On Taking the Low Road

Since most of y'all stopping by have likely seen the Talking Points Memo posts about the United Church of Christ's ad about tolerance being banned by CBS/UPN and NBC--or have maybe seen other takes on this, e.g., Timshel's post, I'll simply note that I'm just as appalled as they are. Welcome to the land of not-so-free-speech--don't forget to say your loyalty oath...

However, over at Cursor, this Washington Square News article caught my eye--it's the counterpoint to banning messages of tolerance from the airwaves:

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.

Re: Rove--no shit. I've been waiting, hoping for someone to emerge on the Democratic side who would recognize the need to, well, get down to the level of the GOP and hit back hard. No, it isn't pleasant or pretty--but, like taking out the garbage, it's necessary. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party didn't seem to grasp that point.

Trbovich also noted that the Democrats failed to enlarge their base. In particular, there was a failure to reach out to blue-collar voters. Instead, Kerry ran what he called a "yuppified campaign." This didn't sit well with the Trbovich--he noted that, in spite of having known the candidate for thirty years (and in spite of Kerry having, in his words, "more integrity and intelligence than almost anyone else" he knew), that "you've literally got to beat the shit out of John Kerry sometimes to get him where you want him to go."

The same could be said for the Democratic Party as a whole.