Ryan Lizza’s postmortem on John Kerry’s loss reveals the fundamental confusion in the Kerry campaign between strategy and tactics:
The largest caucus of recriminators, one that spans ideological boundaries and includes critics from every corner of the party, argues that Kerry failed to offer a compelling message. As Kerry seemed to realize in his speech Saturday night, the no-message critique is congealing into conventional wisdom. I heard it in every conceivable permutation from almost everyone I interviewed. “I don’t know that we ever knew what it was we were saying about George W. Bush,” says one senior member of the team, whose job it was to come up with a message about Bush. It was a problem that plagued the campaign as soon as they stumbled, penniless, from the primaries into the general election. “When we got into the general, nobody knew how to go against Bush,” says a senior campaign official. “[Senior adviser Bob] Shrum and [pollster Mark] Mellman built this strategy against Bush, ‘Stronger at home, respected in the world.’ What does that mean? We never even had strategy memos.” By the fall, things were no better. “If there was a clear message in September about why you elect Kerry and defeat Bush, most of the people in the campaign were unaware of it,” says one senior strategist hired late in the campaign.
The lack of message clarity hurt morale and sapped support for Kerry among his own people. “One thing I would always tell people is that I don’t know shit about John Kerry,” says a campaign official. “I had an opportunity to work on his campaign last December and I said, ‘Well, I don’t really know that guy.’ I still don’t. I don’t know what he stood for, other than an alternative to George Bush.” That Kerry lacked a clear message isn’t just a convenient postelection critique. It was a mantra during the campaign. Says a junior staffer, “I remember one day [Joe] Lockhart saying, after watching the evening news, ‘We have no message.’” It didn’t help that the Bush team was extremely effective in pushing its own message. “I don’t think we ever came up with a frame to define Bush in the way they did with Kerry,” says a senior official. “They woke up every day and said, ‘We’re going to call John Kerry a flip-flopper.’ We did not wake up every day and call Bush ‘X.’ We never gave voters a positive reason to vote for Kerry.”
The lack of message was made worse by the failure to articulate a compelling narrative. “People had a story about George Bush,” says a senior Kerry adviser. “The story was he was the accidental president who was transformed by 9/11 into a strong and serious leader. That kind of story matters to people.” Instead of a story, aides confess, the Kerry campaign had a laundry list of policy proposals, or, in the words of James Carville, a litany rather than a narrative. “The human mind revolves around a story,” says Carville. “Churches have litanies. Religions have a narrative…. It’s the way we think. But we’re selling a set of issue positions. The same thing always comes back: People always like our positions on the issues, and we always lose.”
Aides complain that the litany of issues filled the message vacuum. Inside the campaign, the message was known as jhos (pronounced “jay-hose”), which stood for jobs, health care, oil, and security. “jhos,” says a senior policy adviser, despondently. “That was our message. It was jhos. That was literally our message. And, by the way, someone made millions of dollars to come up with that.” That someone would be the political consulting firm Shrum, Devine, and Donilon, which is now receiving the brunt of criticism from demoralized staffers. The problem, aides say, is the lack of imagination Shrum and his colleagues exhibited. One common complaint is that they were slaves to polling data and used the research in a ridiculously literal way. Says a senior aide, “When you ask people, ‘What is the most important issue?’ and they say prescription drugs, [the consultants] say, ‘Well, if we run on prescription drugs, we’ll win.’” One aide repeatedly pressed Kerry to give a speech about welfare reform, since he had voted for Bill Clinton’s bill in 1996. The idea was rebuffed because welfare didn’t show up in polling as a key issue for voters. “It’s never going to be the top issue,” the aide complains. “If you call me on the phone, I’m not going to say that. But, if I hear you talk about welfare reform, it tells me something about your underlying character.” There seemed to be an insurmountable gulf between the consultants, at their best running issue-based Senate campaigns, and the other staffers, who pressed for Kerry to explain the values he would bring to office rather than just his specific proposals. “Things became increasingly programmatic rather than values-based,” says a senior adviser. “We were talking more and more about the specifics of our plan rather than the principles John Kerry would bring to bear in making those decisions.”
…In addition to jhos, Shrum is also taking a beating for the decision not to attack Bush. The swing voters in the focus groups said they didn’t want to see attack ads, so the campaign dutifully obeyed. “There was a belief within the campaign that you did not need, fundamentally, to raise these questions about Bush,” says one of the architects of the campaign’s strategy. “It was much more about John Kerry and filling in the picture on John Kerry and making him an acceptable alternative.” One of Kerry’s closest aides says, “I absolutely think the lack of negative campaigning killed us.” Aides argue that the absence of a negative case against Bush led directly to the absence of a coherent message overall. “The whole strategy was based on polling,” says one of Kerry’s senior advisers. “Mark Mellman always focused on swing voters. You’ve got to start making the case for change, but we were never allowed to do that because it scared the swing voters.”
The reality is that poll-driven tactics don’t work very well on their own. This is a point that Karl Rove and Bill Clinton understand, and Bob Shrum and Mark Mellman don’t. In 1992 and 2000, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did all kinds of things that didn’t speak to voters’ top issues. These gestures were intended to give voters signals about the kinds of candidates Clinton and Bush were, and to differentiate them from other members of their party. From Clinton’s criticism of Sister Souljah to Bush saying he wouldn’t balance the budget on the backs of the poor, both of them worked to set the meta-narrative of their candidacies. And later, both went negative in a serious way to make the election a referendum on the incumbent (or quasi-incumbent in Gore’s case), again using a consistent frame to create a meta-narrative about their opponent. These overall strategies drove the tactics that were adopted, not the other way around. It’s pretty clear that the Kerry campaign had no overall meta-narrative about their candidate or President Bush. And their apparently slavish devotion to following what “swing voters” say they want is hardly a substitute — any political scientist can tell you that everyone claims to hate negative ads, but they work.
The question for political science is when and to what extent speeches and advertising on issues where a candidate is at a disadvantage can help their campaign. Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar have published experimental findings indicating that politicians should never advertise on issues they don’t “own” because the ads end up helping their opponents instead. But many successful candidates like Bush in 2000, Clinton in 1992, or Brian Schweitzer in Montana this year have successfully neutralized issues traditionally used against members of their party by addressing them head-on.