thanks to the ministrations of a brilliant but overrated strategist.
5. Most importantly, both men's chief foe is -- or was, in Dean's case -- Kerry. The senator ignored Dean in the early days until it appeared entirely too late to recover, claiming he could take Dean out at any time. It seemed an idle boast -- until he won. Now some pundits are already calling the race for the presidency lost for Kerry, who seems to believe the old collegiate procrastinator's dictum that the sooner you fall behind the longer you have to catch up. While Bush has gone gangbusters after Kerry, Kerry has not engaged with Bush or gone after him as vigorously in the past month as many would have liked. In selecting Kerry, Democratic voters chose a candidate who historically has appeared weaker than he actually is and seems tailor-made to give them anxiety attacks on a regular basis.
What this means, in practical terms, is that there may be many months ahead in which it will look like Kerry simply cannot win. But that doesn't mean that he won't.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor. Her column appears weekly.