Countdown

Home > Stories > Dirty Politics – Part Four

Dirty Politics – Part Four (cont.)

Near the end of the election, an outside group, the National Security Political Action Committee, launched an ad attacking Dukakis for allowing the Massachusetts corrections department to give 10 weekend furlough passes to a violent criminal named Willie Horton. While out on a weekend pass, Horton twice raped a young woman and stabbed her boyfriend before stealing their car. Dukakis didn’t personally furlough Horton, but he had vetoed legislation that would have banned furloughs for convicts like Horton who were serving life sentences without parole.

The original ad didn’t include a photo of Horton, an African-American, but later versions did. Ad creator Larry McCarthy called the photo, “every suburban mother’s greatest fear.” The ads immediately generated an onslaught of media coverage and cries from Democrats that they were racially charged smears.  The ads, which were based on opposition research generated by Bush aides James Pinkerton and Andrew Card, were not paid for by the Bush campaign, which was able to distance itself from the racism charges. The Bush campaign instead aired a milder ad that criticized Dukakis on the weekend furlough issue without mentioning or showing Horton. In the end, the ads totally shifted the debate and helped propel Bush to a come-from-behind victory.

The Horton ad became synonymous with negative campaigning, but its success also demonstrated the virtues of opposition research wielded deftly to manipulate the media and change the subject in a close election. That’s just what George W. Bush needed to do in 2004, when he was running a tight race with John Kerry. Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, had a leg up on Bush, who had not only avoided Vietnam by getting a cushy National Guard post arranged through political connections, but also hadn’t even completed his Guard service.  Bush needed to shift the focus of the debate away from his lack of credentials and to poke a hole in Kerry’s biggest perceived asset: his military service.  Vulnerable to being labeled a draft-dodger, Bush couldn’t make the attacks himself; they wouldn’t be perceived as credible.

Instead, in May 2004, a group of Vietnam veterans assembled at the National Press Club for a press conference denouncing Kerry as “unfit to serve” and accusing him of distorting his service record in Vietnam. When the press conference didn’t generate much news coverage, the group created a series of TV ads that were aired in contested election areas. But even though the ads included statements from vets who, like Kerry, had served in Vietnam and on Swift Boats, most of them had not served with Kerry and were not in a position to judge his performance there. Nonetheless, they were extremely effective messengers, and their message was created with enough hard facts that it took the Kerry campaign a long time to find a compelling way to respond.

One of the Swift Boat ads used Kerry’s own words against him, though out of context. The ad contained footage of him testifying in 1971 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee recounting the results of an investigation into war crimes committed by American soldiers. The testimony was contrasted with charges from former POWs who said that Kerry’s testimony had betrayed soldiers in Vietnam.  The ads weren’t broadcast for very long, but they generated a gold mine’s worth of media coverage from traditional news outlets, which kept the story alive and moved the focus on the media away from Bush and onto Kerry. Many observers credit the ads with Kerry’s loss in November.

The 2008 election has yet to have a Willie Horton or a Swift Boat moment, but the chances are good that there will be one.  The Internet, 24-hour cable news, YouTube, and a fresh crop of front organizations have made negative techniques more potent. “There are so many more ways to communicate smears,” says presidential historian Richard Shenkman. “It’s all smear, all the time.”