1. Welcome! Please take a few seconds to create your free account to post threads, make some friends, remove a few ads while surfing and much more. ClutchFans has been bringing fans together to talk Houston Sports since 1996. Join us!

Kerry cannot define his message to the American people...

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by ROXRAN, May 2, 2004.

  1. ROXRAN

    ROXRAN Member

    Joined:
    Oct 12, 2000
    Messages:
    18,815
    Likes Received:
    5,222
    Kerry lacks a defining message, many say
    Party chiefs: Now is`crucial moment'
    By ADAM NAGOURNEY
    New York Times
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Sources: Almanac of American Politics; candidate Web site; Congress.org.

    WASHINGTON -- Two months after Sen. John Kerry effectively captured the Democratic presidential nomination, party officials say his campaign is being outmaneuvered by the White House as it struggles to find a focus and to make the transition from the primaries to the fight with President Bush.

    Even while expressing confidence about Kerry's prospects, Democratic Party officials said they were concerned about what they described as his trouble in settling on a defining theme for his candidacy, the pace of his advertising and his progress in setting up field organizations in battleground states.

    "George Bush has had three of the worst months of his presidency, but they (the Kerry campaign) are stuck and they've got to move past this moment," said Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign.

    While Brazile said she thought Kerry had the time, the political skill and the money to defeat what many Democrats described as a highly vulnerable president, she said, "This is a very crucial moment in the campaign."

    For many Democrats, Kerry's single biggest difficulty was what they described as his continuing search for a defining theme for his candidacy.

    Last week, after completing the most in-depth poll of his campaign, Kerry unveiled yet another theme for his candidacy: "Together, we can build a stronger America." It was, by the count of one aide, the sixth message Kerry has rolled out since he first announced his candidacy nearly 18 months ago.

    "We need to be honest with ourselves: Our candidate is not one who's good with a 30-second sound bite," said Rep. Harold Ford Jr. of Tennessee, co-chairman of Kerry's campaign. "He is very thoughtful, and it takes him a while to say things."

    Kerry's aides and some Democrats outside the campaign described the concerns as overstated and said any drift that might be taking place now would have little meaning in the fall.
     
  2. MacBeth

    MacBeth Member

    Joined:
    Aug 19, 2002
    Messages:
    7,761
    Likes Received:
    2
    Pretty much agree.
     
  3. AroundTheWorld

    Joined:
    Feb 3, 2000
    Messages:
    83,288
    Likes Received:
    62,281
    Also my impression (from afar).
     
  4. Rockets10

    Rockets10 Member

    Joined:
    Jul 25, 2001
    Messages:
    588
    Likes Received:
    1
    I agree as well. The Republicans have kept him off-balance for quite awhile now with all these seemingly pointless attacks about medals, etc. While they are obviously irrelevant issues in the long-term, together they have derailed Kerry's campaign and have not allowed him to strengthen his message. In the end, I don't think it matters much since, IMO, this election will be decided in October depending on the situation in Iraq and how the economy is going at the time. This election is a referendum on Bush, not on Kerry.
     
  5. Deckard

    Deckard Blade Runner
    Supporting Member

    Joined:
    Mar 28, 2002
    Messages:
    57,791
    Likes Received:
    41,228
    Here is an excellent article about today's polarization of the electorate here in the States. I thought the comment mentioned early on was telling about why Kerry is having problems getting traction. There is some great stuff here, by the way...


    The Great Divide
    Divided electorate is a natural for a bitter, issueless campaign


    Read the entire series

    on statesman.com/greatdivide
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    By Bill Bishop

    AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

    Sunday, May 2, 2004

    President Bush spent more money this March than any other candidate ever spent in one month -- almost $50 million. Most Americans didn't see this campaign, because in 2004, the presidential election isn't a national contest. The money Bush and his Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry, are spending goes to just 18 states.

    Bush and Kerry are campaigning in the dwindling number of counties where Democrats and Republicans mix in nearly even numbers, according to an Austin American-Statesman study of election returns.

    In the country's 18 battleground states, 41 percent of voters live in counties where the difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000 was 10 percentage points or less.

    In non-battleground states -- the 32 states and the District of Columbia that are all but ignored by Bush and Kerry -- only 25 percent of the voters live in competitive counties.

    As the number of competitive communities dwindles, there are fewer voters who can be swayed by rhetoric, policy or debates. In turn, campaigns have grown more locally focused and bitter, a strategy aimed more at turning out supporters and less at collecting swing voters.

    The paradox of American politics is that as presidential elections have become closer nationally, the results locally have grown further apart. In 2000, 105 million people voted, and only a half-million ballots separated Gore and Bush. The candidates were within 10 percentage points of each other in just 772 counties out of more than 3,100.

    The majority of these politically competitive counties are in the 18 states where Bush and Kerry are conducting their presidential campaigns today, according to an analysis conducted by the Statesman's statistical consultant, Robert Cushing.

    Only six states have a majority of voters living in counties where both parties were competitive in 2000: New Hampshire, Nevada, Iowa, Maine, New Mexico and Florida. Even some battleground states are highly polarized. Tennessee, for example, had fewer competitive counties than the national average in 2000, but the state is politically balanced between a highly Democratic west and a very Republican east. In most of the country, presidential candidates face an electorate sorted into communities that have voted consistently Republican or Democratic for a generation.

    The tendency of communities to be mostly Republican or Democratic "is probably one of the things that's driving our politics into a more polarized situation," says Paul Maslin, Howard Dean's pollster in the Democratic presidential primary.

    "It's calcifying our politics," Maslin says. As regions become wedded to one party, Maslin says, there is "less true competition . . . going on for those voters. And, again, that contributes to polarization, not only on the electoral level but on the legislative level, as well. The whole thing is a mess."

    The trend toward more politically segregated communities began sometime in the 1970s. When Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976, 46 percent of all voters nationally lived in counties where the presidential election was decided by 10 percent or less.

    In the1992 contest between Bill Clinton and President George H.W. Bush, 36 percent of American voters lived in competitive communities.

    By 2000, only 25 percent lived in these politically mixed counties -- and just eight states had an electorate as politically integrated as the national average 24 years earlier.

    All eight of these states are battlegrounds in the 2004 campaign.

    As communities become increasingly partisan, the parties are less interested in persuading undecided voters. The parties are most concerned with turning out their local super-majorities of Republicans and Democrats. And the best way to do that is to spur on a politics of partisanship, ideology and division.

    "It makes campaigns more ideological," Republican demographer John Morgan, Sr., says of the nation's lopsided politics. "You can't help it."

    With communities becoming strongly Democratic or Republican, "you better damn well be sure you maximize your votes, whether it's inner city African Americans or suburban conservative Republicans," says Democrat Maslin. "We have to maximize our base, and they have to maximize their base. Ergo, polarization."

    Voters clustered in like-minded communities have caused candidates to develop new campaign techniques. Instead of broad appeals, presidential campaigns now "narrowcast" their message, says Washington-based political analyst Stuart Rothenberg.

    Campaigns "want to carve out these smaller niches, and then you add them up (to)get a whole big political party, the whole electorate." As communities become increasingly Republican or increasingly Democratic, Rothenberg says, "it probably makes it easier to target communities."

    As a result, there is no national campaign for the presidency. Neither party spent money on national advertising in 2000, says Michael Hagen, director of the Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University. "It was all bought at the local level," Hagen says. "And so it obviously was a more narrowly targeted campaign than any presidential campaign had been before.

    "When you start chopping up an electorate narrowly and narrowcasting messages to them, you create smaller societies that see themselves as separate," Rothenberg says. "It destroys the sense of community and common interests and values. It makes it a lot easier to see your opponent in caricature terms, as not entirely patriotic or caring about old people. Each party uses these ridiculous stereotypes. . . .

    "That does fit with an electorate and a country that is increasingly fractured."

    Rothenberg's description also fits with a 2004 campaign that seems more concerned with the divisive events of Vietnam and protests from the 1970s than questions facing the nation today. Social scientists have persistently found that turnout among those who feel partisanly Republican or Democratic is higher than for those who consider themselves independents. And Ohio State University political psychologist Jon Krosnick has said that turnout is highest when voters "like one candidate and hate another."

    Toward extremism


    Psychologists have known for some time that as people become less likely to encounter those with opposing ideas, their politics tends to move away from the middle and toward the extreme.

    In the 1950s, political scientist John Fenton puzzled over the political differences between Ohio and other industrialized states such as Michigan.

    Michigan politics were partisan, ideological and keenly divided, Fenton observed. In Ohio, politics was dull and the voters lacked conviction. Fenton concluded the difference between the two states had to do with where people lived.

    Michigan had tightly clustered working-class neighborhoods. People lived near those who had the same kind of job, the same level of income and the same ideology. They took their politics seriously, and they were partisanly Democratic.

    Similarly, enclaves of middle-class managers were just as partisanly Republican. These richer, more conservative neighborhoods were fertile recruiting grounds for the chamber of commerce or, in some cases, the John Birch Society.

    In Ohio, however, the social classes lacked cohesion. Factory workers lived next to shop owners and field hands. Fenton wrote that the "effect of a diffusion of the working population, as opposed to their concentration, on attitudes and voting behavior was profound." People didn't feel strongly about candidates or parties. People's "social isolation" from others in their class produced weakly held beliefs and a politics that lacked ideology or partisanship.

    The lesson Fenton learned is now generally accepted by social psychologists: People with like-minded beliefs living in the same community "can lead to a kind of monolithic, overconfident support for a single party," explains University of Maryland political scientist James Gimpel. Moreover, Gimpel says, these groups tend to grow more extreme in their beliefs.

    Polls conducted for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in 2000 and again in 2002, for example, found rural voters grew more ideologically conservative on issues such as abortion and gun control -- and they became much more supportive of Republican candidates.

    Since the 1970s, the number of people living in politically monolithic communities nationally has increased by 69 percent, according to an analysis by Cushing.

    By the 2000 election, 45.3 percent of all U.S. voters lived in counties where the presidential candidate won by more than 20 percent of the vote. Sixty percent of all American voters lived in counties that have voted consistently Republican or Democratic for nearly a generation.

    Since the mid-1970s, American communities have become Balkanized and partisan. In the past 25 years the United States has become much more like polarized Michigan of the 1950s and a whole lot less like homogenous Ohio.

    Voting angry


    One of the ironies of democracy is that citizens who see both sides of an issue are less likely to vote and become politically active than those people who are angry, partisan and unsympathetic to those who think differently.

    "In order to actually participate actively in politics you've got to feel pretty sure of yourself, and if you're just in the middle on things you seldom do," explains University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana Mutz. "Living among like-minded people who, essentially, reinforce your beliefs really spurs people on to become politically active."

    The super political majorities that have appeared in most U.S. communities have set off a social, psychological snowball. Communities attract more like-minded members looking for places where they feel socially and culturally comfortable. (Or, perhaps, they chase out those with differing beliefs.) Political majorities increase, as they have in the majority of communities.

    Surrounded by like-minded members of the community, people become more extreme in their thinking. As local majorities grow, people in the minority are less likely to vote.

    Majorities grow stronger in number and in the certainty of their beliefs. Minorities become less vocal and less likely to participate. The process reinforces itself, and the nation's politics grow more divided, calcified and partisan.

    Presidential campaigns have to deal with this geographically polarized electorate. They are shaping their campaigns accordingly.

    "Look, you hunt ducks where the ducks are," says Republican consultant Scott Reed. "And so you attempt to put your base together. Get it up to 45 to 47 percent range with the right issues and then you figure out how to get across the finish line."

    Both parties have become obsessive about turnout. Republicans have a Voter Vault, and the Democrats have built their Datamart, each containing information on 168 million voters. Both parties will use sophisticated marketing data to target groups of voters with direct mail and cable television advertisements.

    Democrats did a better job than Republicans in 2000 in turning out voters, so Republicans formed what it calls its 72-Hour Task Force to pull people to the polls.

    "All this new emphasis on turnout is perfectly consistent with the trends you're highlighting," says the University of Maryland's Gimpel. "If we do see an electorate that is more polarized, we are probably going to see a campaign that is less oriented toward persuasiveness and more oriented toward just old-fashioned mobilization and turnout. And clearly that's what we're seeing."

    The problem for candidates is that the country is polarized along a range of subjects. In the 1950s Michigan voters were divided on primarily economic issues. Today's candidates face voters who have roped off positions on race, religion, abortion, gay marriage, the war in Iraq and stem-cell research.

    "The old game was safer," says Paul Maslin. "Let's just go for the middle and to hell with everybody else . . . If I had to say one true statement about the entire process you are describing at the national or state level, it's making life increasingly difficult for people who are trying to thread the needle, to find the swing voter."

    Since the mid-1970s, when Democrats and Republicans were more likely to live in the same communities, American politics changed. Parties aligned with economic and social issues. Communities became predominantly Republican or Democratic. The number of voters in the middle declined.

    "Now you are in a different game and a much more dangerous game," Maslin says. "You've got to appeal to the base, but at the same time you still have to make some kind of breakthrough to the other guy's turf. And yet you know you run the risk of every time you run in one direction you lose the other ones."

    The conservative backlash to President Bush's more liberal immigration proposals was just the kind of danger politicians face in this new world.

    "My hunch is that it's just going to continue in the 2004 election," says Harvard University political scientist Eric Schickler. It's hard to reach out to new voters without alienating ones already in your camp, Schickler says. Meanwhile, "the polarization on Bush is accentuating, he says. "You have a good number of people who despise him and a good number of people who love him. And they live in different places."

    Candidates are less concerned with persuasion -- since only a small percentage of voters are uncommitted or live in politically diverse communities -- and more obsessed with turnout. There is less need for debate in this kind of political environment. It's not to either candidate's benefit to confuse voters by discussing issues -- after all, people who understand the other side are less likely to vote.

    Everything people and the media say they deplore about elections -- the negative advertisements and the issueless campaigns -- is exactly what a population that is both divided and geographically isolated demands.

    "Isn't it interesting," Maslin says, "that in this age of the Internet and tremendous communication we were supposed to become more tolerant over time. Our fondest wishes would be that, like Rodney King, we'd all be getting along and coming together. When, in fact, in a bizarre sense even though the threads connect us, we may be driving ourselves apart."

    bbishop@statesman.com; 512-445-3634

    find this article at:
    http://www.statesman.com/news/content/auto/epaper/editions/sunday/news_0449d9958360b0520027.html
     
  6. El_Conquistador

    El_Conquistador King of the D&D, The Legend, #1 Ranking

    Joined:
    Jun 11, 2002
    Messages:
    15,607
    Likes Received:
    6,577
    Forbes Kerry is in a horrible position right now. Bush is polling well over 300 electoral votes (270 are needed), Forbes Kerry's central issue of a poor economy is being rendered ridiculous by the strong economic growth we've seen in the last three quarters, and Forbes Kerry has such a silly and indiscernable position on the War on Terror that he can't get any traction there. He is screwed. His biggest helpers have probably been the politically motivated 9-11 commission's witch hunt and the trio of smear campaign books that have been written. All of that should have vaulted him in the polls -- it didn't. I can think of no positive catalyst for the Forbes Kerry campaign going forward.

    DUKAKIS PART DEAUX
     
  7. HAYJON02

    HAYJON02 Member

    Joined:
    May 20, 2002
    Messages:
    4,777
    Likes Received:
    278
    I agree with his message of anti-Bush, a message many agree with. Doing a worse job than Dubya would be next to impossible. The good part about our government was our checks and balances system and right now we have neither.
     
  8. glynch

    glynch Member

    Joined:
    Dec 1, 2000
    Messages:
    18,075
    Likes Received:
    3,605
    Kerry is just hoping Bush self destructs, which might not be good enough.

    Sadly, Iraq is hurting Kerry, too as he essentially claiming that he supports the needless war, but in a less stupid fashion. While many people feel the war was needless and many feel it was needed, I'm not sure how many really get fired up by Kerry's needed war, done in a stupid fashion position..

    The war is taking all the attention from Kerry's issues.
     
  9. Sishir Chang

    Sishir Chang Member

    Joined:
    Nov 12, 2000
    Messages:
    11,064
    Likes Received:
    8
    To a certain extent I agree but it is still nice to have something to vote for whether than against. That's why I'm looking at this election as a vote for divided government since if Kerry wins he will still be kept in check by the Repub Congress and vice versa.
     
  10. Sishir Chang

    Sishir Chang Member

    Joined:
    Nov 12, 2000
    Messages:
    11,064
    Likes Received:
    8
    A good article and from my vantage point sadly true. The amount of money it takes to win the presidency and the also the increase in the power of the presidency in a much more powerful Federal government now means that the stakes have become so much higher for winning office. To attract as much support as they can the parties have built themselves into somewhat unwieldly super-coalitions with often internal conflicting views but bound by the desire to win office. This has also made them more timid about risking resources on getting voters outside of their coalition rather than strengthen their own base. IMO this has led to both a more polarized electorate and frankly inferior political leaders. Who have come to office beholden to their ideological base than to the wider interests of all their constituents.

    This divide has driven out people who IMO could make excellent leaders who are bold enough to take positions that might be counter to their base but will serve wider interests. People like Collin Powell, John McCain, Warren Rudman, Russ Feingold and even Joe Lieberman (who I didn't agree with about Iraq but think he is the one of the most pragmatic Dems on economic issues.) These guys don't stand a chance because the partisans will try to maginalize their delegate support in their own parties and more importantly cut their funding.
     
  11. Major

    Major Member

    Joined:
    Jun 28, 1999
    Messages:
    41,682
    Likes Received:
    16,206
    I can think of no positive catalyst for the Forbes Kerry campaign going forward.


    Well, that has more to do with you and your own ability to think than it does with the actual viability of the Kerry campaign.
     
  12. GreenVegan76

    GreenVegan76 Member

    Joined:
    May 14, 2003
    Messages:
    3,336
    Likes Received:
    1
    Bush's presidency has been an absolute disaster -- on his watch, three million Americans have lost their jobs, 600 soldiers lost their lives and 3,000 Americans were brutally murdered. Not to mention the global isolation, loss of civil liberties and the historic degradation of the environment. If Kerry can't find a way to beat this illiterate monkey, he shouldn't be president.

    Bush is *VERY* vulnerable, but Kerry is trying too hard to posture himself on every issue. Everybody knows the emporer wears no clothes -- we're just waiting for Kerry to say it.
     
  13. Major

    Major Member

    Joined:
    Jun 28, 1999
    Messages:
    41,682
    Likes Received:
    16,206
    Bush is *VERY* vulnerable, but Kerry is trying too hard to posture himself on every issue. Everybody knows the emporer wears no clothes -- we're just waiting for Kerry to say it.

    Keep in mind, no one is paying attention to the election right now. Nothing Kerry does is going to win him significant amounts of points because no one cares. Bush's overall ratings keep dropping and such - that will catch up to him eventually. But this election will be defined starting in July and August - all the stupid stuff going on now ultimately is going to have very little effect by then.

    Kerry may very well be a flop - that was a major concern during the primaries (that Kerry was just picked because he was looked at as electable, not because he was a good candidate)... but we won't know for a few more months.
     
  14. Deckard

    Deckard Blade Runner
    Supporting Member

    Joined:
    Mar 28, 2002
    Messages:
    57,791
    Likes Received:
    41,228
    We all know, well, most of us, how polarized the electorate is now. It's a trend that was going on for a long time and has been accelerated since the election of Bush II. It's reflected here. How often have we seen moderate Republicans (sorry if you think it doesn't fit) like MadMax "shouted down" by shills for the right like Uncle_Tim? Called names that would have called for WWIII if said to someone in their face instead of in the safe anonymity of the internet? And we also have those on the other side, like glynch, who isn't aggressive in the same sense, but often takes incendiary views? Actually, and I'm sure the right-wing folks here will disagree, I think the posters on the "left" are pretty moderate in their views by comparison... in the main. But what isn't moderate, and I fall in this category, is a strong belief that Bush is a danger to our country and needs, no must be defeated in November. So the partisan divide is here for all of us to see.

    It wasn't always like this. The rest of the series (which I can post, if those not registered are interested) points that out. There used to be a large "middle" which frequently voted one way or another, depending on how they liked the candidates, instead of looking at the party and "pulling their lever". Things go in cycles, and this will pass eventually, but the country can suffer great damage before it does. And some damage may not be repairable... not in our lifetimes.

    And so it goes.



    (sorry... I read Slaughterhouse Five again recently. ;) )
     
  15. rimrocker

    rimrocker Member

    Joined:
    Dec 22, 1999
    Messages:
    23,120
    Likes Received:
    10,158
    I'm not worried. Kerry has taken a Bush punch like no other ($50 million + of ads) and not much happened except Bush spent money and Kerry raised it. The vaunted Republican ground campaign is really an Amway type pyramid scheme designed to fail, even after another $30 million has been pumped into it by the campaign. Going into the summer, the incumbent is no more than even with declining numbers and all sorts of albatrosses around his neck and half of his original warchest while Kerry has yet to really engage. The campaign should ratchet up in intensity going into the Dem Convention where Kerry will start to pull away.

    Kerry begins a new ad campaign today...

    http://www.johnkerry.com/features/heartandlifetime/index.php
     
  16. GladiatoRowdy

    GladiatoRowdy Member

    Joined:
    Oct 15, 2002
    Messages:
    16,596
    Likes Received:
    496
    I like the ads. They are positive, focus on who Kerry is and what he has done, and don't even begin to sling the slightest bit of mud. Nice start.
     
  17. rimrocker

    rimrocker Member

    Joined:
    Dec 22, 1999
    Messages:
    23,120
    Likes Received:
    10,158
    More on the ad buy... $25 million, running in the states Bush targeted plus CO and LA.

    Should be interesting to watch the polls over the next couple of weeks.
     
  18. FranchiseBlade

    Supporting Member

    Joined:
    Jan 14, 2002
    Messages:
    51,807
    Likes Received:
    20,465
    Kerry is in a good position provided he still has some gas in his tank. The VP selection should give him a boost, because of media attention. The convention will a huge time for him to define himself and his agenda. Meanwhile he's done fine letting Bush shoot himself in the foot, and coming back and defending the Bush's misrepresenting ads. His own ads start, and that's another boon. Then will come the debates, and there should be no contest there. Kerry just needs to find a way to throw all of it in Bush's face during those debates.

    If he could pound Iraq, Bush's anti-science record, and most importantly the Plame scandal down Bush's throat he will be almost unstoppable. The main worry for him is that the Republican convention is the latter of the two, and it will introduce some slick stuff. Or it could be a problem if Kerry doesn't have anything left to add to where he is now.
     
  19. El_Conquistador

    El_Conquistador King of the D&D, The Legend, #1 Ranking

    Joined:
    Jun 11, 2002
    Messages:
    15,607
    Likes Received:
    6,577
    If you think that the American voting public is capable of understanding the Plame 'scandal', then you are sorely mistaken. I hope Forbes Kerry does make that an issue. It will blow right over the voters' heads and backfire. Get real. With ideas like this, it's no wonder the liberals are so far behind in the battleground states...
     
  20. rimbaud

    rimbaud Member
    Supporting Member

    Joined:
    Nov 3, 1999
    Messages:
    8,169
    Likes Received:
    676
    Most election years there would not be an oppositional candidate yet. This year's Dem. primary was really early. Dumb.
     

Share This Page