Q: Well, 2004, could you talk about the Democrats going into their convention? Their convention was before the Republican convention. And Kerry was already clearly the nominee. So it’s even more than ads, it’s a national stage for a candidate to make his case to a big audience, at length, and in detail. Over four days, really. Was that an advantage? Was that an opportunity that Kerry took full advantage of?
GEER: Well, it was an opportunity that Kerry took some advantage of, but I would certainly not say full advantage of. He left a couple things on the table that probably ended up costing him pretty heavily. You know, that convention was an effort to try to check the Republican advantage on national security, because of the 9/11 response, and Bush having all that credibility. [00:40:00]And he played his military experience, which of course, President Bush didn’t have. And I can remember when John Kerry came out, he saluted and said, “Reporting for duty.” And I thought, “Oh.” I thought, “You’re really playing this heavy.” And they told the positive story. And Kerry is a war hero. He’s decorated. I mean, people can complain about it one way or the other, but the record suggests that he’s definitely a war hero. And at minimum, he served in Vietnam, where of course, President Bush chose not to. So you have that fact. But what they didn’t do was to talk about the full story. They only accentuated the positive, and they didn’t tell about some of the things that John Kerry did when he got back to the States, after he did his service. And that allowed the Republicans to do that defining. And it was during the time when Kerry didn’t have a lot of money to fight back with, and I don’t know how seriously they took the attacks, but third-party ads started to come up, attacking mainly, now famously known as the Swift Boat ads came up. [00:41:00] But those Swift Boat ads were made possible, I think in part, because the Kerry people didn’t take time to tell the full story about Kerry’s military career in the post return of service. That’s not the right term, but —
Q: And describing what that was, what Kerry did after he came back from Vietnam.
GEER: That’s right. And so —
Q: Well, I’m asking you to describe.
GEER: Oh. Well, he came and he testified, and he talked about the problems in Vietnam, and what was going on there. And it sounded, by some, to be unpatriotic. But of course, what was going on in Iraq, a lot of people were complaining about the Iraq war at that very point in time, that it wasn’t necessarily unpatriotic. You could argue it was very patriotic. But Kerry had to make that case, rather than letting the Republicans fill in the vacuum. And that’s what happened. Especially when he had the national stage. I mean, he could have talked about that in a way that could have been quite powerful, and could have activated a lot of people. And people say, “Oh yeah, I can understand that,” because the Vietnam War was always controversial. [00:42:00]
Q: So here’s a case where, in terms of your theory, not taking the opportunity to present positive information about yourself. Not just positive images of yourself, but positive information, really hurt Kerry by setting him up for criticism on that score from the Bush campaign.
GEER: Yeah. I think that’s right. I mean, basically, you knew the negative stuff was going to come, and you should have been inoculating yourself much more effectively against it with your side of the story. And they just didn’t do that. And, you know, that whole campaign remains very controversial because of the Swift Boat ads, because it wasn’t an ad sponsored by the Bush people officially. But it tapped a reasonable conversation point.
Q: Let’s come back to the Swift Boat ad in a minute, but I’m also thinking about something you said earlier, and that is that the Democrats, at their convention, made a positive case for Kerry, but didn’t make the negative case [00:43:00] against the Bush administration. You know, here, the Bush people who are saying all through the campaign, “If you trust President Bush in the War on Terror, the War in Iraq is part of that.” And Kerry, with a message that, “No, the War in Iraq has nothing to do with the War on Terror. It’s a diversion from the War on Terror. A distraction from it.” Is that an argument he should have been making when they had the nation’s attention?
GEER: That’s a fair question. I think the answer is yes. I haven’t thought enough about that to give that a full, you know, really careful, and, you know, careful and thoughtful response that it warrants.
Q: What should they have attacked the Bush Administration for?
GEER: Yeah, I think they should have gone after the Iraq War. The difficulty was that he wasn’t the vehicle, because he had voted for it. And, you know, that issue came back to play in 2008. I mean, Barack Obama didn’t vote for it. Of course, he wasn’t in the US Senate at the time, and he had a beautiful pass on that. [00:44:00] And Senator [Hillary Rodham] Clinton voted for it. But that, you know, I think that if he had voted against it, he could have used that a lot more effectively. So they probably felt a little bit boxed in on that one. I think in the end, while I would — you know, we can make various interpretations, is that the 2004 campaign played out basically as the structure would have predicted. You had an incumbent with reasonable popularity, the big issue in his favor, the economy, was doing OK. Most of the kind of prediction models that are based on the structural futures suggested that Bush would win, and he did. And so it was going to be a tough campaign for Kerry, no matter what. And I think he made it tougher because of what he did in the 2004 convention.
Q: Well, let’s turn to the Swift Boat ad, because it’s probably the most famous example, other than the Willie Horton ad, of a political ad that the candidate and his campaign didn’t sponsor, but that came from some other source. So how are people supposed to — well, talk about how that ad came to be, [00:45:00] and why it was so effective.
GEER: Yeah. Well, I think the ad itself wasn’t effective, in the sense that the ad was only aired to a million Americans. The ad was effective because the news media chose to talk about it. So there were very few ad buys behind those ads. Excuse me. Aired in a handful of states, maybe a million Americans watched them. In September of 2004, 80% of Americans had said they had heard about the term “Swift Boat.” Well, where were they getting that from? They were getting it from the 24/7 news coverage about the Swift Boat ad that the news media were engaged in covering it. And so I think the ad had a big effect, but it wasn’t the ad itself. It was the coverage of the ad, and the way it shaped the entire narrative of the campaign to Bush’s advantage. Partly because again, getting back to the convention, that the Kerry people didn’t do their homework, in my opinion, in inoculating themselves against these kinds of attacks, so that, you know, why the news media chose to give this so much coverage was partly because Kerry [00:46:00] hadn’t told that story. And so it became news. And then, you know, the issue was, you know, did he in fact earn these medals? And, you know, is he really the war hero? And all these things are totally reasonable issues to cover. I think the news media went overboard, frankly, given the amount of attention it spent. I mean, that ad got more attention than any other ad in the history of presidential politics from the news media. I mean, huge amounts. I have a table somewhere, an article I’ve written since the book we’re talking about today. And the Swift Boat ad dwarfs all ads with it. The Daisy ad, which is supposedly a hugely controversial ad, you know, ten times more coverage of Swift Boat than the Daisy ad. Maybe even more than that. The Willie Horton ad, you know, again, much, much higher coverage. So the news media really covered this ad. I think probably in retrospect, they would never give another ad that kind of coverage, because they realized it went overboard. But still, it was a legitimate issue to cover, and the Kerry people didn’t handle it very effectively.
Q: Was this, to some extent, an artifact of [00:47:00] change in the news media? In other words, if this had been the ’60s when you have the three major broadcast networks period in terms of television, would that kind of media structure have picked up on this ad the way the transformed media, with multiple cable news stations, including Fox News, which was looking for ways to bring down the Democrats?
GEER: Well, and they just needed something to talk about, too. I mean, that’s the problem with 24/7 news. I mean, you know, Walter Cronkite era, we’ll call it. You know, they had to get their, you know, story together sometime early afternoon so they could produce it for that day, so that, you know, a deadline. But now, it’s constant. It’s all the time. You know, think about the coverage of the Malaysian jet and all that, the amount of attention it’s got. And again, partly because it’s of interest to some, to many people, but it’s also, you have to have fill. You have to cover something. And so I think that’s what’s going on. [00:48:00] And then, of course, it gets back to the early part, in the news, we like to cover the negative. And so it fills both the need to cover something, but also that it’s this, you know, juicy controversy that, you know, Kerry claims one thing, and these soldiers, or former soldiers claim something else, and it becomes a great story that got replayed again, and again, and again.