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The Morning Grind / DayAhead |
Swift boat, the sequel
By John Mercurio
CNN Political Unit
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- It's the silly season of summer sequels. If you liked the original, you'll love "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth 2," the new TV ad released this morning that responds to enemy fire the anti-Kerry group has drawn this week.
The ad will go up in "selected states" next week, presumably in the same three battleground states where they launched their first 30-second spot August 5 -- Wisconsin, Ohio and West Virginia. By releasing it to the media today, however, Sen. John Kerry's accusers guarantee they'll have a voice over a weekend in which this debate will surely hold court.
Camp Kerry, which broke its own plan not to run TV ads in August in order to chime in and fire back, was bolstered yesterday by newly released military records on Larry Thurlow, one of Kerry's accusers. Today, The New York Times details the connections, financial and otherwise, among top members of this group, Karl Rove and other Bush family friends.
Aides say Kerry decided to launch his own meaty response Wednesday night during a conference call with campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill and top staff. Kerry took the call from his home office in Boston, where two pictures of friends he lost in Vietnam hang on the wall.
Another reason Camp Kerry is fighting back: This controversy appears to be hurting the former Navy lieutenant's campaign. A new CBS News poll shows that while the national race is virtually even, Kerry's support has fallen nine points among veterans this month.
Kerry, who was tied with Bush among vets, 46 percent to 46 percent, after his Boston confab, now trails Bush, 55 percent to 37 percent, among the group.
The poll, conducted Sunday through Thursday, also shows Kerry's support among independents slipping. It has Kerry at 44 percent, Bush at 39 percent and Nader at 4 percent. Kerry led the president 50 percent to 33 percent with independents in the postconvention poll, with Nader at 7 percent at the time. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.
Kerry's remarks yesterday at the International Association of Fire Fighters speech in Boston were notable -- if only because they revealed how negative, and how responsive, both campaigns have become this year.
"More than 30 years ago, I learned an important lesson: When you're under attack, the best thing to do is turn your boat into the attacker. That's what I intend to do today," Kerry said.
"The fact that the president won't denounce what they're up to tells you everything you need to know. He wants them to do his dirty work. The president keeps telling people he would never question my service to our country. Instead, he watches as a Republican-funded attack group does just that. Well, if he wants to have a debate about our service in Vietnam, here is my answer: Bring it on!"
Call it a summer squall. Call it a silly season. Perhaps. But it's ugly and, we say, increasingly difficult to keep in mind that the origin of this fight was a 1969 battle (a real one) in the Bay Hap River, where all principals apparently were fighting valiantly on the same team.
The Grind would also like to indulge itself for a minute and reveal an obvious truth we think is getting lost here. Forget about Bush-Cheney's namby-pamby condemnation of the anti-Kerry group. And ignore Kerry's "tsk-tsk" to the MoveOn PAC, as top surrogates like Wes Clark echo almost verbatim that group's ads.
When it serves their purposes, each side welcomes the "dirty work" of these 527s. (Groups that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money.) In fact, they rely on it. It's an unwritten (we hope), but vital, part of each campaign's strategy. Campaign aides in do their little desk dance every time these hatchet jobs hit the airwaves.
Looking south
Meanwhile, Kerry pivots to domestic issues today in a southern romp. He'll talk about jobs in Charlotte, North Carolina, a state hit hard by job losses, where a new poll this week from Research 2000 shows the Kerry-Edwards ticket trailing Bush-Cheney by just three points.
Since Bush took office in 2001, with help from Tar Heel voters, the state has lost 160,000 jobs, with manufacturing employment down more than 20 percent.
Of course, Gov. Mike Easley, a Democrat in a tough race for re-election, has a different view of the state's economy. In his current TV ad, Easley says North Carolina this year is "fourth in the nation in jobs created."
At Central Piedmont Community College this morning, Kerry will address laid-off workers and their families before he travels this afternoon to Ft. Myers, Florida, to survey Charley's wrath.
Bush stays down on the ranch working on his convention speech. But Bush-Cheney is still at work, hitting Kerry for venturing south.
"Apparently disregarding his own advice that Democrats make a 'mistake' in 'looking to' the South, John Kerry is expected to talk about his plan to keep manufacturing jobs in America during his remarks in North Carolina," Bush-Cheney spokesman Steve Schmidt says.
"It will be interesting to see whether Kerry repeats the 'Benedict Arnold CEOs' refrain. Once Kerry had the nomination sewn up -- and was more concerned about winning support from millionaires than mill workers -- he disavowed responsibility for the Benedict Arnold line."
In a earlier speech this year, Kerry referred to executives who send jobs overseas as "Benedict Arnold CEOs."
New hires
And in the "Staff Hires" section of The Grind, we can report today that the Kerry campaign has hired Joe Lockhart, a Clinton White House spokesman, and Joel Johnson, a lobbyist who also worked for Bill Clinton.
Along those lines, the Media Fund will announce today that it has hired Steve McMahon and his firm McMahon, Squier and Associates as their lead advertising agency.
McMahon and his partners, Mark Squier and John Donovan, have worked in political campaigns for nearly two decades. McMahon and Squier served as senior political strategists in Howard Dean's presidential campaign and produced Dean's ads.
