The Bush dynasty and "flip-flop" campaigns

Hesiod makes a good statement on the risks of running a campaign, as Bush largely has against Kerry, based on the idea that the less-known challenger is a "flip-flopper":  Karl Rove Blew This Election 10/14/04.

The problem is, that such an attack can only work if it's based on a kernal of truth. And, Kerry had to walk right into the trap and reinforce the flip flopper image with some gaffes at the nominating convention and the debates. (Like Gore did).

That didn't happen.

Thus, they literally spent $100 million on attack ads painting Kerry as this "flip flopper," and it was all destroyed in three Presidential debates when Kerry could speak directly to the American people, clarify what he meant, and come off as consistent.

Now, they are falling back on the tried and true "he's a tax and spend liberal from Massachusetts that wants to take away your guns and force your kids to marry homosexuals" GOP attack.

But in this election, it's not going to work. The issues are too important. And it sounds desperate...because it is desperate.

I've talked before about how Bush used this approach in his campaign against Al Gore, as Hesiod also notes.  I would add, though, that it obviously failed in 2000, even if Gore may not have responded as effectively as he might have.  Gore, after all, won the 2000 election decisively.

Old Man Bush used a similar strategy against Bill Clinton in 1992, with results that are well known.  I was reminded again recently about how strikingly similar the strategy was in this respect in 1992, as I was reading Tom Wicker's surprisingly interesting biography of George Herbert Walker Bush (2004), aka, Poppy Bush, Old Man Bush.

Poppy Bush 1988

Wicker recounts an incident in Poppy Bush's 1998 run for the presidency that was a short but revealing precursor to the 1992 "flip-flopper" campaign.  During the Republican primaries, Vice President Bush found himself facing unexpectedly strong competition from rivals Pat Robertson and Bob Dole.  Facing a looming Dole win in the crucial New Hampshire primary, Old Man Bush's advisers began pressing him for a more aggressive approach, as Wicker describes:

The specific question was about an attack ad that Roger Ailes, the campaign television adviser, had prepared on his own, without direct authorization from George Bush.  It pictured Bob Dole with two faces, looking at each other.  After the prominently displayed word "Straddled," numerous issues were listed.  The world changed to the present-tense "Straddle" as "Taxes" flashed on the screen, then became "He Can't Say No."

A narrator proclaimed: "Bob Dole straddles, and he just won't promise not to raise taxes.  And you know what that means."

Bush, viewing a tape of the ad, expressed doubt but did not make a firm decision; he wanted to be sure the charges were provable.  He was assured they were were, owing to Dole's Senate record and his speeches.  The pressures to run the ad were strong - Mrs. [Barbara] Bush, George junior [Shrub] on the telephone, campaign strategist Lee Atwater, Ailes himself - all wanted the ad to go on the air, and some advisers openly said it was needed to rescue the campaign (at least in New Hampshire, perhaps nationally).

That Roger Ailes is the same Roger Ailes who today heads Fox News.  He was a Foxist long before the Fox News Channel came into existence.  Lee Atwater was the political strategist famous for his negative campaigning, most notoriously the highly polarizing, race-baiting "Willie Horton" ads that Old Man Bush was to use later in the year against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis.

Bush relented and used the "Straddles" ad heavily for three days before the primary election.  Bush won the New Hampshire primary and Dole was unable to recover his momentum.  In this case, in the limited political market of New Hampshire, the flip-flop charge - in a "straddling" incarnation - worked for Poppy Bush.

The 1988 general election didn't use the flip-flop charge against Dukakis, except perhaps tangentially.  Instead, the campaign more resembled Shrub Bush's recent blasts at Kerry for being liberal, liberal, liberal.  Dukakis was painted as a supporter of black rapists and murderers (the Willie Horton theme), an unpatriotic American-flag-hater and an out-of-touch Yankee liberal nerd.  The Doonesbury cartoons that year pictured a hapless Dukakis as a man completely covered in mud.

Poppy Bush 1992

But against Bill Clinton in 1992, the flip-flopper charge was front-and-center.  There was plenty of sleaze-slinging, too, worse than in 1988.  Old Man Bush's campaign accused Clinton of being a womanizer and a draft-dodger.  For the Bush dynasty, avoiding the draft is a noble cause if the children of wealthy Republicans are doing it, like Dan Quayle or Shrub Bush.  For Democrats, they consider it represehensible.  In fact, as we see from the Swift Boat Liars for Bush campaign in 2004, they also consider heroic military service reprehensible for Democrats.

At one point, they even spread a totally concocted tale that Clinton had been an agent of the Soviet spy agency, the KGB.  Clinton effectively shoved that one back down Bush's throat along with the rest of the accusation of being unpatriotic, in their first presidential debate.  He even successfully made Bush's nasty brand of campaigning an issue in itself.

Wicker gives a good, succinct description of how the "flip-flop" issued played against Clinton, this time in a "waffler" incarnation:

Bush can never be accused of having given up - as, indeed, no incumbent ever should give up, considering all the advantages a sitting president should have over even an opponent as adept as Bill Clinton had proved to be.  For the remaining two weeks of the campaign, after the third debate, the president  drove himself relentlessly about the country, pounding away primarily at Clinton's long-ago role in anti-Vietnam demonstrations abroad, and what Bush called his "waffling" at home - saying one thing here, another there.  These indicated a slippery character not to be trusted, Bush reiterated, and personal "trust" became the theme of the president's campaign.

"Who do you trust," Bush frequently shouted, "to be president of the United States?"  The words sometimes changed - the basic question never did.

For his part Clinton remained determinedly "on message" - about the economic recession and the hard times people were having.  He used Bush's stumbling responses [to a question on the economy in the third debate] to suggest that the president "just didn't get it" - he didn't understand the consequences of his economic policies.  Clinton was not hesitant, either, to remind voters of the cut-and-slash Bush campaign against Dukakis only four years earlier ("Don't forget that Mr. Bush has said himself that he'd do anything to get reelected"), suggesting that Bush's "trust" charges were of the same negative stamp.

The Bushes: Born to Rule?

I don't want to getinto a lot of pop psychology and Bush and his relationship to his father.  But it is striking that both men, running as incumbent presidents, decided to put some an emphasis on their challenger as an uncertain, untrustworthy straddler/waffler/flip-flopper and on themselves as strong, resolute leaders.

It's also fascinating that both of their campaigns tried to paint the challenger as unpatriotic, because they had protested the Vietnam War.  Kerry volunteered for service while Clinton actively sought to avoid it.  Old Man Bush volunteered for service (in the Second World War) while Shrub Bush sought to avoid it (in the Vietnam War).  Yet both campaigns trashed their Democratic opponents as unpatriotic.

One possible explanation is that the Bush dynasty sees themselves as entitled to rule.  And anyone who challenges their rule is in their minds "unpatriotic."  That would be a genuinely monarchical way of looking at things.  And entirely plausible for the two Bush presidents.