RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events The 2004 Presidential Election

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'04 slugfest may appeal to, not repel, voters
Fri Mar 12, 6:08 AM ET

By Martin Kasindorf and Mark Memmott, USA TODAY

It isn't even spring. Most voters have yet to see a daffodil. But it feels like October in the presidential campaign.

With 236 days to go before Election Day, President Bush is jabbing at his Democratic opponent by name. Thursday, Bush released his first "negative" broadcast ads aimed straight at Sen. John Kerry, who has been criticizing Bush throughout the primary season.

The Massachusetts senator is firing back, this week calling the opposition a "crooked, ... lying group." Kerry also plans to air ads in response to the Bush ads beginning today. Lots more negative campaigning is expected in coming months.

Is there anyone - the campaigns, the media and most of all the voters - who isn't dreading what looks to be an eight-month-long, down-and-dirty war for the White House? Is there anyone who isn't going to be sick of politics if this keeps up? The answers could be surprising.

For every political scientist or media watchdog who's warning that a bare-knuckles campaign is going to turn off voters, there's a campaign strategist, pollster or journalist predicting the opposite.

This could be a year when the presidential race captures and holds the public's interest no matter how mean it gets - much like 1992, when Bill Clinton defeated the first President Bush in a three-way race with Ross Perot.

"This is 1992-plus," says Tim Russert, host of NBC's Meet the Press. "We have the debate about the economy, as in '92, and the debate about terrorism and national security. ... This is a big election. I think people sense that."

Just beware, cautions Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist. There can be such a thing as "too much democracy," he says. "In this 240-day war, the whole country will resemble California, which is always voting on referendums."

The unseasonable signs of the times include:

• Kerry, basking in heavy news coverage and in polls showing him ahead or tied with the president, firing at Bush through what is usually the slack period between the effective end of party primaries and summer conventions.

• Bush attacking Kerry by name, an act notable because past presidents have usually waited until much later in their campaigns to even utter the other guy's name. Bush's father, according to the Washington Post, waited until Aug. 17, 1992, to say Bill Clinton's name. President Reagan, the Post reported, didn't mention Walter Mondale until Oct. 12 in the 1984 campaign.

• The Bush-Cheney re-election campaign's first ads causing an uproar. Those ads, which started airing last week, were attacked by Democrats and some families of Sept. 11 victims because the spots include a brief clip of firefighters carrying a flag-draped body from the rubble of the World Trade Center. Critics accused Bush of playing politics with Sept. 11. Republicans and conservatives accused Democrats and the Kerry campaign of being behind the protests.

• Two pro-Kerry organizations trying to counter the Bush ads with spots of their own that skewer Bush on economic issues.

The intense start worries some political scientists. "I can't bear the thought of this drumbeat for eight months," says Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a public policy analyst at the University of Southern California. "I am very worried this will (depress) participation and turnout."

Campaigns know the risks

This year's campaign is going to feel remarkably long in large part because Kerry wrapped up the Democratic nomination so early, setting up the head-to-head race with Bush. In 2000, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., kept up a challenge to Bush for the GOP nomination into the spring. In 1996, several Republican challengers kept Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas from getting his party's blessing until spring.

The Bush and Kerry campaigns say they're well aware of the risk that voters will grow tired of politics and tune out. They say they've mapped out their strategies accordingly.

Matthew Dowd, the Bush campaign's chief strategist, says "there will be days (in the next eight months) when we don't air any ads. ... Voters have 'windows of time' when they're interested. ... After the primaries, is such a window of opportunity" when, he says, voters are interested and campaign ads are most effective. He defines "after the primaries" as right now.

Other such windows: The days leading up to the conventions, the traditional Labor Day kick-off of the final drive to Election Day and the days between the end of the World Series and voting on Nov. 2.

Kerry in an interview with USA TODAY earlier this month, said he plans to talk about the "choices before the country. I'll be doing things regularly along the way to help define that choice." He said those include rallies and policy speeches.

Bush has more than $100 million available to spend on ads between now and the Republican convention. They're expected to air heavily in 18 states, 17 of which were decided by small percentages in the 2000 election and are expected to be close again this year.

In the fall, Bush and Kerry will get federal funds that will help pay for advertising through the rest of the campaign. Kerry is running low on money now, but later this month will go on a 20-city drive to try to raise $20 million. He'll have help in the advertising and organizational wars, however.

Wednesday, the AFL-CIO announced it will spend $44 million - the most in its history - to help get out the Kerry vote in November. One pro-Democratic group, MoveOn.org Voter Fund, has been airing ads since last fall and is near the end of a $15 million broadcast campaign. Another pro-Democratic group, the Media Fund, this week started a $5 million ad campaign. It and a sister organization have plans to spend about $190 million total on ads and organizing.

The campaigns will also use their Web sites to keep supporters informed and to distribute their toughest attacks on each other.

The campaigns know there's one big reason even a long, nasty campaign may not hurt them. The real targets of all that advertising will be a relatively small number of people, the "swing" voters in the 17 key states who aren't already committed to one candidate. That amounts to about 20% of the voters in those states and a much smaller percentage of the national voting population. In 2000, there were 130 million registered voters.

The campaigns also know that for many voters, the race for the White House won't really come into focus until well after Labor Day.

And Republican National Committee (news - web sites) chairman Ed Gillespie says both sides must keep talking because they never know when a voter will choose to check out political news over the Internet, a 24-hour cable news network, talk radio or other source. "I'm tired of hearing myself talk already, but I'm going to keep doing it for another eight months," he says. "We live in an age where voters can get their information as they need it. We may find ourselves saying something in May, saying it again in August and again in October."

This fall's three presidential debates and the single vice-presidential debate may well be pivotal. "This is going to be a photo-finish, razor-thin election in which the debates will have a huge impact," says Scott Reed, manager of Dole's '96 campaign and a Republican political consultant.

Keeping it interesting

For the media, the months to the election pose a challenge.

"There's no shortage of interest in the presidential race (now), and it's up to the press not to extinguish that interest," says David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and a nationally syndicated columnist who often writes on politics "The way that could happen is if we bore people to death by doing way too much on the campaign way too early."

Judy Woodruff, anchor of CNN's Judy Woodruff's Inside Politics, hosts a daily show whose audience presumably is addicted to politics. "But we just had a meeting about this very subject," she says. "We asked ourselves, 'How do we keep this interesting?' "

Inside Politics' answer includes taking the show on the road to those contested states, for discussions of what voters are thinking. The show will also mix in reports on Congressional and state races.

But Woodruff agrees the presidential race will be Topic A. "I see all the signs of an engaged electorate this year so I think we'll hold people's attention," she says.

At CBS News, political editor Dotty Lynch says she expects coverage of the presidential campaigns will ebb and flow a bit in the next few months, as other news pops up and interest in politics edges. In coming weeks, CBS will begin airing political reports from Allentown, Pa., a manufacturing city hit hard by job losses.

Pollsters and journalists say there are reasons to expect, however, that voters' interest won't decline very much. In a recent poll done for National Public Radio by Republican pollster Bill McInturff and Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, 85% of the 922 registered voters surveyed were very interested in this year's election.

People are paying so much attention, and could continue to do so, because of the threat of terrorism, and Afghanistan and the unemployment rate. Those are putting the race for the White House "in a whole different context" than it would have been absent all those issues, says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

This isn't 1996, she says, "a race that never generated much excitement among voters and in which Clinton never seemed seriously threatened by Dole." That year, "the economy was doing reasonably well and there was no war."

Adds Jamieson, "when an election is a referendum on the incumbent's record, the news becomes a much more important factor in the race. That's why this year is more like 1992."

Then there's the effect the Sept. 11 attacks had on the USA, and on interest in politics. "Sept. 11 has changed the thinking of everyone in the country," NBC's Russert says. "It affected our culture. It's part of this election, and it's driving interest."

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