WASHINGTON, 7 March 2004 — We’ve seen this election before — or have we?
Sixteen years ago, a Republican named Bush was running against a Democrat from Massachusetts. In the spring of 1988, that Bush launched an offensive; in the parlance of politics, he “went negative.’’
Bush zinged his opponent as part of the “Harvard boutique,’’ declaring that the Massachusetts man might be presenting himself as a centrist, but he was, in reality, a liberal. The negative attacks worked. The Republican — full name: George Herbert Walker Bush — went on to win the general election in a landslide.
The big idea of those long-ago Bush campaigners was that the state of Massachusetts was itself the target. The ‘88 Democratic nominee, Gov. Michael Dukakis, might have been a centrist by Bay State standards, but that meant he was well to the left of the country as a whole. He opposed just about every weapon system ever known, he supported gun control and abortion rights, and he even embraced a bizarrely lenient prison-furlough program, in which convicted murderers were allowed to leave prison for weekend passes. And so, of course, once that record was known to the general electorate, he was doomed.
Today, as George W. Bush ranges up against John Kerry, a similar anti-Massachusetts dynamic might be in the offing. Like Dukakis before him, Kerry has a moderate demeanor, but he has accumulated a voting record in the Senate that puts him to the left of his colleague Teddy Kennedy. Indeed, the National Journal rated Kerry as the most liberal senator for 2003.
And on the hottest social issue of the time, gay marriage, Kerry finds himself in an awkward position. His state’s supreme court is poised to legalize gay marriage. Meanwhile, his own stance is tortured. He opposes gay marriage, even though he voted against the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. Today, he supports civil unions, but opposes Bush’s anti-gay-marriage amendment.
There are differences, to be sure, then and now. Unlike Dukakis, who served an honorable but uneventful stint in the mid ‘50s in the peacetime army, Kerry won a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts in Vietnam. Yet in the minds of many, his distinguished combat service was undercut by his subsequent anti-war activism.
But the biggest difference between 1988 and 2004 is the passage of time. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote 2,500 years ago, you can’t step into the same river twice. In 1988, negative campaigning was a relatively new phenomenon. The Bush campaign freely bombarded Dukakis, and the Dukakis campaigners never knew what hit them. But in politics, as in war, losers learn from their mistakes. Just four years later, Bill Clinton’s campaigners set up a “war room’’ to manage “rapid response’’ to Republican attacks, and they launched salvos of their own against George H.W. Bush. In other words, the Clinton people used superior techniques to beat the Bush people at their own negative game. (For the record, I worked in both of the Bush campaigns.)
Yet another change has taken place: A public revulsion against negative advertising. Put simply, attack campaigners have often seen their own negatives rise even faster than the negatives of the intended victim. And so Kerry was smart to get out front on the issue. In his Tuesday night victory speech, he lashed out at “the Republican attack machine,’’ even before the GOP had launched a single negative TV spot. In other words, Kerry went negative on negative campaigning.
Will it work for Kerry? Or will the Republicans find some new way to expose his liberal record? Or, on the other hand, will the Democrat be able to throw Bush on the defensive through negative campaigning, through his own anti-Bush barrage even if, as seems likely, he refuses to admit he is indulging in “n-word’’ campaigning?
Yes, there’s a certain familiarity to this contest. But it’s not deja vu all over again. It’s deja vu with a difference.
