Emphasis Added

Tuesday, June 01, 2004

Advertising Strength

There's a good new John Kerry campaign spot about to hit the airwaves (follow this link, select "Optimists" in your choice of format and bandwidth). This is about the best I've seen him package himself and his message, with great imagery and a good economy of words. I love how he stays upbeat and draws some pretty clear distinctions from Bush without a hint of negativity. This is an excellent strategy right now. There's no need to go after the Bush record or the Bush administration travelling clown show as long as both are such conspicuous failures. But people do need to see Kerry as a viable alternative, and his supporters need air-cover to innoculate the campaign from the "unpatriotic" smears. Bush and his gang are hanging a lot on the proposition that the "flip-flopping liberal" label will stick, but outside of the red-meat GOPpers, I don't think people will care as long as Bush gives simple-minded stuborness a bad name every time he opens his mouth.

1:49:26 PM

Emphasize This! []

Bad News and Lies: Grumpy Back-to-Work edition

Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend. We didn't have much decent weather up here in the Great NW, but at least I got a chance to kick back and relax. This is going to be a fairly busy week for me and I'm not sure how much time I'll have for major blogging, but I know from experience that the minute I put the "Slow Blogging" sign up, suddenly I get the itch. So, be fairly warned, it could go either way.

Clicking through my daily reads this morning, I find numerous references to the Milbank and Vanhise story in the Post, documenting that nearly 75% of Bush ads so far have been negative (vs. about 27% for Kerry), and most of them have been lies or "misleading." Mark Kleinman has the best spin on this:

Given that there's nothing really good to say about the record of the past three and a half years, Bush has no real choice but to go negative. And given that there isn't actually anything very bad in Kerry's public record, those negative spots are going to have to contain a high proportion of lies.

Under those circumstances, if reporters start calling Team Bush for all its negativity and dishonesty they will give Kerry (running a more positive and less mendacious campaign) an advantage that Bush will not be able to overcome. Unless the press goes back to its habit of neutrally reporting false allegations from the Bush campaign as "charges" and then dutifully reporting the Kerry campaign's answers to them, this election is going to be over before it starts.

Our good friend The Raven wrote in over the weekend, a propos of some of the stuff written here last week about the war and what it has (failed to) accomplish. He sends a link to this fairly even-handed story from the Asia Times, talking about how the US plan to "remake" the Middle East is being received on the ground. Brad DeLong has some really interesting observations on Kerry's health plan, and, on the Editorial Page of the Times, David Brooks and Paul Krugman shadow-box about the nature and purpose of the Bush tax cuts. Brooks is really a witless tool, as Josh Marshall explains.

OK, that should provide some grist for the mill. Back to see you again soon.

7:26:15 AM

Emphasize This! []