A Campaign In Disarray

Prestopundit touches on two subjects I've been noodling about, but hadn't gotten around to.  The first is a Newsweek piece that typifies the media's parting shot at the Swift Vets.  The article leads off with this surprising admission:

The attack of the Swift Boat vets did not catch the Kerry campaign by surprise, not entirely at least. Kerry's operatives had worried from the beginning that some right-wing group would try to use his old Vietnam antiwar speeches against him. In the summer of 2003 the Kerry campaign had quietly made some inquiries with C-Span, asking the cable network not to release old videotapes of Kerry as an angry young vet fulminating about war crimes and atrocities. Portions of his sometimes overwrought testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971 could be twisted into an attack ad, the Kerryites feared. They were told not to worry: the rules prohibited the use of the tapes for political advertising. (When the Swift Boat vets made ads attacking Kerry with images from his 1971 testimony, they used an audio tape, but not video.)

This is amazing in light of the media's repeated mantra that the Kerry campaign was blindsided by the below-the-belt tactics of the Swift Vets.  And just to make sure you understand they were nothing more than bitter, right-wing partisan hacks aided and abetted by the Karl Rove's Blogging Machine, Newsweek beats you over the head with it:

The Swift Boat charges were the source of constant debate in the blogosphere, the new online world of bloggers, the modern-day Internet pamphleteers whose screeds were widely read—especially by the young bookers and producers who set the agenda on cable TV. With all this churning in the new media, the story was bound to spill out into the undecided electorate. Mellman could see it in the numbers. So, too, could Kerry's old campaign manager, Jim Jordan. As an adviser to America Coming Together, he saw lots of polling. He could see that in West Virginia, a key battleground state, 65 percent of voters told one survey that they had seen the group's first ad, which was impossible—but they had clearly heard about it. A fairly small slice—16 percent—said the ad made them feel less favorable to Kerry. Jordan knew that the real number was higher. People don't like to admit that they're influenced by propaganda.

But the really juicy part is this... the admissions that started to leak out in the weeks just before the election: even Kerry insiders knew of his traitorous meetings with the North Vietnamese and his indecisiveness was affecting the campaign:

Both Kerry and Bush were able to call on some very clever political minds. Indeed, Kerry could not stop calling on them—he used his cell phone so much that his handlers twice took it away. Kerry's tendency to endlessly revisit decisions muddled his message. Often, he seemed so tangled up in dependent clauses that he lost sight of the larger issues facing the country.

The Newseek article paints a study in contrasts - one candidate in control, the other seemingly unable to command his own wife, let alone his campaign.  One wonders how they thought the Senator (with no prior track record running any large organization, now having failed to successfully run a national campaign) could ever command the world's largest superpower:

Viewed close in, the Kerry campaign was even more unwieldy and clumsy than it appeared in plain view. An underreported story of the campaign was the distracting presence of the candidate's willful wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who demanded everyone's attention, including her husband's. Kerry was delighted by Teresa, and not just by her fortune; she was smart, sexy and independent. But at times she could be a trial. Kerry himself was a loner, willing to be criticized but oddly impervious to criticism. The candidate was almost impossible to "manage," at least until the fall of 2004, when John Sasso arrived on the campaign plane to impose some discipline. It was a good thing Sasso came aboard with less than 60 days to go, observed Jim Jordan, Kerry's first campaign manager (fired after nine months in 2003); any longer and Kerry would have tired of him, too.

The ADD candidate? Try as they might to frame competence in negative terms, Newsweek still manages to make Bush sound good and Kerry completely inept. 

President Bush, by contrast to senator Kerry, was a zealot for order. The hard-drinking frat boy had long since found the cleansing joy of discipline. He demanded a tightly wound, top-down, on-time-to-the-minute operation. His advisers, some of them martinets, gave him what he wanted. At Bush-Cheney 2004 headquarters in Arlington, Va., the dress code was corporate and the atmosphere vaguely martial. Staffers were supposed to be upbeat at all times. The press was at best a nuisance to be tolerated. Better organized than the Kerry campaign, more clever and quicker to respond, the Bush campaign became too confident, openly condescending toward the sometimes hapless Kerryites. It was almost too successful in creating, in the public mind, a caricature of Kerry as a loser.

We've heard this refrain often over the past few days: those ruthless Republicans.  They just beat up on our guys. "They painted Kerry as soft on terrorism".  It's an amazing admission: if he couldn't handle the RNC, one wonders how he was going to fare against Al Qaeda.  Or were we supposed to infer that Marc Racicot is more ruthless than Bin Laden?

So why didn't the media, well aware of Kerry's indecisiveness, consider his inability to keep his campaign on task newsworthy?  If he couldn't stay focused on winning, how would he win the war on terror when faced with domestic and other foreign policy crises?

Patterico has a few thoughts:

Commenter Steve M. says that the Newsweek people were given inside access to the Kerry campaign in return for a promise not to reveal details until after the campaign. Turns out Steve is correct: the introduction to the Newsweek feature (which I had read only excerpts of) says:

The reporters were granted unusual access to the staffs and families of both candidates on the understanding that the information they learned would not be made public until this Election Issue—after the votes were cast on Nov. 2.

I find this access-for-silence arrangement disturbing. It reminds me of Eason Jordan's decision to withhold disturbing facts about Saddam so that CNN could remain in Baghdad. For example, how was Newsweek to report accurately on the central issue of Kerry's indecisiveness, while withholding the clear evidence of that character trait learned by the reporters who observed Kerry close up?

So, while the existence of the agreement does make the issue of non-disclosure more complex and subtle, I am still disturbed by the end result: voters learned the true facts too late.

I think it's time that reporters renounced access-for-silence agreements like this. If candidates can't handle the truth being reported in time for voters to use it, then they shouldn't grant close access, period. Arrangements like this are unsavory, and justifably lead the public to wonder whether they are being told the whole truth.

Why is this surprising?  The lamestream media decided there were several things the voting public did not 'need to know' in this election:

1. The Swift Vets' allegations were 'propaganda' - no need to examine the facts.  Instead, the accusers were attacked and smeared, their factual allegations were never aired.  Instead the media promoted the Kerry campaign's responses.

2. Serious questions on the validity of Senator Kerry's military discharge were virtually ignored.

3. The investigation into his medals was ignored.

4. His postwar activities, including meeting with the enemy during wartime while he was a Naval Reserve officer were ignored.

5. Numerous factual inaccuracies in his Vietnam war record  and on the Kerry web site were glossed over by the media.  His request for a draft deferment, his claim to have completed two tours of duty in Vietnam, his appropriation of one month of Ted Peck's command history, David Alston, Christmas in Cambodia, the 'which boat' inconsistencies in his and Jim Rassman's accounts, the fact that his own journal states he was not under enemy fire when he received his first Purple Heart award. None of these stories were judged as important as the unsubstantiated rumor that George Bush might have missed 3-5 drill periods in 1973.  Amazing...

6. Eyewitness accounts, meeting minutes, and FBI surveillance records proving that Senator Kerry was present at a VVAW meeting where the assassination of 6 US Senators was plotted were never reported by the MSM. Not newsworthy.

Just one more example of how we are told exactly what the media want us to know.  But watch out for that unreliable Blogging Machine.

- Cassandra