Off Message

President Bush said on Monday that political advertisements run by a broad swath of independent groups should be stopped, including a television advertisement attacking Senator John Kerry’s war record. But the White House quickly moved to insist that Mr. Bush had not meant in any way to single out the advertisement run by veterans opposed to Mr. Kerry.

I wrote earlier that the press doesn’t understand what Bush is doing. He is supposed to simply condemn the ad with a wink and a nod because the CW is that the 527’s give both campaigns a freebie on deniability. They can hardly bear it that he isn’t following their script, so today they jumped on it when he went off his own message and they practically shoved the words in his mouth.

But, Bush does not want to condemn this ad and for good reason. If he did some of his staunchest supporters would think he was a pussy — and that’s the essence of what is going on here. Bush has to tear down veterans because he isn’t one, but he can’t do it himself. Bush just cracked under mildly difficult questioning and blurted out something he didn’t mean to say.

Lawrence O’Donnell had an interesting analysis of this dynamic on Olberman last Friday that I think is interesting:

OLBERMANN: Let‘s talk response tactics, first. One of his crew mates from Vietnam said today that Kerry had been way too much of a gentleman and should have come out swinging earlier. Should he have?

O‘DONNELL: He could not tactically, in the presidential campaign, do it that way, Keith. I actually think both campaigns have handled this perfectly in their ways. What Kerry had to wait for is he had to wait for a linkage to President Bush. It would be unworthy of the nominee, the candidate, to be attacking somebody named John O‘Neill or someone involved in the Swift Boat controversy who no one in the country had ever heard of. John Kerry can only mount attacks against his opponent, George Bush, so what he needed was John McCain to come out and condemn the ads, which John McCain did, and then he needed John McCain to ask the president to condemn the ads, and then he needed, very much needed, the president not to condemn the ads, which the president did not do. Which by the way, parenthetically was a wise tactic for the president and his campaign.

Once that had occurred, Kerry needed one more thing. He needed to condemn an ad himself. And so, MoveOn.org provided that opportunity by doing an ad that was negative on President Bush‘s Vietnam non-military service in the National Guard. John Kerry, the nominee, then immediately condemns the Bush ad. That gives him an opportunity, within 48 hours of that, to call on President Bush to denounce the ad against John Kerry.

He could not have done that until he had all those ducks in a row. And then he also needed the investigative journalism that the “New York Times” and the “L.A. Times” and others have done to create a sensation, at least, of linkage to the Bush world and then blame the ad on President Bush.

John Kerry needed every one of those elements to be in place before he could level his attack and have it aimed specifically at one person, George Bush, his opponent.

OLBERMANN: And as the Kerry camp obviously tries to make this debate less about his service, what strategically does the president do next, A, to prevent that, B, to not look like he wrote the commercial and somebody‘s just been laundering the attack for him?

O‘DONNELL: It‘s very, very difficult to get a president to respond to anything. You see tonight, are footages of the president‘s spokesman responding to what Senator Kerry said. That‘s why the Kerry language now is getting more and more intense. They are trying to smoke out President Bush. They are trying to force it to the point where the traveling White House press corps must ask President Bush to respond to this.

President Bush really doesn‘t want to tactically, and tactically really should not, because the question to President Bush now that the Kerry campaign is trying to frame is, why don‘t you condemn the ads? President Bush doesn‘t want to condemn the ads because he then is, in effect, condemning a certain group of Vietnam veterans. He‘s not one of them, himself a Vietnam veteran, so it‘s difficult for him to do. He‘s also now doing better with veterans in polling in the current situation.

So, the best thing for President Bush to do is simply to say “I don‘t criticize John Kerry‘s record” and leave it at that and he‘s going to be forced on this question of “are you going to condemn it” and he‘s just going to have to continue to say no.

O’Donnell doesn’t comment on one of the elements of the counterattack — Bush’s history of dirty campaigning beginning to come back to haunt him. That’s the other side of the story. The NY Times story continues:

The president spoke on a day when Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, in another indication of its web of ties to the Republican Party, acknowledged that a woman who helped set it up and works for it is an officer of the Majority Leader’s Fund, a political action committee affiliated with the former House majority leader Dick Armey of Texas.

The name of the woman, Susan Arceneaux, is given as the contact person on the post office box that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth lists as its address. She is treasurer of the Majority Leader’s Fund. Records show that like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group receives significant financing from Bob Perry, a Texan who has long supported Mr. Bush, and his company, as well as Sam and Charles Wyly, prominent Texas Republican donors. Sam Wyly, under the name “Republicans for Clean Air,” took out advertisements in 2000 criticizing the environmental record of Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

Mr. Perry has donated $200,000 to the Swift boat group, records show, and Merrie Spaeth, a Republican strategist who has been advising the Swift boat group, was a spokeswoman for Sam Wyly’s advertising campaign in 2000.

Every day of the tit for tat is risky for both sides. But, I tend to think that Kerry losing the veterans is a lot less fatal than Bush losing the independents who don’t like dirty campaigning. We’ll see.