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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Snapman said:
If the two candidates are going to get this down and dirty, can we at least see them use some folding chairs?

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Kerry Challenges Bush to Monthly Debates

Sat Mar 13, 7:45 PM ET Add Politics to My Yahoo!


By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent

QUINCY, Ill. (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry visiting the site of one of the most famous political debates in U.S. history, challenged President Bush on Saturday to a "real discussion about America's future" in monthly debates.

Kerry, already engaged in a running exchange of negative ads with Bush before the November election, said, "America shouldn't have to put up with eight months of sniping."


"I believe the American people are hungry for a genuine conversation about the fundamental questions before us," Kerry said in Quincy, Illinois, site of one of the seven historic Abraham Lincoln-Stephen Douglas debates.

The 1858 senatorial debates between Douglas and Lincoln, who lost the Senate race but won the presidency two years later, are legendary in U.S. political history for their reasoned discussion of burning issues like slavery and states' rights in the period before the Civil War.

Kerry said modern candidates "find it easier to exchange insults than to face issues" and called for a campaign that "honors the best in America."

"Surely, if the attack ads can start now at least we can agree to start a real discussion about America's future," Kerry said, trying to take the high road early in a campaign already marked by bitter charges and counterattacks.

Bush and Kerry exchanged negative ads on Thursday, with Bush criticizing Kerry by name, accusing him of planning to raise taxes and threatening to weaken U.S. security. Kerry fired back at what he called "misleading" accusations.

Kerry, who earlier this week called his Republican critics a "crooked ... lying group," challenged Bush to monthly debates on the "great issues" of the day, including the war on terrorism, the loss of U.S. jobs and the plight of Americans without health care.

VIGOROUS DEBATES AT THE APPROPRIATE TIME'

The Bush campaign rejected the request for monthly debates and questioned how Kerry could ask for a civil discussion after his remarks about Republicans and after spending millions of dollars on ads attacking Bush.

"Senator Kerry should finish the debate with himself before he starts trying to explain his positions to the voters," said Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt. A campaign official said they looked forward to "vigorous debates at the appropriate time."

The presidential candidates are tentatively scheduled to hold three debates beginning in late September, before the Nov. 2 election, with the vice presidential candidates holding a fourth debate. Kerry proposed that monthly debates begin this spring.

After the Quincy rally, Kerry planned to travel to Pennsylvania and Ohio on Sunday, key battleground states in November.

After a brief vacation next week, he will embark on a 20-city fund-raising tour to try to close the cash gap. Bush had $100 million more on hand than Kerry at the end of January.

Kerry has raised more than $10 million on the Internet since he effectively clinched the nomination on March 2.

Several TV networks said earlier in the week that Kerry had amassed enough delegates to clinch the nomination, but the campaign has not yet declared victory.

Kerry picked up more delegates on Saturday with a win in the Kansas caucuses, where 33 delegates were at stake.

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FBI Shadowed Kerry During Activist Era

Records show agents and informants found no evidence of illegal activity. The extent of monitoring in the 1970s troubles the candidate.

By John M. Glionna, Times Staff Writer

As a high-profile activist who crossed the country criticizing the Nixon administration's role in the Vietnam War, John F. Kerry was closely monitored by FBI agents for more than a year, according to intelligence documents reviewed by The Times.

In 1971, in the months after the Navy veteran and decorated war hero argued before Congress against continued U.S. involvement in the conflict, the FBI stepped up its infiltration of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the protest group Kerry helped direct, the files show.

The FBI documents indicate that wherever Kerry went, agents and informants were following — including appearances at VVAW-sponsored antiwar events in Washington; Kansas City, Mo.; Oklahoma City; and Urbana, Ill. The FBI recorded the content of his speeches and took photographs of him and fellow activists, and the dispatches were filed to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and President Nixon.



The files contain no information or suggestion that Kerry broke any laws. And a 1972 memorandum on the FBI's decision to end its surveillance of him said the agency had discovered "nothing whatsoever to link the subject with any violent activity."

Kerry, now the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, has long known he was a target of FBI surveillance, but only last week learned the extent of the scrutiny, he told The Times. The information was provided by Gerald Nicosia, a Bay Area author who obtained thousands of pages of FBI intelligence files and who gave copies of some documents to The Times.

The FBI files shed new light on an early chapter in Kerry's public life and are another example of the extent to which the U.S. intelligence apparatus monitored and investigated groups opposed to government policies during the Vietnam era, especially the Hoover-run FBI.

FBI harassment of some activists and leaders in the antiwar and civil rights movements — including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — was exposed after Hoover's death in 1972, and reforms were mandated in the bureau to prevent such abuses and restore public confidence.

The files reviewed by The Times on Kerry do not show that the FBI engaged in any illegal actions in its surveillance of him. But the documents also show the lengths the government went to investigate not only Kerry, but the VVAW and other antiwar groups.



Intelligence officials referred to the VVAW in their reports as the "New Left." "Due to abundant indications of subversive influence, we are actively investigating VVAW," read one FBI report from 1971.

The documents could become an important resource for historians because they show the extent of U.S. government surveillance directed against an individual who, three decades later, may become president.

They also suggest that Kerry's memories of some of his antiwar activities, including the date he left his position on the VVAW national steering committee, were inaccurate. Kerry has stated that he left the group in the summer of 1971, but the files show that he did not quit until the late fall of that year.

Kerry said he was troubled by the scope of the monitoring documented in the papers.

"I'm surprised by [the] extent of it," he said in an interview. "I'm offended by the intrusiveness of it. And I'm disturbed that it was all conducted absent of some showing of any legitimate probable cause. It's an offense to the Constitution. It's out of order."

Kerry told The Times that knowing the scope of the government surveillance against him had made him more conscious of selecting the right people to run intelligence agencies. If elected president, he said, he would appoint an attorney general "who knows how to enforce laws in a way that balances law enforcement with our tradition of civil liberties."

"Today's FBI isn't the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI of today is on the front lines of the war on terror, and it's critical that they be effective," he said. "But the experience of having been spied on for the act of engaging in peaceful patriotic protest makes you respect the civil liberties and the Constitution even more."

Kerry said that in 1987, two years after assuming office as a senator from Massachusetts, he requested and received an FBI dossier on himself. He later told aides it was "boring," and mostly included news clippings. The senator was apparently unaware that a much larger file existed that included reports on his activities as a VVAW leader.

Kerry said he was disturbed by "this extensive component of spying" on him that wasn't in his file. "If I was the subject of individual surveillance and individual tape recordings, I'd have thought it would have been released to me," he said.

Fourteen boxes of FBI files standing 12 feet high have been sitting for five years at Nicosia's home in Corte Madera.

Many of the files include mention of Kerry, who became the VVAW's most widely recognized figure after he sought to make the case against the Vietnam War in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971. His appearance was widely reported because of his stature as a veteran who had been awarded a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts. As a lieutenant, Kerry had commanded swift boats patrolling the sniper-filled rivers across the Mekong Delta.

"The Nixon people viewed antiwar protesters as anti-American subversives," said Douglas Brinkley, author of "Tour of Duty," a book that details Kerry's Vietnam-era exploits. "Because of his record as a war hero, they feared Kerry's influence with the public."

Many FBI reports on Kerry relied on informants who had infiltrated the VVAW. One report, filed after a gathering in Oklahoma City on Nov. 8, 1971, described how 22 veterans gathered to talk about "alleged war atrocities in which they participated in Vietnam."

The file added: "From four p.m. to five p.m., John Kerry, featured convention speaker and national spokesman for VVAW, spoke to one hundred to two hundred people, followed by brief question and answer period. Kerry spoke against the war and encouraged young people to vote for candidates who will end the war. He said VVAW members will continue to be active in activities to end the war, but indicated that VVAW members are against any type of violence."

Other former VVAW members recalled their suspicion that their telephones were being tapped and their concern that informants had infiltrated their ranks.

"Once, our national office in Washington called the phone company to say they couldn't pay the bill," said Bill Crandell, a writer who lives in Silver Spring, Md. "They were told, 'Don't worry, it's being paid.' "

Crandell said he and others assumed that intelligence agents made sure that the phone lines remained active, though the FBI files reviewed by The Times contain no mention of wiretapping.

Ann Barnes, who worked with the VVAW and who now lives in Milwaukee, said the protesters took the surveillance seriously. "Wherever you went, there'd be people taking your picture, writing down your license plate, doing what they did," she said. "At demonstrations, we'd spot the guys tailing us and say, 'Hey, there's our guys over there.' But we weren't really laughing."

Kerry also recalls the shadow of surveillance. "I wasn't doing anything that I was worried about," he said. "That was the nature of the FBI and the dialogue of the times…. People used to joke about it more than anything, but it was frustrating."

He added: "I remember coming out of a meeting and seeing one of their unmarked cruisers sitting there. Somebody had left a firearm on the seat, as a form of intimidation. In Washington, when I walked the streets … I knew there were surveillance cars. But never to the depth I know about now."

When Nicosia began researching his book "Home to War," a history of the Vietnam veterans movement, he sent a Freedom of Information request in 1988 to the FBI seeking its VVAW surveillance files.

Eleven years later, in 1999, he received 14 boxes of largely redacted files. But the release came too late for any significant inclusion in his look at the VVAW, which was founded in 1967 and drew 10,000 members nationwide.

He had not read the files before allowing The Times to view a portion of them last week. After a call from Nicosia, Kerry aides came to his home to collect the same 50 pages of documents copied by The Times.

The files show that Kerry and his activities within VVAW were a subject of FBI surveillance throughout the summer of 1971, during a time he had said he had already left the organization.

The documents include evidence that Kerry did not resign from the VVAW's national steering committee until November 1971, during four days of meetings in Kansas City. Several Vietnam-era histories — and Kerry himself — had said his resignation occurred at a VVAW gathering in St. Louis in July.

Previously, Kerry had denied being at the Kansas City gathering. But the FBI files, along with interviews with former VVAW members, indicate that he attended at least some portion of the meetings, using the occasion to resign his post as one of the group's national coordinators.

"I still have no memory of a Kansas City meeting.

"I have this stark memory of the humidity that day [I resigned from VVAW]…. I just remember forever a dark storm brewing, with these huge thunderhead clouds."

But his recollection was that he resigned at the St. Louis meeting. "And every reminder we have since then has put it there, including Nicosia's book," he said.

But the files include a "priority" memorandum dated Nov. 16, 1971 — the day after the VVAW's Kansas City meeting ended — from Hoover to Nixon and other high-ranking administration officials. Quoting a "confidential source," the report said Kerry was there and had resigned from the VVAW for personal reasons.

"It's just weird," Kerry said, when asked about the discrepancy. He attributed his previous assertions to a faulty memory.

For example, he said, "there was a day in where I gave two speeches in Norman, Okla. I remember the first speech. I don't remember the second. It's just the nature of memory."

Several VVAW members also distinctly remember Kerry's presence in Kansas City.

"I remember the Kansas City meeting like it was last week," said Barnes. She said Kerry read an emotional resignation letter while scores of VVAW members sat around long tables in a church classroom.

"He said he was going into public service, that he was going to run for office," said Barnes. "It was a short speech, but it was emotional. Everybody cheered."

Afterward, Barnes recalled, Kerry and others stepped outside the church for a break, only to see FBI agents taking pictures of them from across the street. Barnes recalled saying to Kerry: "You've been thinking about this a long time."

And Barnes recalled Kerry saying: "Yeah, since high school."

The files document other Kerry appearances in 1971.

One report from Oklahoma said, "The entire conference lacked coordination and appeared to be a platform for John Kerry, national leader of VVAW rather than for VVAW."

Another concluded that a speech he gave at George Washington University was "a clear indication that Kerry is an opportunist with personal political aspirations."

But the reports were not always accurate. In one, an informant reported that Kerry planned to accompany VVAW co-director Al Hubbard to Paris to meet with North Vietnamese representatives to negotiate a POW prisoner of war release.

But another FBI file and other historical accounts report that Kerry was critical of Hubbard for making the trip and for exaggerating aspects of his military record. "John Kerry again attempted to have Al Hubbard voted off the executive committee as Kerry stated he did not think Hubbard ever served in Vietnam or was ever in service," reported one Kansas City informant on the tension that existed between Kerry and Hubbard.

Kerry recalled his opposition to VVAW leaders meeting with North Vietnamese officials. "I thought that would be disastrous to the credibility of the organization," he said, "to the people we were trying to convince about the war."

Kerry soon left VVAW, which he thought had lost its focus.

"The group achieved a lot of good, but it eventually splintered and diversified into these various things," he said. "It started to broaden into this diverse tug of war."

On Friday, the Kerry campaign released pages from the senator's personal FBI file, including a May, 24, 1972, memorandum in which the agency decided to end its information- gathering on Kerry's activities.

"It should be noted that a review of the subject's file reveals nothing whatsoever to link subject with any violent type activity," the report said. "Thus, considering the subject's apparently legitimate involvement in politics, it is recommended that no further investigation be conducted regarding subject until such time as it is warranted."

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Wednesday said:

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whomod said:
FBI Shadowed Kerry During Activist Era

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the G-man said:

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whomod said:
FBI Shadowed Kerry During Activist Era

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Given that Kerry was involved in, and at a meeting of, an organization that actually considered assassinating U.S. government figures, why WOULDN'T the FBI have shadowed him?

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Matter-eater Man said:
You do realize that he emediatley dropped out of that organization [that actually considered assassinating U.S. government figures] before that talk started. Also he was being shadowed prior to that.

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June 15, 2004


IN BRIEF / WASHINGTON, D.C.

Paperless Ballots Lose Voters League Backing

From Times Wire Reports

The League of Women Voters rescinded its support of paperless voting machines after hundreds of members voiced concern that paper ballots were the only way to safeguard elections from fraud, hackers or computer malfunctions.

About 800 delegates who attended the nonpartisan league's biennial convention voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution that supports "voting systems and procedures that are secure, accurate, recountable and accessible."

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