Campaign Relief: Winning Ugly

By: John Hanchette This is the period in a presidential campaign marked by two dominant news efforts: lingering analysis over the effect of the debates and ramped up attention to the bare-knuckle tactics both camps will employ in the homestretch.

The first, assessing the debates, reveals a philosophical progression I've observed in covering six presidential campaigns: perceived wisdom, received wisdom, accepted wisdom, then chiseled-in-stone wisdom.

Today, the consensus seems to be that Bush blew the first debate, then did somewhat better in the remaining two clashes, but not well enough to keep Kerry from drawing even in the polls. "The debates did have an effect in this campaign on the momentum," says my former colleague Richard Benedetto, now covering the campaign for USA Today. "They evened it up."

So, in horse race terms: two weeks to go, and neck-and-neck. Jon Sawyer of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch pretty much nailed it in his lead Sunday: "After three head-on debates that tightened the presidential race, George W. Bush and John F. Kerry enter a campaign endgame that will be marked by fierce ad wars and get-out-the-vote drives but also the perils of unforeseen events."

The New York Times hewed to this theme Sunday with a story down the gut of page one headlined, "Scary Ads Take Campaign to a Grim New Level." Jim Rutenberg's piece described two campaigns that "are taking an already unusually intense and confrontational advertising war into grim new territory, with some of the most vivid and evocative images and messages seen in presidential commercials in a generation."

The TV ads you will see in the two homestretch weeks are all about triggering fear and anxiety. They have few precedents. Compared to the 2000 campaign variety, they feature fear and anxiety on speed. Bush will be portrayed as uncaring and violent, his policies putting innocent Americans in the path of terrible deaths and medieval beheadings. Kerry will be painted as weak and fatally soft against terrorism.

Rutenberg describes one GOP ad in which images of Osama bin Laden and masked terrorists appear as an announcer says "These people want to kill us. Would you trust Kerry against these fanatic killers?"

The unanticipated events Sawyer referred to as able to "topple a campaign's best-laid plans" are already popping up. Some are ghosts from the trio of debates. Kerry is still trying to quiet a minor tempest over a gentle reference he made in the last debate to Vice President Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter, Mary.

Cheney seized upon the remark in following days to portray Kerry as a man "who will do and say anything in order to get elected." The clash grew news legs and several papers editorialized at length on it as a doorway into gay rights and family values as campaign issues.

Many followed the editorial view expressed by the Times Union in Albany, N.Y.: "This is a rough democracy, and in a close presidential election, rough tactics are to be expected. But Mary Cheney isn't running for president or public office. She deserves to be left alone."

Drew Loftis bluntly echoed that sentiment Sunday in an op-ed piece in The Free Press of Kinston, N.C. He wrote ,"If Mary's gay, let her be gay. ...Just let her be." Loftis wrote that terminology used in such exchanges to describe long-term relationships between gays as basically meaningless: "Call it what you want. Call it marriage. Call it a civil union. Call it ... a partnership of people headed to Hell (if that's what your beliefs dictate)."

An unanticipated foreign affairs flap that could "topple a campaign's best-laid plans" is about to descend on Bush's last two weeks. Kate Kelland of Reuters reported Sunday that Tony Blair's government "has rejected accusations that it might reposition British troops to more dangerous areas in Iraq to boost George W. Bush's political position in the U.S. presidential race."

British troops are currently stationed in the relatively quiet Basra area in southern Iraq. The Ministry of Defence confirmed the Bush administration had asked for British troops to be redeployed, and Kelland wrote that sources in that ministry said the Washington request, if met, would send about 650 Brits "to the hotspots of Falluja or Baghdad."

The Democratic accusation will follow, of course, that Bush is trying to get the British to soak up casualties that would have been American during the last two tumultuous campaign weeks, and thus allow Dubya to boast about decreased U.S. casualty numbers.

Of course, the specter of unforeseen bad news disrupting a candidate's last two weeks on the campaign trail hardly limits itself to presidential aspirants. Consider the Sunday story in The Times Herald of Olean, N.Y., and some other papers.

Under a subhead, "Dirt on candidate Kuhl dredged up," the story, written by Associated Press reporter Devlin Barret, describes how New York state senator Randy Kuhl, a Republican running for the congressional seat of retiring Republican Amo Houghton, "pulled two shotguns on his wife at a dinner party in 1994 and threatened to shoot her, according to a divorce complaint."

Now there's a homestretch challenge for the best of campaign managers. The "two shotguns" instead of just one seems a nice touch in a political story. Kuhl's wife filed for divorce in 1998 and it was granted in 2000. The AP reporter wrote that details from the divorce document first appeared on RawStory.com, a political Web site describing itself as a provider of "relevant news stories of interest to the left-leaning market."

Kuhl is opposed by Democrat Samara Barend, a former staffer for Hillary Clinton. Barend's campaign denied any involvement with the divorce records.

And I don't even have room to describe an excellent weekend USA Today lead article, written by Kathy Kiely and Jim Drinkard, describing allegations from both parties of fraud and voter intimidation in the registration process - mostly in swing states.

So, welcome to the homestretch. This one is going to be ultra-ugly.