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Kerry 1, Drudge 0

But it's still the first inning

Yes, this is really a featured download at
johnkerry.com

Well, that was strange: Just hours after the Murdoch UK tabloid The Sun posted the most concrete hint yet of big sex troubles for John Kerry, the woman of the hour finally emerged to deny that any affair ever took place. And Alex Polier's parents added their pledge to vote for Kerry even though her father had been quoted last week as opining that Kerry was a "sleazeball." As Churchill observed, "There is nothing more exhilirating than to be shot at and missed," and today Kerry has a fresh reminder of what he meant. Now that the first putative "crisis" of his campaign has passed, let's review the landscape, starting with the obvious.

Parsing Polier: Naturally, Republicans were disappointed. Rush Limbaugh had a very predictable fit over the Poliers' statements, and closed by sputtering--oh, just guess--that they "raised more questions than they answered."

He meant to imply that dark doings of some sort had colored the parents' revised opinion of Kerry. I doubt that, but their statement was curious. Last week Polier's father, Terry, told reporters, "I did kind of wonder if my daughter didn't get that kind of feeling [that Kerry was a sleazeball] herself... He's not the sort of guy I would choose to be with my daughter." And today he and wife Donna said, "We appreciate the way Senator Kerry has handled the situation, and intend on voting for him for president of the United States."

How did Kerry "handle the situation"? All he did publicly was to deny a liaison, which was entirely in his own self-interest--and hardly a gesture that seems likely to assuage parents who resented him for drawing public attention to their daughter in the first place. What does it mean? Maybe nothing; maybe just that they're glad it's over and want everybody to go away. Or perhaps Kerry was gracious toward the family in some private way.

But read the parents' words again: It practically sounds as if it was Kerry who had Polier at a disadvantage, and not the other way around. Which in turn makes one wonder whether there are aspects to the story that might have proven unflattering to Alex Polier as much or more than to John Kerry.

It looks like Polier's role in Kerry's campaign is over, but I wouldn't be surprised if we learn there's more to the tale of Polier and her connection to the Kerry camp. For one thing, The Sun article was emphatic that she had taped some sort of television interview about Kerry, and even quoted an anonymous network source describing how badly she wanted to tell her story. Now all that may be wholly fabricated, but if so it would be a fairly remarkable thing for even the worst tabloids to be so reckless in this litigious age. I'm assuming there was some basis for the initial uproar, even if inferences of an affair were wrong--any pro knows that wholly baseless allegations taint the accuser with time and are therefore best saved for the 11th hour.

Bush's Guard troubles: Ever since Kerry took command of the Democratic race, I have been waiting for him to turn back into John Kerry, a guy who historically has been not just "another Washington insider" but an exceptionally cheesy and prosaic one who followed much more than he led. But Kerry has been awfully canny so far. His Monday pronouncement that everybody ought to stop looking so hard at Bush's Guard records was impeccably timed: The point has been made, and there was danger of a Bush-symp backlash if the Dems pushed that line much harder at this juncture.

Is Kerry's "electability" a mirage?: The Economist put it best in their February 7 issue: "Electability is a will o' the wisp idea. Voters are choosing a candidate not because they like him, but because they think other people do. And that raises doubts about how solid Mr. Kerry's support is." Do tell: According to a Washington Post poll released last week, Kerry led Bush 52-43--but 83 percent of Bush backers said their support was "strong," compared to 59 percent for Kerry. That suggests that the Republicans' attack ads will cut deeper than the Democrats'--and there's every reason to think this will be the nastiest presidential campaign of the media age. 

The Mother of all Direct Mail Campaigns: You may have noticed the small buzz over an anti-Kerry commercial titled "Unprincipled, Part 1," that Republicans emailed to supporters earlier this month. (You can see it here, at the Bush-Cheney reelection page.) It's quite effective, really, and underlines some of the weaknesses in Kerry that I discussed in my 2/11 City Pages feature. (Small wonder that Kerry, as GOP mouthpiece Bob Novak wrote last week, is the Democrat "Republican heavy thinkers"--we know who that is, right?--deemed their second-favorite choice for a Democratic nominee, after Dean.) Republican officials said the spot or one like it would eventually be aired on TV.

So the Republicans sneak-peeked a TV ad on the Internet; so what? This is what:

a) Direct mail has long been the nastiest and least scrutinized aspect of national political campaigns. Nor is it strictly the province of Republicans; in Iowa before the caucuses, the Democrats likewise saved their most ruthless attacks on each other for direct mail pieces.

b) Direct mail is, however, a Republican specialty, and an integral part of Karl Rove's career.

c) The Internet opens up whole new vistas for direct mail campaigning, by dint of technology and of the vast number of email lists compiled by countless companies and political interest groups. Now not only printed tracts can be targeted to individuals, but cheap-to-produce audio and video spots as well. 

In short, the possibilities for mounting guerrilla ad strikes, and testing themes and ads broadly before taking them fully public, has grown exponentially since even the 2000 election. The Democrats and Bush antagonists will have these tools at their disposal, too, but somehow I suspect the Republicans and their fellow travelers will make better use of the medium--if only because they understood better the role of old-fashioned direct mail in the first place.

So it will behoove all of us media watchers on the net to get on as many partisan mailing lists as we can, and see what winds up in our inboxes. The role of direct mail and guerrilla marketing in this campaign is going to be too large to allow that whole segment of the race to happen off-radar. 

(Incidentally, I'm sure others must be writing about this, but I've read very little. If you've seen any commentaries on the Internet's changing role in political marketing--any commentaries that are not about organizing and fundraising on the web a la Howard Dean, that is--please send them along to me, and thanks.)

Posted by Steve Perry at February 17, 2004 8:46 AM

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