Jonathan M. Stein
Monday, Aug. 9, 2004

Echoes and threads of both campaigns can be clearly discerned in the contemporary 2004 strategy of candidate John Kerry. However, although the scripts may be remarkably similar, the 2004 presidential campaign actually has less in common with the precedent campaigns of 1968 or 1948 than meets the eye.

Most startling to anyone familiar with the history of modern presidential campaigns is the nearly chapter-and-verse similarity between the 2004 Kerry strategy and the 1968 Nixon strategy. Perhaps the 2004 Democrat campaign should be more aptly titled “Kerry’s War.” Nixon’s 1968 campaign theme was an amorphous message of “Unity” in the midst of the war in Southeast Asia; Kerry’s 2004 campaign theme is the formless, vague notion of “America Coming Together,” in the midst of a polarized electorate and a difficult worldwide war on terrorism (a war started by an attack on the U.S. that Kerry would rather downplay as much as possible as a cause of the overall political climate, while deviously reaping the benefits of its divisive effects).

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As Johnson waded deeper into the jungles of Vietnam, Nixon stayed out of sight; when a viciously partisan press hounds President Bush over Iraq, Kerry’s handlers hide their candidate in a political grotto. A staunch anti-Communist, Nixon presented himself as a wartime moderate, using his convention address to merely reiterate his confounding call for “unity”; Kerry, the most left-wing senator in the United States, similarly used his party’s convention to obscure his radical roots and record from Americans, most of whom were being introduced to the Democrats’ candidate for the first time.

Like Nixon, who was derided for his elusive “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam, Kerry has a “secret plan” of his own for America; Kerry’s message: “Elect me and find out what I’ll do.” Both candidates woefully short on specifics, hoping that their opponents would/will be undermined by the natural course of events (ghoulishly delighting at the sight of body bags) instead of by an active, substantive and principled opposition.

Both candidates also dropped hints at solutions for perceived national problems in an attempt to win over independent or wavering voters, without detail or substance. Nixon was, and Kerry is, banking on the tide of fate and unscrupulously cultivating opportunism for electoral advantage.

However, there are significant differences between the world of John Kerry and that of Tricky Dick.

In Nixon’s America, Humphrey’s Democrats had been badly fractured by the Vietnam War and Johnson’s handling of it. In 1968, the Democrats had inflicted further damage on their party by waging a (literally) bloody primary contest. Alternatively, in 2004, President Bush is running unopposed for the Republican nomination.

Kerry’s opposition, the Republican Party, despite repeated attempts by the left-wing media to manufacture wedge issues via “push stories,” is almost completely united behind its candidate. Even the most liberal Republican will privately tell you how untenable the thought of a Kerry presidency is. No push story – i.e., a media-manufactured story titled “Republicans Angry at Bush Over XYZ” - can possibly disabuse Republicans of the basic notion that Kerry is too dangerously incompetent for an America at war to be a considerable, viable alternative.

Finally, the average voter in 1968 was relatively uninformed and incurious in comparison to the average voter in 2004, generally an avid consumer of information from a variety of mediums. As the election looms closer and closer, and more and more voters start paying attention, it is unlikely that today’s more information-savvy voters will allow themselves to be deceived by candidates campaigning on ambiguity. Today’s voters want substantive answers, not vague promises. And most voters have the means, e.g. the Internet, to get the answers they seek. An ambiguous candidate will be left with both a credibility gap and a vote gap.

Kerry’s post-convention tactics have added a splash of Truman to their base of Nixon. Truman, like Humphrey in 1968, was faced with a fractured Democrat Party – fractured by the Dixiecrats in the south and the communists in the north. Truman partially mitigated his dilemma by altering public perception of who his opponent in 1948 really was. Truman opted to face off against a Republican Congress instead of his actual opponent, left-of-center Dewey (by today’s standards).

To score political points with the public, Truman called Congress back into session after the Republican convention, daring them to enact their allegedly moderate party platform. Truman set out to prove that the Republicans were more conservative than they portrayed themselves at their convention. So Truman called their political bluff by inviting them back to Washington to enact their alleged agenda.

Truman’s ruse worked, and although Dewey was actually rather left of center, the public imparted on Dewey the more rightist ideology of congressional Republicans.

After the Democrats’ convention in 2004, President Bush quickly vowed to enact the proposals enumerated in the 9/11 Commission’s report. Trying to create the illusion that the president is merely bluffing in his stand against terror, Kerry has co-opted and perverted Truman’s play, asking the president to call a special session of Congress to enact the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations.

Like his Nixonian plays, this co-opted move from the Truman playbook will fail Kerry as well. Kerry’s first error in executing this Truman strategy is that he immediately opened himself up to renewed criticisms of his Senate attendance – he has the absolute worst attendance record in that chamber. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay quickly made light of Kerry’s demand for a special session by asking whether Kerry himself planned to show up.

More pointedly, unlike John Kerry, who believes that all posturing is political, President Bush is quite serious when it comes to fighting the very real war against international terrorism.

And, ultimately, that is why Kerry will lose.

Jonathan Stein is on staff at the Hofstra Law Review and has been published in the Washington Times, Brown Daily Herald, NewsMax.com and The Committee for Justice.