Posted on 11/30/2004 11:38:53 AM PST by dukeman
George W. Bush ran the most negative presidential campaign in history, and the media never covered the story, an aide to Sen. John Kerry's campaign said last Monday at the journalism department.
Marco Trbovich, a United Steelworkers of America employee who advised Kerry on labor policy, told the 20 students gathered at Carter Hall that about 80 percent of Bush's campaign money was spent on negative advertising.
"If you can think of a few positive commercials that you saw, you saw all of them that were there," he said.
Bush's campaign played upon fear, using patriotic and religious fervor to make voters fear Kerry and the changes he might bring, Trbovich said.
"The Bush strategy worked, creating a big question mark over John Kerry's ability to lead," he said.
Trbovich, who spoke as part of the journalism department's "brown bag" lecture series, singled out two campaign phenomena that he said the media covered particularly poorly: a Bush ad about Kerry's health care plan that Trbovich called completely false, and the months-long smear campaign by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which claimed, among other things, that Kerry faked injuries in Vietnam.
"The Kerry campaign didn't act fast enough because it wasn't cynical enough about the media [to think] that controversy was more important than context," said Trbovich, who has reported for United Press International, the Detroit Free Press and The Boston Phoenix, among other news organizations.
"I think [Bush strategist Karl] Rove is appropriately cynical about the quality -- or lack of it -- in the American media these days," he said.
Trbovich also credited Rove for successfully enlarging the base of the Republican Party, something he said his own party failed to do. He was particularly disappointed in the Democrats' failure to reach blue-collar workers.
"We had a very yuppified campaign," he said, citing as an example Kerry's five speechwriters, all of whom were Harvard University graduates and were under 30. "I could never convince those people that the privatization of Social Security was a big issue."
He also said labor had been marginalized, adding, "There's a kind of elitism to the Democratic Party."
Trbovich has known Kerry for more than 30 years, he said, and even worked as communications director of Kerry's failed 1972 congressional campaign. He said the Massachusetts senator has more integrity and intelligence than almost anyone else he knows. He added, however, that unlike Bill Clinton, Kerry's intellect is at stronger than his political ear.
"Excuse my language, but you've literally got to beat the shit out of John Kerry sometimes to get him where you want him to go," he said. •
Our minister spoke of this campaign as being the most contentious in history. We spoke to him after the service of campaigns in the 19th and 20th centuries. It seems that most folks regard themselves as the center of history. The most, the best, the worst, the least in history; all of these are usually an expression of the extremes of the speaker's life as altered by the speaker's world view. There is nothing different with this article. The writer is blissfully ignorant of history.
I take it he knows very few people ......
And why is that guy walking around with a street sign coming out of his hardhat??
They aren't call Rent-A-Mob for nothing.
Yes they are and it's good to see the learning curve on FR!
I myself have benefited greatly from being a member.
Oh yeah, and calling the President a liar, and idiot, stupid, etc. was positive right?
The boys and girls on DU are sold on the idea that a draft will have to occur. They freely discuss techniques for getting their children out of it when it occurs. They expect only the worst.
They really are flummexed right now. They're examining every possible reason for why they lost except for the possibility that America just ain't buyin' what they're sellin'. Their universe has been turned upside down. Great despair and gnashing of teeth....
I wonder whether one of the students loaned him lunch money.
I wonder if the media didn't cover the story because New York, California, and Washington, DC, were never battleground states. The only presidential political ads that I saw in California were those run as news on the cable talk shows, and the national ads that ran on some cable channels. I hear that the ratio was like 3:1 political ads:soap ads in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, but did the anchors and newsmag reporters see it from their cozy living rooms in Manhattan or DC?
-PJ
I couldn't help but notice that this guys name is very close to the Russian word for "comrade"...
tovarisch
"but you've literally got to beat the sh*t out of John Kerry sometimes to get him where you want him to go,"
And that's just what the voters did.
like my dad used to say, " A billion here and a billion there, pretty soon, you are talking real money!"
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