About the same time that the Senate passed a measure increasing the penalty for indecent material on broadcast television and radio last week, the Bush campaign released, via the Internet, a new ad to 6 million supporters that most certainly would not have met the “decency” test for broadcast.
The ad, arguably far more outrageous than a glimpse of Janet Jackson's breast, attacks Democrats as the "John Kerry's Coalition of the wild-eyed" and blends photos of Al Gore, Howard Dean, and John Kerry with those of Adolf Hitler.
In fairness, the ad does feature a short portion of another advertisement that appeared on the MoveOn.org Web site as part of a contest submission several months ago. However, it was quickly taken off of the MoveOn site, with an acknowledgement from one of MoveOn's founders that it was in poor taste. As you'd expect, the Bushies make no mention of this and conveniently neglect to note that at the time the ad appeared, the field of Democratic contenders was still wide open. What's more, MoveOn is not, and was not, a part of any campaign.
What was the response from Kerry and the Democrats to having their photos blended in with those of Hitler? Did they mobilize a strategy to turn that despicable ad back on the Republicans, illustrating just how divisive the GOP really is? No. Instead, we saw a fairly tempered quote from Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry's campaign manager, and a fund-raising letter to supporters decrying the ad.
Not exactly what you'd call a tough response. In fact, it was wholly inadequate when you consider that this was the third instance of Republican misbehavior in a week where Vice President Dick Cheney set the tone for civility between Democrats and Republicans in his comments to Senator Patrick Leahy.
Later in the week, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and his merry band of Senate Republicans played an ugly game of partisanship when they intentionally postponed a vote on a veterans' health bill, knowing that Kerry had returned to Washington after canceling campaign events so as to be on the Senate floor to cast his vote.
After all of that, you'd have expected there to be a tougher response or a show of outrage of some kind. You'd think that someone other than Kerry would cry foul in order to send a signal that, as a party, Democrats are truly united behind their candidate and will not lie down in the middle of the road to let the Republicans run over them as they please.
Instead, as Frist gloated, practically giddy with reporters at the press stakeout on Capitol Hill, there was again a fairly mild reaction on the part of Democrats, a mere sentence in Kerry's speech the next day. No one stepped in to point out the indecency of manipulating the rules of the U.S. Senate for the sake of partisanship, and, more importantly, to show how Republicans are politicizing the health and well-being of their veterans at a time when scores of soldiers are returning from Iraq in need of medical care.
The lingering impression from the week was that the Kerry camp and the Democrats generally seemed to have been outmaneuvered, unprepared, or unable to organize an appropriate response, leaving many to wonder why there is not an effective rapid-response operation in place and why the campaign won't play the kind of tough game that the Republicans are clearly willing to play.
It is possible to play tough and play fair. So what should the Democrats have done? Let's say they let Cheney's comments to Leahy pass. Fine. When it came to playing politics with health care for veterans, though, they should have mobilized House and Senate Democrats -- led by Robert Byrd, perhaps the most respected parliamentarian in the Senate -- along with any one of the retired generals or veterans supporting Kerry's campaign to express an appropriate level of outrage and disgust. In failing to respond, the Democrats also passed up an opportunity to raise the stakes on the bill and thus create a degree of public pressure on the Republicans to support the measure when it comes up again.
As for the ad, if the phone calls from supporters ready and willing to speak out weren't already pouring in (as they should have been), the rapid-response team still needed to pull together a coalition of key Jewish leaders like Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League and civil-rights activists like John Lewis, Kweisi Mfume, and even Elie Wiesel for a press conference to express their outrage at such a callous trivialization of the suffering of those persecuted by Hitler and his regime.
At this press conference, the coalition could have first shown the ad, then, in various statements, demonstrated a unified, firm, yet measured tone of disappointment and disgust. This coalition could have also called for an apology from the Bush campaign. At a minimum, a group of Kerry supporters should have released statements denouncing the Republicans' mention of Hitler. Ideally, this rapid-response strategy would not be led by the candidate himself but executed separately, allowing Kerry to continue to stay on message and talk about other campaign issues.
In 2000, Representative Rick Lazio and the New York state Republican Party inappropriately used the bombing of the USS Cole for political purposes against Hillary Clinton. Shortly after the Cole bombing, which killed 17 American sailors, the Lazio campaign released a television ad, and the New York state Republican party paid for an automatic telephone message directed at hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers just 12 days before the election.
Their assertion was essentially that Clinton had taken money from someone who belonged to a group that Lazio and Co. claimed supported terrorists -- the same kind of terrorists that attacked the USS Cole. The Lazio campaign and the state GOP then called on New Yorkers to “stop supporting terrorism.”
Of course the accusation was false, but it was the immediacy and tone of the Democrats' response that turned things around and caused the whole thing to blow up in Lazio's face. Within a day or so of discovering the Lazio campaign ad, WE held a press conference to release a television ad that featured former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, who called on Lazio to “stop the sleaze already.” Hillary Clinton did not attend the press conference; instead, we held to our campaign message strategy for that day. She was therefore able to stay above the fray and comment on it later in the day, so we basically got two message “hits” in the news. It was very successful in turning the tables back on the Republicans and again delineating for New Yorkers what the real contrasts in the election were between Democrats and Republicans.
As the Hitler ad remains on the Bush campaign's Web site, there is still an opportunity for Democrats to push back. Democrats and supporters could hold a press conference this week and call on the Bush campaign to stop lurking in the shadows with its negative and divisive attacks and either take down the ad or release it publicly, out in the light of day, and let voters decide for themselves if it is an appropriate or decent way to conduct a campaign.
Karen Finney worked in the Clinton White House and on Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign.
