Harold Titus's Blog, page 18
September 20, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2012 Election -- Obama's First Term: Disenfranchisement, Vilification
"No-one's ever asked to see my birth certificate," Mr Romney told a crowd of about 5,000 people at an event in a Detroit suburb.
"They know that this is the place that we were born and raised," he said, to laughter from the crowd.
The comments allude to a debunked conspiracy theory that Mr Obama, whose father was from Kenya, was not born in the US and is not eligible to be president.
…
Mr Romney is due to be officially appointed next week as the Republican nominee at the party's convention in Tampa, Florida (Romney’s 1-2).
Birther theories vary.
Some argue Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. Others, such as the one outlined in Iowa, focus on the fact that Obama's father was not a U.S. citizen, supposedly rendering his son ineligible for the Oval Office.
The Romney campaign would clearly prefer to focus on the economy and banish birth certificate talk to the “fever swamps” of the Internet, as Buzzfeed's Ben Smith recently labeled the sinister corners of the Web where conspiracy theories thrive.
Instead, birtherism is creeping more and more into the domain of GOP officialdom.
…
In North Carolina, the state GOP convention will be headlined next week by Donald Trump, whose 2011 crusade to unearth details about Obama's origins drew global attention and prompted the White House to release the president's long-form birth certificate.
The Romney campaign has since leveraged Trump as a campaign surrogate and fund-raiser (Hamby 1-2).
Voter Disenfranchisement
Between January 2011 and October 2012, governors signed into law twenty-three bills that imposed constraints on voting. Many of these measures mandated the presentation of a state-issued photo identification such as a driver’s license. In June 2012, the Republican majority in the Pennsylvania legislature took up the issue of voter identification cards, a topic of great interest to Republican-controlled legislatures in other states as well. The purported impetus for voter IDs was the prevalence of fraud—of voters presenting themselves at more than one polling station or of assuming someone else’s identity.
Typically, the poll worker at the voting location asks the voter his or her address and then the voter signs a document verifying his or her identity. Although the evidence for fraud in this system is only anecdotal – a study by the New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice calculated the incidence of individual voter fraud to be literally equivalent to the incidence of individual Americans getting struck by lightning—several states raced to address the “problem” before the 2012 presidential election.
The real motivation, however, was to suppress the minority (mainly African American and Hispanic) turnout. Some poor residents do not own a car and, therefore, have no driver’s license, and the process for obtaining a picture ID could be intimidating, inconvenient and/or expensive. The U.S. has no national identification card with a photo. Someone who does not have such a document would need to go to a government office and purchase a photo I.D., thus making it difficult for those (particularly poor) residents to arrange such a visit as well as the cost on a fixed budget. It is estimated that about 25 percent of black voters and 16 percent of Latino voters do not have a government-issued photo ID. The figure among the rest of the population is around 11 percent. Approximately 30 percent of students lack the most common government-issued ID, a driver’s license. And young people, especially those between the ages of 18 and 29 tend to vote Democratic by substantial majorities.
Voter ID laws, if allowed to stand, would have clearly suppressed the minority vote. And that was the point. Mike Turzai, the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives divulged the real reason for the legislation: “Voter ID is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” Since almost all black and Hispanic voters would cast their ballots for President Obama, the statement revealed the motivation behind the move to fix alleged voter fraud.
Republicans also initiated other procedures designed to suppress minority voting. In nine states that passed voter ID laws, the government office to obtain them often kept irregular hours. For example, the Woodville, Mississippi, office opened only on the second Thursday of every month. That was more accommodating than Wisconsin’s Sauk City office, which was open only on the fifth Wednesday of every month. Eight months of the year do not have a fifth Wednesday, meaning the office was open only four days for the entire year.
Texas and Florida went further in their attack on alleged voter fraud. Both states targeted nonprofit organizations that conduct voter registration drives, such as the League of Women Voters and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The states placed new training requirements and liability burdens on the groups’ volunteers. It was estimated that roughly twice as many blacks and Latinos register through such organizations as whites.
Republicans also favored shorter polling hours, arguing that keeping the polls open too long was too expensive. This made it difficult for voters who worked early in the morning or until the late evening hours to vote. Republicans also mobilized against early voting, especially on Sundays. In 2008, in Hamilton County, Ohio (which includes Cincinnati) 42 percent of early voters were black. As for Sunday voting, conservative commentator Glenn Beck called it “an affront to God.” The real reason behind the Sunday ban movement was that black churches provided transportation to the polls following Sunday services. Ohio and Florida eliminated Sunday voting for the 2012 presidential election. Both were swing states.
Doug Preisse, a Republican official from Columbus, Ohio, explained, “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban (read African American) voter-turnout machine.” When courts struck down Ohio’s assault on early voting, billboards appeared in black neighborhoods in Cleveland with a picture of a judge’s gavel and the words: “VOTER FRAUD IS A FELONY: UP TO 3½ YEARS & $10,000 FINE.” The billboards’ owner is part of the Bain Capital Group, which Mitt Romney headed in the 1990s.
Federal courts struck down or stayed most of these attempts at voter suppression. The major impact of these measures was to spur minority voting. African Americans were especially incensed at these veiled attempts to deny their right to vote, attempts that were reminiscent of the Jim Crow era when subterfuges such as literacy tests and poll taxes effectively reduced African American voting (Goldfields 5-8).
Smears
Barack Obama may, or may not, deserve reelection. But no man with as much decency as Obama exhibits in both his private and public life deserves the contempt that has been dumped on him by arch-conservative ideologues, talk show ranters and Internet goons.
From Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Donald Trump to all the anonymous creators of the wild fabrications that churn out of websites and go viral in emails, the relentless vilification of Obama has been unprecedented. Sure, every president suffers unfair criticism. Many of our most effective presidents, from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, have been slandered and hounded by critics. But Obama’s detractors have plumbed new and revolting depths of mendacity.
Obama’s birthplace, his paternity, his religion, his academic attainments, his citizenship and his loyalty to the country have all been called into question by people who feel no moral qualms about spreading fabrications and untruths. Any unfair tactic, any lie is justified in order to “take back America” from someone they refuse to accept as a legitimate president, despite the indisputable reality that he was elected by a majority of American voters in a near-landslide of electoral votes.
It is a false equivalence to say the left has been guilty of similar smears during the administrations of Republican presidents. In those past instances, all but a few Democratic elected officials shunned such slanders. The same was true for all but the most rabid liberal commentators. But most of today’s Republican leaders stay silent in the face of the lies and many eagerly repeat them, while leading conservative pundits give the endless falsehoods credence, not an honest critique.
The right wing’s eagerness to engage in deceit has distorted credible conservatism and corrupted political discourse. It has turned the Grand Old Party into a rigid and narrow ideological club that tries to purge any Republican who displays even a hint of moderation or willingness to compromise (Horsey 1).
Today on his radio show, Rush Limbaugh claimed that he got a phone call during a break that revealed Barack Obama had the “lowest grades ever in Harvard, never went to class.” This, of course, is a complete lie.
…
It’s quite well known that Obama graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law School in 1991, a designation based soley upon grades which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only is it impossible for Obama to have had the “lowest grades that any Harvard graduate ever got,” but also that Obama was one of the top students at Harvard Law School.
…
Limbaugh’s attacks on Obama are more than just intellectual jealousy and ignorance about higher education. It’s hard not to see racism when a white dropout accuses a black man with academic honors of receiving preferential treatment based on race, despite clear proof of the contrary. … Limbaugh has repeatedly made racist comments about Obama. When Limbaugh declares that Obama got fake grades at Harvard and dismisses him as a beneficiary of affirmative action, he’s not just lying; Limbaugh is also trying to provoke racist feelings among his audience (Wilson “Rush” 1-2).
Six times on his show today, Rush “accidentally” referred to Obama as “Osama.” And Limbaugh reached his lowest point by claiming that Obama only went after Bin Laden for political opportunism. At a moment when America was united by relief at Bin Laden finally being found, Limbaugh turned it into an opportunity for sleazy partisanship to smear his political enemies (Wilson “Limbaugh” 2-3).
Michelle Obama was not spared.
The internet was buzzing Tuesday night with video of First Lady Michelle Obama apparently showing extreme disrespect to the American flag at a ceremony in honor of the victims of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. As police and firefighters fold the flag to the sound of marching bagpipers, a skeptical looking Mrs. Obama leans to her husband and appears to say, “all this just for a flag.” She then purses her lips and shakes her head slightly as Mr. Obama nods.
Fox's Juan Williams claimed that Michelle Obama's instinct is to “blame America. ”Fox News contributor Juan Williams baselessly attacked Michelle Obama, claiming that “her instinct is to start with this 'blame America' ... stuff.” Williams asserted that Michelle Obama's “instinct” is to “blame America” or be “the victim.”
Fox's [Laura] Ingraham directed GOP To oppose Michelle Obama's efforts To fight childhood obesity.
Andrew Breitbart's website published a cartoon of an overweight Michelle Obama saying “Shut up And pass the bacon!” Taking a cue from Rush Limbaugh's nickname for the first lady -- “Michelle, My Butt” -- one of Andrew Breitbart's websites posted a cartoon of an overweight Michelle Obama eating a plate-full of hamburgers and saying: “Shut up and pass the bacon!”
Limbaugh Told Michelle Obama …:“If you're gonna tell everybody to eat twigs and berries ... you had better look like an Ethiopian” [and] President Obama's limousine “weighs eight tons without Michelle in it” (Krepel and Rosenberg 1-4).
Four days before Barack Obama was sworn into office, a prominent radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, told his conservative listeners that a major American publication had asked him to write 400 words on his hopes for the Obama presidency.
“I…don’t need 400 words,” he said, “I need four: I hope he fails” (Debusmann 1).
Works cited:
Debusmann, Bernd, “The Lucrative Business of Obama-Bashing.” Reuters, October 22, 2009. Web. http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate...
Goldfields, David, “What We Can Learn about America from the 2012 Presidential Election.” American Studies Journal, 58 (2014). Web. June 9, 2020. http://www.asjournal.org/58-2014/what...
Hamby, Peter, “Despite a Frustrated GOP, Anti-Obama 'Birthers' Still Persist.” CNN, May 23, 2012. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/23/politi...
Horsey, David, “Romney Victory Would Vindicate Right-Wing Smears of Obama.” Los Angeles Times, October 30, 2012. Web. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/topof...
Krepel, Terry, and Rosenberg, Leslie, “Michelle Obama Derangement Syndrome: Four Years, 40 Smears.” Media Matters, September 4, 2012. Web. https://www.mediamatters.org/barack-o...
“Romney's 'Birther' Jibe Upsets Obama Campaign.” BBC News, August 24, 2012. Web. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-can...
Wilson, John K., “Limbaugh Smears “Osama” 6 Times.” Daily Kos, May 2, 2011. Web. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011...-
Wilson, John K., “Rush Limbaugh’s False Smears about Obama’s Harvard Record.” Academe Blog, August 2, 2012. Web. https://academeblog.org/2012/08/02/ru...
"They know that this is the place that we were born and raised," he said, to laughter from the crowd.
The comments allude to a debunked conspiracy theory that Mr Obama, whose father was from Kenya, was not born in the US and is not eligible to be president.
…
Mr Romney is due to be officially appointed next week as the Republican nominee at the party's convention in Tampa, Florida (Romney’s 1-2).
Birther theories vary.
Some argue Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. Others, such as the one outlined in Iowa, focus on the fact that Obama's father was not a U.S. citizen, supposedly rendering his son ineligible for the Oval Office.
The Romney campaign would clearly prefer to focus on the economy and banish birth certificate talk to the “fever swamps” of the Internet, as Buzzfeed's Ben Smith recently labeled the sinister corners of the Web where conspiracy theories thrive.
Instead, birtherism is creeping more and more into the domain of GOP officialdom.
…
In North Carolina, the state GOP convention will be headlined next week by Donald Trump, whose 2011 crusade to unearth details about Obama's origins drew global attention and prompted the White House to release the president's long-form birth certificate.
The Romney campaign has since leveraged Trump as a campaign surrogate and fund-raiser (Hamby 1-2).
Voter Disenfranchisement
Between January 2011 and October 2012, governors signed into law twenty-three bills that imposed constraints on voting. Many of these measures mandated the presentation of a state-issued photo identification such as a driver’s license. In June 2012, the Republican majority in the Pennsylvania legislature took up the issue of voter identification cards, a topic of great interest to Republican-controlled legislatures in other states as well. The purported impetus for voter IDs was the prevalence of fraud—of voters presenting themselves at more than one polling station or of assuming someone else’s identity.
Typically, the poll worker at the voting location asks the voter his or her address and then the voter signs a document verifying his or her identity. Although the evidence for fraud in this system is only anecdotal – a study by the New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice calculated the incidence of individual voter fraud to be literally equivalent to the incidence of individual Americans getting struck by lightning—several states raced to address the “problem” before the 2012 presidential election.
The real motivation, however, was to suppress the minority (mainly African American and Hispanic) turnout. Some poor residents do not own a car and, therefore, have no driver’s license, and the process for obtaining a picture ID could be intimidating, inconvenient and/or expensive. The U.S. has no national identification card with a photo. Someone who does not have such a document would need to go to a government office and purchase a photo I.D., thus making it difficult for those (particularly poor) residents to arrange such a visit as well as the cost on a fixed budget. It is estimated that about 25 percent of black voters and 16 percent of Latino voters do not have a government-issued photo ID. The figure among the rest of the population is around 11 percent. Approximately 30 percent of students lack the most common government-issued ID, a driver’s license. And young people, especially those between the ages of 18 and 29 tend to vote Democratic by substantial majorities.
Voter ID laws, if allowed to stand, would have clearly suppressed the minority vote. And that was the point. Mike Turzai, the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives divulged the real reason for the legislation: “Voter ID is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” Since almost all black and Hispanic voters would cast their ballots for President Obama, the statement revealed the motivation behind the move to fix alleged voter fraud.
Republicans also initiated other procedures designed to suppress minority voting. In nine states that passed voter ID laws, the government office to obtain them often kept irregular hours. For example, the Woodville, Mississippi, office opened only on the second Thursday of every month. That was more accommodating than Wisconsin’s Sauk City office, which was open only on the fifth Wednesday of every month. Eight months of the year do not have a fifth Wednesday, meaning the office was open only four days for the entire year.
Texas and Florida went further in their attack on alleged voter fraud. Both states targeted nonprofit organizations that conduct voter registration drives, such as the League of Women Voters and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The states placed new training requirements and liability burdens on the groups’ volunteers. It was estimated that roughly twice as many blacks and Latinos register through such organizations as whites.
Republicans also favored shorter polling hours, arguing that keeping the polls open too long was too expensive. This made it difficult for voters who worked early in the morning or until the late evening hours to vote. Republicans also mobilized against early voting, especially on Sundays. In 2008, in Hamilton County, Ohio (which includes Cincinnati) 42 percent of early voters were black. As for Sunday voting, conservative commentator Glenn Beck called it “an affront to God.” The real reason behind the Sunday ban movement was that black churches provided transportation to the polls following Sunday services. Ohio and Florida eliminated Sunday voting for the 2012 presidential election. Both were swing states.
Doug Preisse, a Republican official from Columbus, Ohio, explained, “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban (read African American) voter-turnout machine.” When courts struck down Ohio’s assault on early voting, billboards appeared in black neighborhoods in Cleveland with a picture of a judge’s gavel and the words: “VOTER FRAUD IS A FELONY: UP TO 3½ YEARS & $10,000 FINE.” The billboards’ owner is part of the Bain Capital Group, which Mitt Romney headed in the 1990s.
Federal courts struck down or stayed most of these attempts at voter suppression. The major impact of these measures was to spur minority voting. African Americans were especially incensed at these veiled attempts to deny their right to vote, attempts that were reminiscent of the Jim Crow era when subterfuges such as literacy tests and poll taxes effectively reduced African American voting (Goldfields 5-8).
Smears
Barack Obama may, or may not, deserve reelection. But no man with as much decency as Obama exhibits in both his private and public life deserves the contempt that has been dumped on him by arch-conservative ideologues, talk show ranters and Internet goons.
From Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Donald Trump to all the anonymous creators of the wild fabrications that churn out of websites and go viral in emails, the relentless vilification of Obama has been unprecedented. Sure, every president suffers unfair criticism. Many of our most effective presidents, from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, have been slandered and hounded by critics. But Obama’s detractors have plumbed new and revolting depths of mendacity.
Obama’s birthplace, his paternity, his religion, his academic attainments, his citizenship and his loyalty to the country have all been called into question by people who feel no moral qualms about spreading fabrications and untruths. Any unfair tactic, any lie is justified in order to “take back America” from someone they refuse to accept as a legitimate president, despite the indisputable reality that he was elected by a majority of American voters in a near-landslide of electoral votes.
It is a false equivalence to say the left has been guilty of similar smears during the administrations of Republican presidents. In those past instances, all but a few Democratic elected officials shunned such slanders. The same was true for all but the most rabid liberal commentators. But most of today’s Republican leaders stay silent in the face of the lies and many eagerly repeat them, while leading conservative pundits give the endless falsehoods credence, not an honest critique.
The right wing’s eagerness to engage in deceit has distorted credible conservatism and corrupted political discourse. It has turned the Grand Old Party into a rigid and narrow ideological club that tries to purge any Republican who displays even a hint of moderation or willingness to compromise (Horsey 1).
Today on his radio show, Rush Limbaugh claimed that he got a phone call during a break that revealed Barack Obama had the “lowest grades ever in Harvard, never went to class.” This, of course, is a complete lie.
…
It’s quite well known that Obama graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law School in 1991, a designation based soley upon grades which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only is it impossible for Obama to have had the “lowest grades that any Harvard graduate ever got,” but also that Obama was one of the top students at Harvard Law School.
…
Limbaugh’s attacks on Obama are more than just intellectual jealousy and ignorance about higher education. It’s hard not to see racism when a white dropout accuses a black man with academic honors of receiving preferential treatment based on race, despite clear proof of the contrary. … Limbaugh has repeatedly made racist comments about Obama. When Limbaugh declares that Obama got fake grades at Harvard and dismisses him as a beneficiary of affirmative action, he’s not just lying; Limbaugh is also trying to provoke racist feelings among his audience (Wilson “Rush” 1-2).
Six times on his show today, Rush “accidentally” referred to Obama as “Osama.” And Limbaugh reached his lowest point by claiming that Obama only went after Bin Laden for political opportunism. At a moment when America was united by relief at Bin Laden finally being found, Limbaugh turned it into an opportunity for sleazy partisanship to smear his political enemies (Wilson “Limbaugh” 2-3).
Michelle Obama was not spared.
The internet was buzzing Tuesday night with video of First Lady Michelle Obama apparently showing extreme disrespect to the American flag at a ceremony in honor of the victims of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. As police and firefighters fold the flag to the sound of marching bagpipers, a skeptical looking Mrs. Obama leans to her husband and appears to say, “all this just for a flag.” She then purses her lips and shakes her head slightly as Mr. Obama nods.
Fox's Juan Williams claimed that Michelle Obama's instinct is to “blame America. ”Fox News contributor Juan Williams baselessly attacked Michelle Obama, claiming that “her instinct is to start with this 'blame America' ... stuff.” Williams asserted that Michelle Obama's “instinct” is to “blame America” or be “the victim.”
Fox's [Laura] Ingraham directed GOP To oppose Michelle Obama's efforts To fight childhood obesity.
Andrew Breitbart's website published a cartoon of an overweight Michelle Obama saying “Shut up And pass the bacon!” Taking a cue from Rush Limbaugh's nickname for the first lady -- “Michelle, My Butt” -- one of Andrew Breitbart's websites posted a cartoon of an overweight Michelle Obama eating a plate-full of hamburgers and saying: “Shut up and pass the bacon!”
Limbaugh Told Michelle Obama …:“If you're gonna tell everybody to eat twigs and berries ... you had better look like an Ethiopian” [and] President Obama's limousine “weighs eight tons without Michelle in it” (Krepel and Rosenberg 1-4).
Four days before Barack Obama was sworn into office, a prominent radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, told his conservative listeners that a major American publication had asked him to write 400 words on his hopes for the Obama presidency.
“I…don’t need 400 words,” he said, “I need four: I hope he fails” (Debusmann 1).
Works cited:
Debusmann, Bernd, “The Lucrative Business of Obama-Bashing.” Reuters, October 22, 2009. Web. http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate...
Goldfields, David, “What We Can Learn about America from the 2012 Presidential Election.” American Studies Journal, 58 (2014). Web. June 9, 2020. http://www.asjournal.org/58-2014/what...
Hamby, Peter, “Despite a Frustrated GOP, Anti-Obama 'Birthers' Still Persist.” CNN, May 23, 2012. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2012/05/23/politi...
Horsey, David, “Romney Victory Would Vindicate Right-Wing Smears of Obama.” Los Angeles Times, October 30, 2012. Web. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/topof...
Krepel, Terry, and Rosenberg, Leslie, “Michelle Obama Derangement Syndrome: Four Years, 40 Smears.” Media Matters, September 4, 2012. Web. https://www.mediamatters.org/barack-o...
“Romney's 'Birther' Jibe Upsets Obama Campaign.” BBC News, August 24, 2012. Web. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-can...
Wilson, John K., “Limbaugh Smears “Osama” 6 Times.” Daily Kos, May 2, 2011. Web. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011...-
Wilson, John K., “Rush Limbaugh’s False Smears about Obama’s Harvard Record.” Academe Blog, August 2, 2012. Web. https://academeblog.org/2012/08/02/ru...
September 17, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2012 Election -- Results
2012 Election Results
Candidate
Party
Electoral Votes
Popular Votes
✓
Barack H. Obama (I)
Democratic
332
65,446,032
W. Mitt Romney
Republican
206
60,589,084
Gary Johnson
Libertarian
0
1,275,971
2012 Election Facts
• Issues of the Day: Role of government, Spending & tax rates, Nuclear Iran, Arab Spring, Global warming, Campaign finance
• Obama only the 2nd president (Wilson, 1916) to be elected to a second term with fewer electoral votes than earned when winning first term
• Few Battlegrounds: Despite a fairly competitive race overall, only four states were decided by less than a 5% popular vote margin
• Electoral Vote changes for 2012 based on 2010 Census: [+4 TX], [+2: FL], [+1: AZ, GA, NV, SC, UT, WA],
[-1: IA, IL, LA, MA, MI, MO, NJ, PA], [-2: NY, OH]
• More Census: First time that CA hasn't gained an electoral vote in reapportionment; 7th consecutive time NY has lost 2 or more; TX gain of 4 most since CA gained 7 after 1990 count
The 2012 United States presidential election was the 57th quadrennial American presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. The Democratic nominee, President Barack Obama, and his running mate, Vice President Joe Biden, were elected to a second term. They defeated the Republican ticket of former Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
As the incumbent president, Obama secured the Democratic nomination with no serious opposition. The Republicans experienced a competitive primary. Romney was consistently competitive in the polls and won the support of many party leaders, but he faced challenges.from a number of more conservative contenders. Romney clinched his party's nomination in May, defeating Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and several other candidates.
The campaigns focused heavily on domestic issues, and debate centered largely around sound responses to the Great Recession. Other issues included long-term federal budget issues, the future of social insurance programs, and the Affordable Care Act, Obama's marquee legislative program. Foreign policy was also discussed, including the phase-out of the Iraq War, military spending, the Iranian nuclear program, and appropriate counteractions to terrorism. The campaign was marked by a sharp rise in fundraising, including from nominally independent Super PACs.
Obama defeated Romney, winning a majority of both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Obama won 51.1% of the popular vote compared to Romney's 47.2%. Obama was the first incumbent since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944 to win reelection with fewer electoral votes and a lower popular vote percentage than had been won in the previous election, and was also the first two-term president since Ronald Reagan to win both his presidential bids with a majority of the nationwide popular vote (2012 1-2).
As with previous presidential elections, the contest hung on the swing states—those states where the pre-election polls indicated a race too close to call. Depending on the media outlet, those states numbered anywhere from six to nine. This is where the election took place. The other states were so solidly behind one or the other candidate that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Not so the swing states.
Most of the parties’ face-to-face campaigning and political advertising concentrated in the swing states. The candidates made occasional forays into states such as California and New York (both solidly Democratic) or Texas (solidly Republican) only for fund-raising not for on-the-ground campaigning. The election-day surprise was that Barack Obama lost only one swing state—North Carolina—and that by a margin of less than one percent. In fact, the president lost only two states he won in 2008: Indiana and North Carolina. This was a remarkable feat considering the pundits’ predictions of a very close election.
The second surprise was the remarkable turnout of the African American electorate. Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the registration of black voters has grown to be equal to that of white registrants: slightly better than two-thirds of the eligible electorate. However, turnout among black voters has historically been less than the turnout among whites. Turnout is often a function of class: poor people vote less often than more affluent voters. Turnout is also a function of opportunity: the ease of accessing polling places, the time to wait in lines, and the weather. Poorer people, tied to jobs, family care issues, and the daily grind of survival may have priorities that take precedence over casting a ballot on a given day.
In recent years, however, changes in the voting process have enabled less affluent voters to vote on a more flexible schedule. Many states have installed early voting procedures that allow registrants to cast ballots as much as three weeks prior to the election day (the first Tuesday in November). Also, the registration process has become easier, with more venues open to enroll voters. Finally, particularly in those states and counties (mostly in the South), the 1965 Voting Rights Act has required any change in the electoral process to be pre-cleared by Washington for its impact on minority voting rights. (The U.S. Supreme Court struck down this pre-clearance provision of the Act in an Alabama case, Shelby County v. Holder, on June 25, 2013.)
Still, many of these features were in place during the 2008 presidential election, including, and most important, the presence of a black candidate at the head of a major party ticket. Yet, the turnout among white voters was higher than that of black voters in the 2008 contest. What motivated African Americans in 2012, was not only the possibility of re-electing Barack Obama, but also the assault on their voting rights by various Republican-led state legislatures.
…
According to a U.S. Census Bureau report, 66.2 percent of eligible blacks voted in the 2012 election, compared with 64.1 percent of eligible non-Hispanic whites. The national turnout rate for all voters was 61.8 percent. Marvin Randolph, the NAACP’s senior vice president for campaigns explained, “We are accustomed to people trying to deny us things, and I think sometimes you wake the sleeping giant, and that’s what happened here.”
Such motivation made an impact, particularly in the swing states. In Ohio—and no Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio—the African American vote increased from 11 percent of the total vote in 2008 to 15 percent of the total vote in 2012.
...
… Overall, a record 71 percent of Hispanic voters supported the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama in 2012. This is astounding considering that Republican President George W. Bush received 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004 (“US Elections”; Lizza 50).
The major reason for the shift toward the Democrats was Republican hostility to immigration reform, or at least to a reform that would address the status of 11 million undocumented immigrants (the vast majority of whom are Hispanic), and particularly their children, in a compassionate manner.
In addition, Republican legislatures in Arizona and Alabama passed highly restrictive immigration laws allowing, among other provisions, law enforcement authorities to stop anyone and ask for documentation that the individual was in the U.S. legally. This is racial profiling. During the Republican primary, candidate Mitt Romney advocated “self deportation” as a strategy for undocumented immigrants, an awkward phrase that further alienated Hispanic voters.
The Republicans’ position also alienated other immigrant groups, especially Asian immigrants. In 1992, Republican President George H.W. Bush received 57 percent of the Asian vote. Twenty years later, Barack Obama received 73 percent of the Asian vote. Although accounting for only 3 percent of the total voter turnout, Asians will increase their numbers in the coming years, as will Hispanics. The electoral influence of both groups exceeds their raw numbers since many immigrants are concentrated in swing states such as Colorado, Ohio, and Florida.
Another demographic trend is also disadvantageous to the fortunes of the Republican Party: the declining percentage of non-Hispanic whites in the electorate. Though the Republicans achieved 59 percent of the non-Hispanic white vote, accounting for 72 percent of the total turnout, their numbers continue to fall vis-à-vis other ethnic and racial groups. In 1992, non-Hispanic whites accounted for 87 percent of the voters; that figure has declined by at least three percentage points in every ensuing presidential election. And even though Republican candidate Mitt Romney received robust support from whites, some of this strength came from parts of the country, particularly in the Deep South and the Plains, where state populations and hence electoral votes are relatively small.
While the Republicans were losing the new ethnic vote, they were also bucking age, family status, gender, and religious trends. President Obama won the youngest age cohort (18-29 years) with 60 percent of the vote, and the next youngest age cohort (30-44) with 52 percent of the vote. Together, these age cohorts comprised 45 percent of the total turnout. Romney was most competitive in the 60 and older category, winning 54 percent of that vote. However, it is not necessary to consult actuarial tables to know that it is not a winning strategy to depend upon an increasingly aging cohort for political support. Plus, political scientists argue that a person’s first vote for a political party is a strong indication of future voting for that party. The youngest age cohort was especially important in the swing states of Ohio, Florida, and Virginia where the Obama campaign targeted these voters in particular.
The U.S. Census has chronicled the changing nature of the American family, particularly the growth in the number of unmarried individuals, of working and single mothers with children under the age of 18, and of the numbers of gay households. Gays and unmarried women in particular viewed the Republican Party as hostile to their interests. Barack Obama received 76 percent of the gay vote, 62 percent of the vote of unmarried voters, and 62 percent of working mothers with children under the age of 18. Mitt Romney captured 60 percent of the married vote. Unmarried voters accounted for 41 percent of the total electorate.
Although the gender gap was not nearly as large as it was in 2008, President Obama received 55 percent of women’s votes and 47 percent of the men’s. Since women voted at higher rates than men—53 percent to 47 percent—the Democrats’ advantage is magnified in that demographic as well (“Gender Gap”).
Religion has always played an important role in American politics, and the 2012 election was no exception. While the Tea Party portion of the Republican Party stressed that its members stand for much more than opposition to abortion and gay rights, the religious right has found a comfortable home in the Republican Party. But a Pew Research survey indicated that nearly one out of five Americans claims no religious affiliation at all, a record high. Plus, opposition to gay marriage is becoming an increasingly minority position in the nation. Mitt Romney’s greatest strength came from white Protestants—at one time the majority of the nation’s electorate. Today, they account for 39 percent of the turnout. Romney won a commanding 69 percent of that vote.
President Obama continued to receive strong support outside the white Protestant group. Jewish voters gave Obama 69 percent of their votes. Obama won 50 percent of the Catholic vote, reflecting his strong support in the Hispanic community. And black Protestants voted overwhelmingly (better than 95 percent) for the president. Together, Catholic and Jewish voters comprised 27 percent of the turnout in 2012, and they provided key votes in the swing states of Ohio and, especially, Florida (“How the Faithful Voted”).
The Democrats did better than the Republicans in the big cities—69 to 29 percent—and they split the suburban vote, but lost overwhelmingly to Mitt Romney in small towns and rural areas. The difficulty for Republicans is that there are many more votes in cities and suburbs (69 percent) than in small towns and rural areas (31 percent). A look at the 2012 electoral map reinforces this perspective. Mitt Romney won nearly half of the states (twenty-four), but was swamped in the Electoral College.
American political parties are coalitions. Based on the 2008 presidential election and reinforced by the 2012 vote, the Democratic Party is a party that attracts younger voters, women, especially unmarried women, multi-racial constituents, those who live in cities, especially in the coastal states, and secular voters, Jews, and Catholics.
Republican voters tend to be older, male, married, and mostly white. They live in rural areas, small towns, and are especially numerous in the heartland states. They are likely to be regular churchgoers, mainly Protestant and particularly evangelical Protestant (Goldfields 2-3, 8-10).
Works cited:
“2012 Presidential Election.” 270 to Win. Web. https://www.270towin.com/2012_Election/
Goldfields, David, “What We Can Learn about America from the 2012 Presidential Election.” American Studies Journal, 58 (2014). Web. June 9, 2020. http://www.asjournal.org/58-2014/what...
Candidate
Party
Electoral Votes
Popular Votes
✓
Barack H. Obama (I)
Democratic
332
65,446,032
W. Mitt Romney
Republican
206
60,589,084
Gary Johnson
Libertarian
0
1,275,971
2012 Election Facts
• Issues of the Day: Role of government, Spending & tax rates, Nuclear Iran, Arab Spring, Global warming, Campaign finance
• Obama only the 2nd president (Wilson, 1916) to be elected to a second term with fewer electoral votes than earned when winning first term
• Few Battlegrounds: Despite a fairly competitive race overall, only four states were decided by less than a 5% popular vote margin
• Electoral Vote changes for 2012 based on 2010 Census: [+4 TX], [+2: FL], [+1: AZ, GA, NV, SC, UT, WA],
[-1: IA, IL, LA, MA, MI, MO, NJ, PA], [-2: NY, OH]
• More Census: First time that CA hasn't gained an electoral vote in reapportionment; 7th consecutive time NY has lost 2 or more; TX gain of 4 most since CA gained 7 after 1990 count
The 2012 United States presidential election was the 57th quadrennial American presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. The Democratic nominee, President Barack Obama, and his running mate, Vice President Joe Biden, were elected to a second term. They defeated the Republican ticket of former Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
As the incumbent president, Obama secured the Democratic nomination with no serious opposition. The Republicans experienced a competitive primary. Romney was consistently competitive in the polls and won the support of many party leaders, but he faced challenges.from a number of more conservative contenders. Romney clinched his party's nomination in May, defeating Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and several other candidates.
The campaigns focused heavily on domestic issues, and debate centered largely around sound responses to the Great Recession. Other issues included long-term federal budget issues, the future of social insurance programs, and the Affordable Care Act, Obama's marquee legislative program. Foreign policy was also discussed, including the phase-out of the Iraq War, military spending, the Iranian nuclear program, and appropriate counteractions to terrorism. The campaign was marked by a sharp rise in fundraising, including from nominally independent Super PACs.
Obama defeated Romney, winning a majority of both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Obama won 51.1% of the popular vote compared to Romney's 47.2%. Obama was the first incumbent since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944 to win reelection with fewer electoral votes and a lower popular vote percentage than had been won in the previous election, and was also the first two-term president since Ronald Reagan to win both his presidential bids with a majority of the nationwide popular vote (2012 1-2).
As with previous presidential elections, the contest hung on the swing states—those states where the pre-election polls indicated a race too close to call. Depending on the media outlet, those states numbered anywhere from six to nine. This is where the election took place. The other states were so solidly behind one or the other candidate that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Not so the swing states.
Most of the parties’ face-to-face campaigning and political advertising concentrated in the swing states. The candidates made occasional forays into states such as California and New York (both solidly Democratic) or Texas (solidly Republican) only for fund-raising not for on-the-ground campaigning. The election-day surprise was that Barack Obama lost only one swing state—North Carolina—and that by a margin of less than one percent. In fact, the president lost only two states he won in 2008: Indiana and North Carolina. This was a remarkable feat considering the pundits’ predictions of a very close election.
The second surprise was the remarkable turnout of the African American electorate. Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the registration of black voters has grown to be equal to that of white registrants: slightly better than two-thirds of the eligible electorate. However, turnout among black voters has historically been less than the turnout among whites. Turnout is often a function of class: poor people vote less often than more affluent voters. Turnout is also a function of opportunity: the ease of accessing polling places, the time to wait in lines, and the weather. Poorer people, tied to jobs, family care issues, and the daily grind of survival may have priorities that take precedence over casting a ballot on a given day.
In recent years, however, changes in the voting process have enabled less affluent voters to vote on a more flexible schedule. Many states have installed early voting procedures that allow registrants to cast ballots as much as three weeks prior to the election day (the first Tuesday in November). Also, the registration process has become easier, with more venues open to enroll voters. Finally, particularly in those states and counties (mostly in the South), the 1965 Voting Rights Act has required any change in the electoral process to be pre-cleared by Washington for its impact on minority voting rights. (The U.S. Supreme Court struck down this pre-clearance provision of the Act in an Alabama case, Shelby County v. Holder, on June 25, 2013.)
Still, many of these features were in place during the 2008 presidential election, including, and most important, the presence of a black candidate at the head of a major party ticket. Yet, the turnout among white voters was higher than that of black voters in the 2008 contest. What motivated African Americans in 2012, was not only the possibility of re-electing Barack Obama, but also the assault on their voting rights by various Republican-led state legislatures.
…
According to a U.S. Census Bureau report, 66.2 percent of eligible blacks voted in the 2012 election, compared with 64.1 percent of eligible non-Hispanic whites. The national turnout rate for all voters was 61.8 percent. Marvin Randolph, the NAACP’s senior vice president for campaigns explained, “We are accustomed to people trying to deny us things, and I think sometimes you wake the sleeping giant, and that’s what happened here.”
Such motivation made an impact, particularly in the swing states. In Ohio—and no Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio—the African American vote increased from 11 percent of the total vote in 2008 to 15 percent of the total vote in 2012.
...
… Overall, a record 71 percent of Hispanic voters supported the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama in 2012. This is astounding considering that Republican President George W. Bush received 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004 (“US Elections”; Lizza 50).
The major reason for the shift toward the Democrats was Republican hostility to immigration reform, or at least to a reform that would address the status of 11 million undocumented immigrants (the vast majority of whom are Hispanic), and particularly their children, in a compassionate manner.
In addition, Republican legislatures in Arizona and Alabama passed highly restrictive immigration laws allowing, among other provisions, law enforcement authorities to stop anyone and ask for documentation that the individual was in the U.S. legally. This is racial profiling. During the Republican primary, candidate Mitt Romney advocated “self deportation” as a strategy for undocumented immigrants, an awkward phrase that further alienated Hispanic voters.
The Republicans’ position also alienated other immigrant groups, especially Asian immigrants. In 1992, Republican President George H.W. Bush received 57 percent of the Asian vote. Twenty years later, Barack Obama received 73 percent of the Asian vote. Although accounting for only 3 percent of the total voter turnout, Asians will increase their numbers in the coming years, as will Hispanics. The electoral influence of both groups exceeds their raw numbers since many immigrants are concentrated in swing states such as Colorado, Ohio, and Florida.
Another demographic trend is also disadvantageous to the fortunes of the Republican Party: the declining percentage of non-Hispanic whites in the electorate. Though the Republicans achieved 59 percent of the non-Hispanic white vote, accounting for 72 percent of the total turnout, their numbers continue to fall vis-à-vis other ethnic and racial groups. In 1992, non-Hispanic whites accounted for 87 percent of the voters; that figure has declined by at least three percentage points in every ensuing presidential election. And even though Republican candidate Mitt Romney received robust support from whites, some of this strength came from parts of the country, particularly in the Deep South and the Plains, where state populations and hence electoral votes are relatively small.
While the Republicans were losing the new ethnic vote, they were also bucking age, family status, gender, and religious trends. President Obama won the youngest age cohort (18-29 years) with 60 percent of the vote, and the next youngest age cohort (30-44) with 52 percent of the vote. Together, these age cohorts comprised 45 percent of the total turnout. Romney was most competitive in the 60 and older category, winning 54 percent of that vote. However, it is not necessary to consult actuarial tables to know that it is not a winning strategy to depend upon an increasingly aging cohort for political support. Plus, political scientists argue that a person’s first vote for a political party is a strong indication of future voting for that party. The youngest age cohort was especially important in the swing states of Ohio, Florida, and Virginia where the Obama campaign targeted these voters in particular.
The U.S. Census has chronicled the changing nature of the American family, particularly the growth in the number of unmarried individuals, of working and single mothers with children under the age of 18, and of the numbers of gay households. Gays and unmarried women in particular viewed the Republican Party as hostile to their interests. Barack Obama received 76 percent of the gay vote, 62 percent of the vote of unmarried voters, and 62 percent of working mothers with children under the age of 18. Mitt Romney captured 60 percent of the married vote. Unmarried voters accounted for 41 percent of the total electorate.
Although the gender gap was not nearly as large as it was in 2008, President Obama received 55 percent of women’s votes and 47 percent of the men’s. Since women voted at higher rates than men—53 percent to 47 percent—the Democrats’ advantage is magnified in that demographic as well (“Gender Gap”).
Religion has always played an important role in American politics, and the 2012 election was no exception. While the Tea Party portion of the Republican Party stressed that its members stand for much more than opposition to abortion and gay rights, the religious right has found a comfortable home in the Republican Party. But a Pew Research survey indicated that nearly one out of five Americans claims no religious affiliation at all, a record high. Plus, opposition to gay marriage is becoming an increasingly minority position in the nation. Mitt Romney’s greatest strength came from white Protestants—at one time the majority of the nation’s electorate. Today, they account for 39 percent of the turnout. Romney won a commanding 69 percent of that vote.
President Obama continued to receive strong support outside the white Protestant group. Jewish voters gave Obama 69 percent of their votes. Obama won 50 percent of the Catholic vote, reflecting his strong support in the Hispanic community. And black Protestants voted overwhelmingly (better than 95 percent) for the president. Together, Catholic and Jewish voters comprised 27 percent of the turnout in 2012, and they provided key votes in the swing states of Ohio and, especially, Florida (“How the Faithful Voted”).
The Democrats did better than the Republicans in the big cities—69 to 29 percent—and they split the suburban vote, but lost overwhelmingly to Mitt Romney in small towns and rural areas. The difficulty for Republicans is that there are many more votes in cities and suburbs (69 percent) than in small towns and rural areas (31 percent). A look at the 2012 electoral map reinforces this perspective. Mitt Romney won nearly half of the states (twenty-four), but was swamped in the Electoral College.
American political parties are coalitions. Based on the 2008 presidential election and reinforced by the 2012 vote, the Democratic Party is a party that attracts younger voters, women, especially unmarried women, multi-racial constituents, those who live in cities, especially in the coastal states, and secular voters, Jews, and Catholics.
Republican voters tend to be older, male, married, and mostly white. They live in rural areas, small towns, and are especially numerous in the heartland states. They are likely to be regular churchgoers, mainly Protestant and particularly evangelical Protestant (Goldfields 2-3, 8-10).
Works cited:
“2012 Presidential Election.” 270 to Win. Web. https://www.270towin.com/2012_Election/
Goldfields, David, “What We Can Learn about America from the 2012 Presidential Election.” American Studies Journal, 58 (2014). Web. June 9, 2020. http://www.asjournal.org/58-2014/what...
September 15, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2008 Election -- The Debates, Why Obama Won
Looking toward November, both McCain and Obama [had] set their sights on a fast-growing segment of the U.S. electorate: the Hispanic vote that was increasingly crucial in battleground states such as Colorado, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico as well as California and other Western states such as Arizona.
Both candidates touted their records on immigration reform, a key issue for many Hispanics, and questioned the other's commitment to it.
McCain believed he could compete for Hispanic voters, who traditionally aligned with Democrats. But he would have to overcome his own party's label, which had become toxic with many Hispanics after the anger expressed over illegal immigration in the recent GOP primaries and the continual anti-"amnesty" rhetoric from conservative talk radio.
After all the abuse that McCain took from his own party for twice pushing comprehensive immigration reform bills in the Senate, he was forced to defend his pivot from the previous year, in which he said he would support reforms such as a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants only after the border was secured.
"That's a tactical difference — that's not a change in his position," Charlie Black, a senior McCain adviser, told The Republic.
To supporters of comprehensive immigration reform, it was more than a tactical shift. The idea behind a single piece of legislation that would balance border security with a guest-worker program, a pathway to citizenship and other reforms was that it was the only way to ensure passage for all the measures. Once the borders were secured, they feared, most Republicans would abandon the benefits that the immigrant community sought.
McCain also got no points with Hispanics for largely ignoring Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's controversial neighborhood crime sweeps, which had started to make national news. Though it was not explicitly stated, it was clear Arpaio's deputies were targeting immigrants in the sweeps.
…
Despite McCain's aggressive courting of the Hispanic vote, there was always a sense that it was futile given the political atmosphere (Nowicki 16-17).
“The last four weeks of this election will be about whether the American people are willing to turn our economy and national security over to Barack Obama, a man with little record, questionable judgment, and ties to radical figures like unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said (Egan 2).
The first presidential debate in Mississippi went off as planned. And it was there that McCain truly may have lost the election.
It wasn't because of McCain's performance, which was solid if a little stiff and abrasive at times. Except for some discussion of the economic crisis, the debate focused on national security and foreign policy, two issues in McCain's comfort zone. Some observers said McCain may have won the debate on points, some said Obama won outright, while still others said it was probably no worse for McCain than a draw.
The problem for McCain was that a draw was all Obama needed, so that effectively made him the winner. Given the economic anxiety and Obama's lack of seasoning, the McCain campaign's last hope was that Americans might not want to risk the presidency on someone so untested. McCain needed Obama to fumble.
Instead, Obama held his own against McCain and delivered a calm and collected performance that put to rest worries about his light experience.
"I think they pretty much did equally well in what they said," Paul Levinson, a Fordham University communications professor and expert on presidential debates, told The Republic after the event. "On the non-verbal level, Barack Obama was much better. He looked relaxed. He smiled at times. He seemed confident."
…
McCain and Obama would share the stage two more times, in Nashville and Long Island, N.Y., though neither debate would move the needle.
Obama was seen as the winner of the second debate. In the third, McCain seemed most comfortable and was at his best. Still, he wasn't able to do much damage to Obama, despite bringing up Obama's ties to William Ayers, a former leader of the violent Weather Underground Organization, and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which was under fire at the time in a voter-registration controversy.
The third debate, held Oct. 15 at New York's Hofstra University, is perhaps best remembered for McCain making "Joe the Plumber" a short-lived household name.
The plumber in question, Joe Wurzelbacher, had questioned Obama on the campaign trail near Toledo, Ohio. He told Obama he wanted to buy a plumbing business that could make as much as $280,000, which would put him over Obama's $250,000 limit for tax protection and relief for small businesses. "When you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody," Obama told Wurzelbacher.
"Joe, I want to tell you, I'll not only help you buy that business that you worked your whole life for and I'll keep your taxes low and I'll provide available and affordable health care for you and your employees," McCain promised from the debate stage. To Obama, he said: "And what you want to do to Joe the Plumber and millions more like him is have their taxes increased and not be able to realize the American dream of owning their own business."
By the second half of October, though, it seemed as if McCain's fate was sealed. He still struggled to connect with voters on the economy, the most important issue of the day. Undecided voters seemed to break for Obama.
"I feel like we got a righteous wind at our backs here," Obama said while campaigning in Virginia.
…
No matter how bleak the outlook, McCain did not give up, campaigning hard to the very last minute. The day before the election, McCain stumped in no fewer than seven states before concluding with a midnight rally at the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse in Prescott. He cast his vote in Phoenix before campaigning some more in Colorado and New Mexico (Nowicki 6-10).
Election night inspired gracious oratory by both candidates. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,” Obama told a cheering crowd of supporters, “who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” Conceding defeat, McCain said, “This is a historic election, and I recognize the significance it has for African Americans and the special pride that must be theirs tonight. We both realize that we have come a long way from the injustices that once stained our nation's reputation” (Nelson 6).
Why Obama Won
Along with the unpopularity of President Bush and the dire condition of the U.S. economy, changes in the composition of the American electorate played a major role in Barack Obama’s decisive victory in the 2008 presidential election. The doubling of the nonwhite share of the electorate between 1992 and 2008 was critical to Obama’s election as African-American and other nonwhite voters provided him with a large enough margin to overcome a substantial deficit among white voters. In addition, voters under the age of 30 preferred Obama by a better than 2–1 margin, accounting for more than 80 percent of his popular vote margin. Despite the overall Democratic trend, the results revealed an increasingly polarized electorate. Over the past three decades the coalitions supporting the two major parties have become much more distinctive geographically, racially, and ideologically. The growth of the nonwhite electorate along with the increasing liberalism and Democratic identification of younger voters suggest that a successful Obama presidency could put the Democratic Party in a position to dominate American politics for many years (Abramowitz “Transformation” 1).
… 15 states accounted for almost 90% of total spending on television advertising by the Obama and McCain campaigns. These same 15 states were also heavily targeted for grassroots voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives by the campaigns. According to data compiled by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, as of early August, more than 80% of Obama field offices and more than 90% of McCain field offices were located in these states.
Thanks to Barack Obama’s enormous fundraising prowess, which allowed his campaign to turn down public financing, the Obama campaign enjoyed a substantial advantage in spending on TV advertising in the battleground states. Altogether, the Obama campaign and its allies spent about $258 million on television ads in these 15 states, compared with about $164 million by the McCain campaign and its allies, a better than three-to-two advantage.
Perhaps reflecting its greater emphasis on grassroots campaigning and ability to capitalize on the enthusiasm of its supporters, the Obama campaign had an even bigger advantage when it came to field organization in the battleground states. As of early August, according to Nate Silver, the Obama campaign had opened 281 field offices in these 15 states, compared with only 94 for the McCain campaign, almost a three-to-one advantage.
…
Evidence from the 2008 presidential election suggests that both spending on television ads and field organization affected the results of the election in the 15 battleground states. On average, the Obama campaign gained a measurable electoral benefit in these states from its huge advantages in spending and field organization. That electoral benefit may well have tipped two states, Indiana and North Carolina, to Obama.
While the findings presented here suggest that advertising spending and field organization made a difference in the battleground states, they did not alter the outcome of the presidential election. Twelve of the 14 swing states that voted for Obama probably would have ended up in his column even without any advantages in advertising spending or field offices because of their normal partisan voting tendencies and the national trend toward Obama (Abramowitz “Do” 5, 7).
The outgoing President George W. Bush, McCain's rival from the 2000 GOP primaries, had left the Republican Party in rough shape.
Polls said he was wildly unpopular, making it more likely voters would seek a change in 2008. The economy was weak and about to get a lot worse. By October, a New York Times/CBS poll would find a historic 89 percent of Americans believed the United States was on the wrong track and only 7 percent believed it was headed in the right direction.
Bush's record appeared to be an all-but-impossible albatross for any nominee from his party to overcome.
Unfortunately for McCain, his fights with Bush — over the 2000 South Carolina primary, over the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, over campaign-finance reform — seemed liked ancient history. While McCain's campaign was eager to revive his "maverick" brand, it had to do so without alienating the party's pro-Bush voters. That meant he never could really reject or truly distance himself from the Bush presidency (Nowicki “John” 6).
In retrospect, McCain certainly made mistakes — some big, some not so big — that damaged his competitiveness. His response to the economic crisis clearly backfired. Many voters saw his return to the Senate as a stunt. There's still an argument about whether his gamble on Palin as a running mate helped him enough with his base to offset how much she hurt him with independents. Perhaps he should have been more aggressive in distancing himself from the politically radioactive Bush.
And for all of McCain's effort to court the Latino vote, Obama clobbered him among that demographic, too, 67 percent to 31 percent. A Latino running mate from a swing state, rather than Palin from Alaska, might have helped, though McCain could never reflect the country's changing demographics the way Obama did.
The hopes of McCain's campaign hinged largely on Obama making rookie mistakes. Not only did Obama not make such mistakes, he ran a much-emulated, highly disciplined campaign that was able to raise unprecedented amounts of money.
The bottom line, though, is that after eight years of the Bush administration, war-fatigued voters were ready to give the Democrats a shot. It was an impulse that would be all but impossible for McCain, or any GOP candidate, to reverse.
A USA TODAY/Gallup poll gauged Bush's approval rating on Election Day 2008 at just 25 percent.
"Look, he didn't run the best campaign that we've ever seen, but no Republican could have won this year," Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 election. "You can't win with conditions this bad for the incumbent party. And that's McCain's consolation: He did reasonably well under extremely difficult conditions. It was never meant to be" (Nowicki “It” 11-13).
Republican operatives (including Karl Rove) were accused of altering voting machine tallies in Ohio in the 2004 presidential election resulting in George W. Bush receiving a plurality of votes to win the state and the national election.
The statistically anomalous [recent practice of] shifting of votes to the conservative right [via voting machine manipulation] has become so pervasive in post-HAVA [Help America Vote Act 2002] America that it now has a name of its own. Experts call it the "red shift."
…
Some argue that the Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008 disprove the existence of the red shift. However, this may be a misinterpretation of complex political upheavals that occurred in each of those election years.
While Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives in 2006, and the White House in 2008, postelection analyses did in fact suggest extensive red-shift rigging. But in both election cycles, these efforts simply failed to overcome eleventh-hour events so negative that they drastically undercut the projected wins for the G.O.P.
…
The collapse of Lehman Brothers months before the 2008 elections [overwhelmed] … John McCain's numbers. Pre-election polls showed that the American public blamed the Republicans for the imploding financial markets. "These political sea changes swamped a red shift that turned out to be under-calibrated," argues [Election Defense Alliance Director] Jonathan Simon, who speculates that Barack Obama actually won by a historic landslide, driven by an overwhelming backlash against the policies of the Bush Administration (Collier 11, 12).
Addendum
There are copious anti-Obama texts from the earliest days of his campaign. In the book I am writing on this subject, there’s a chapter on patriotism. These allegations are among the earliest texts with fauxtography “proving” that Obama wouldn’t sing the national anthem or salute the flag, had an American flag removed from the exterior of his campaign plane, wouldn’t wear a flag pin, and dissed the Boy Scouts of America. There was a rumor that he lowered the White House flag to half-staff after the death of Whitney Houston but not after the death of Nancy Reagan. There’s a chapter on the beliefs that Obama was a Muslim. Chronologically, these surface much sooner than the birther beliefs, a cluster of notions claiming that circumstances surrounding his birth made him ineligible to be president of the United States. There are the beliefs that he started the Ebola epidemic so that whites could be killed off and the United States populated with Muslims, or that he’s gay and had arranged for numerous lovers who referred to him as “Bathhouse Barry” to be killed so that they couldn’t out him. And there are almost as many rumors about Michelle Obama as there are about Barack. It has been claimed that she hired far more assistants than any prior First Lady, that her senior thesis reflected an anti-white agenda, that she wanted a picture of herself wearing a royal crown on a US postage stamp, and (drumroll, please) that she was born a man and had a sex-change operation. Since Obama left office, the rumors have continued: that he left roaches in the White House; that after he moved out, a stash of illegal drugs was discovered in his living quarters; more ominously, that he and “deep state” operatives are sabotaging the current administration. Lest you think the rumors are subsiding, there’s a photo circulating with a caption that says “President Obama gave Presidential Medal of Freedom to Harvey Weinstein,” and a doctored photo “proves” the case (Turner 422).
Works cited:
Abramowitz, Alan I., “Do Presidential Campaigns Matter? Evidence from the 2008 Election.” UVA/Center for Politics, August 2, 2012. Web. http://centerforpolitics.org/crystalb...
Abramowitz, Adam I., “Transformation and Polarization: The 2008 Presidential Election and the New American Electorate.” Science Digest, April 16, 2010. Web. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Collier, Victoria, “How to Rig an Election.” Harper’s Magazine, October 6, 2012. Web. https://harpers.org/archive/2012/11/h...
Egan, Mark, “Obama Accuses McCain of Smear Campaign.” Reuters, October 4, 2008. Web. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-us...
Nelson, Michael, “Barack Obama: Campaigns and Elections.” UVA Miller Center. Web. https://millercenter.org/president/ob...
Nowicki, Dan, “'It Was Never Meant to Be' — John McCain Fails in 2nd Presidential bid.” The Republic, April 2, 2018. Web. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/...
Nowicki, Dan, “John McCain Reaches Long-Sought Goal, Runs for President against Obama.” The Republic, April 2, 2018. Web. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/...
Turner, Patricia A., “Respecting the Smears: Anti-Obama Folklore Anticipates Fake News.” Journal of American Folklore, Volume 131, Number 522, Fall 2018. Web. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/707447/pdf
Both candidates touted their records on immigration reform, a key issue for many Hispanics, and questioned the other's commitment to it.
McCain believed he could compete for Hispanic voters, who traditionally aligned with Democrats. But he would have to overcome his own party's label, which had become toxic with many Hispanics after the anger expressed over illegal immigration in the recent GOP primaries and the continual anti-"amnesty" rhetoric from conservative talk radio.
After all the abuse that McCain took from his own party for twice pushing comprehensive immigration reform bills in the Senate, he was forced to defend his pivot from the previous year, in which he said he would support reforms such as a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants only after the border was secured.
"That's a tactical difference — that's not a change in his position," Charlie Black, a senior McCain adviser, told The Republic.
To supporters of comprehensive immigration reform, it was more than a tactical shift. The idea behind a single piece of legislation that would balance border security with a guest-worker program, a pathway to citizenship and other reforms was that it was the only way to ensure passage for all the measures. Once the borders were secured, they feared, most Republicans would abandon the benefits that the immigrant community sought.
McCain also got no points with Hispanics for largely ignoring Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's controversial neighborhood crime sweeps, which had started to make national news. Though it was not explicitly stated, it was clear Arpaio's deputies were targeting immigrants in the sweeps.
…
Despite McCain's aggressive courting of the Hispanic vote, there was always a sense that it was futile given the political atmosphere (Nowicki 16-17).
“The last four weeks of this election will be about whether the American people are willing to turn our economy and national security over to Barack Obama, a man with little record, questionable judgment, and ties to radical figures like unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said (Egan 2).
The first presidential debate in Mississippi went off as planned. And it was there that McCain truly may have lost the election.
It wasn't because of McCain's performance, which was solid if a little stiff and abrasive at times. Except for some discussion of the economic crisis, the debate focused on national security and foreign policy, two issues in McCain's comfort zone. Some observers said McCain may have won the debate on points, some said Obama won outright, while still others said it was probably no worse for McCain than a draw.
The problem for McCain was that a draw was all Obama needed, so that effectively made him the winner. Given the economic anxiety and Obama's lack of seasoning, the McCain campaign's last hope was that Americans might not want to risk the presidency on someone so untested. McCain needed Obama to fumble.
Instead, Obama held his own against McCain and delivered a calm and collected performance that put to rest worries about his light experience.
"I think they pretty much did equally well in what they said," Paul Levinson, a Fordham University communications professor and expert on presidential debates, told The Republic after the event. "On the non-verbal level, Barack Obama was much better. He looked relaxed. He smiled at times. He seemed confident."
…
McCain and Obama would share the stage two more times, in Nashville and Long Island, N.Y., though neither debate would move the needle.
Obama was seen as the winner of the second debate. In the third, McCain seemed most comfortable and was at his best. Still, he wasn't able to do much damage to Obama, despite bringing up Obama's ties to William Ayers, a former leader of the violent Weather Underground Organization, and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which was under fire at the time in a voter-registration controversy.
The third debate, held Oct. 15 at New York's Hofstra University, is perhaps best remembered for McCain making "Joe the Plumber" a short-lived household name.
The plumber in question, Joe Wurzelbacher, had questioned Obama on the campaign trail near Toledo, Ohio. He told Obama he wanted to buy a plumbing business that could make as much as $280,000, which would put him over Obama's $250,000 limit for tax protection and relief for small businesses. "When you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody," Obama told Wurzelbacher.
"Joe, I want to tell you, I'll not only help you buy that business that you worked your whole life for and I'll keep your taxes low and I'll provide available and affordable health care for you and your employees," McCain promised from the debate stage. To Obama, he said: "And what you want to do to Joe the Plumber and millions more like him is have their taxes increased and not be able to realize the American dream of owning their own business."
By the second half of October, though, it seemed as if McCain's fate was sealed. He still struggled to connect with voters on the economy, the most important issue of the day. Undecided voters seemed to break for Obama.
"I feel like we got a righteous wind at our backs here," Obama said while campaigning in Virginia.
…
No matter how bleak the outlook, McCain did not give up, campaigning hard to the very last minute. The day before the election, McCain stumped in no fewer than seven states before concluding with a midnight rally at the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse in Prescott. He cast his vote in Phoenix before campaigning some more in Colorado and New Mexico (Nowicki 6-10).
Election night inspired gracious oratory by both candidates. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,” Obama told a cheering crowd of supporters, “who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” Conceding defeat, McCain said, “This is a historic election, and I recognize the significance it has for African Americans and the special pride that must be theirs tonight. We both realize that we have come a long way from the injustices that once stained our nation's reputation” (Nelson 6).
Why Obama Won
Along with the unpopularity of President Bush and the dire condition of the U.S. economy, changes in the composition of the American electorate played a major role in Barack Obama’s decisive victory in the 2008 presidential election. The doubling of the nonwhite share of the electorate between 1992 and 2008 was critical to Obama’s election as African-American and other nonwhite voters provided him with a large enough margin to overcome a substantial deficit among white voters. In addition, voters under the age of 30 preferred Obama by a better than 2–1 margin, accounting for more than 80 percent of his popular vote margin. Despite the overall Democratic trend, the results revealed an increasingly polarized electorate. Over the past three decades the coalitions supporting the two major parties have become much more distinctive geographically, racially, and ideologically. The growth of the nonwhite electorate along with the increasing liberalism and Democratic identification of younger voters suggest that a successful Obama presidency could put the Democratic Party in a position to dominate American politics for many years (Abramowitz “Transformation” 1).
… 15 states accounted for almost 90% of total spending on television advertising by the Obama and McCain campaigns. These same 15 states were also heavily targeted for grassroots voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives by the campaigns. According to data compiled by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, as of early August, more than 80% of Obama field offices and more than 90% of McCain field offices were located in these states.
Thanks to Barack Obama’s enormous fundraising prowess, which allowed his campaign to turn down public financing, the Obama campaign enjoyed a substantial advantage in spending on TV advertising in the battleground states. Altogether, the Obama campaign and its allies spent about $258 million on television ads in these 15 states, compared with about $164 million by the McCain campaign and its allies, a better than three-to-two advantage.
Perhaps reflecting its greater emphasis on grassroots campaigning and ability to capitalize on the enthusiasm of its supporters, the Obama campaign had an even bigger advantage when it came to field organization in the battleground states. As of early August, according to Nate Silver, the Obama campaign had opened 281 field offices in these 15 states, compared with only 94 for the McCain campaign, almost a three-to-one advantage.
…
Evidence from the 2008 presidential election suggests that both spending on television ads and field organization affected the results of the election in the 15 battleground states. On average, the Obama campaign gained a measurable electoral benefit in these states from its huge advantages in spending and field organization. That electoral benefit may well have tipped two states, Indiana and North Carolina, to Obama.
While the findings presented here suggest that advertising spending and field organization made a difference in the battleground states, they did not alter the outcome of the presidential election. Twelve of the 14 swing states that voted for Obama probably would have ended up in his column even without any advantages in advertising spending or field offices because of their normal partisan voting tendencies and the national trend toward Obama (Abramowitz “Do” 5, 7).
The outgoing President George W. Bush, McCain's rival from the 2000 GOP primaries, had left the Republican Party in rough shape.
Polls said he was wildly unpopular, making it more likely voters would seek a change in 2008. The economy was weak and about to get a lot worse. By October, a New York Times/CBS poll would find a historic 89 percent of Americans believed the United States was on the wrong track and only 7 percent believed it was headed in the right direction.
Bush's record appeared to be an all-but-impossible albatross for any nominee from his party to overcome.
Unfortunately for McCain, his fights with Bush — over the 2000 South Carolina primary, over the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, over campaign-finance reform — seemed liked ancient history. While McCain's campaign was eager to revive his "maverick" brand, it had to do so without alienating the party's pro-Bush voters. That meant he never could really reject or truly distance himself from the Bush presidency (Nowicki “John” 6).
In retrospect, McCain certainly made mistakes — some big, some not so big — that damaged his competitiveness. His response to the economic crisis clearly backfired. Many voters saw his return to the Senate as a stunt. There's still an argument about whether his gamble on Palin as a running mate helped him enough with his base to offset how much she hurt him with independents. Perhaps he should have been more aggressive in distancing himself from the politically radioactive Bush.
And for all of McCain's effort to court the Latino vote, Obama clobbered him among that demographic, too, 67 percent to 31 percent. A Latino running mate from a swing state, rather than Palin from Alaska, might have helped, though McCain could never reflect the country's changing demographics the way Obama did.
The hopes of McCain's campaign hinged largely on Obama making rookie mistakes. Not only did Obama not make such mistakes, he ran a much-emulated, highly disciplined campaign that was able to raise unprecedented amounts of money.
The bottom line, though, is that after eight years of the Bush administration, war-fatigued voters were ready to give the Democrats a shot. It was an impulse that would be all but impossible for McCain, or any GOP candidate, to reverse.
A USA TODAY/Gallup poll gauged Bush's approval rating on Election Day 2008 at just 25 percent.
"Look, he didn't run the best campaign that we've ever seen, but no Republican could have won this year," Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 election. "You can't win with conditions this bad for the incumbent party. And that's McCain's consolation: He did reasonably well under extremely difficult conditions. It was never meant to be" (Nowicki “It” 11-13).
Republican operatives (including Karl Rove) were accused of altering voting machine tallies in Ohio in the 2004 presidential election resulting in George W. Bush receiving a plurality of votes to win the state and the national election.
The statistically anomalous [recent practice of] shifting of votes to the conservative right [via voting machine manipulation] has become so pervasive in post-HAVA [Help America Vote Act 2002] America that it now has a name of its own. Experts call it the "red shift."
…
Some argue that the Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008 disprove the existence of the red shift. However, this may be a misinterpretation of complex political upheavals that occurred in each of those election years.
While Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives in 2006, and the White House in 2008, postelection analyses did in fact suggest extensive red-shift rigging. But in both election cycles, these efforts simply failed to overcome eleventh-hour events so negative that they drastically undercut the projected wins for the G.O.P.
…
The collapse of Lehman Brothers months before the 2008 elections [overwhelmed] … John McCain's numbers. Pre-election polls showed that the American public blamed the Republicans for the imploding financial markets. "These political sea changes swamped a red shift that turned out to be under-calibrated," argues [Election Defense Alliance Director] Jonathan Simon, who speculates that Barack Obama actually won by a historic landslide, driven by an overwhelming backlash against the policies of the Bush Administration (Collier 11, 12).
Addendum
There are copious anti-Obama texts from the earliest days of his campaign. In the book I am writing on this subject, there’s a chapter on patriotism. These allegations are among the earliest texts with fauxtography “proving” that Obama wouldn’t sing the national anthem or salute the flag, had an American flag removed from the exterior of his campaign plane, wouldn’t wear a flag pin, and dissed the Boy Scouts of America. There was a rumor that he lowered the White House flag to half-staff after the death of Whitney Houston but not after the death of Nancy Reagan. There’s a chapter on the beliefs that Obama was a Muslim. Chronologically, these surface much sooner than the birther beliefs, a cluster of notions claiming that circumstances surrounding his birth made him ineligible to be president of the United States. There are the beliefs that he started the Ebola epidemic so that whites could be killed off and the United States populated with Muslims, or that he’s gay and had arranged for numerous lovers who referred to him as “Bathhouse Barry” to be killed so that they couldn’t out him. And there are almost as many rumors about Michelle Obama as there are about Barack. It has been claimed that she hired far more assistants than any prior First Lady, that her senior thesis reflected an anti-white agenda, that she wanted a picture of herself wearing a royal crown on a US postage stamp, and (drumroll, please) that she was born a man and had a sex-change operation. Since Obama left office, the rumors have continued: that he left roaches in the White House; that after he moved out, a stash of illegal drugs was discovered in his living quarters; more ominously, that he and “deep state” operatives are sabotaging the current administration. Lest you think the rumors are subsiding, there’s a photo circulating with a caption that says “President Obama gave Presidential Medal of Freedom to Harvey Weinstein,” and a doctored photo “proves” the case (Turner 422).
Works cited:
Abramowitz, Alan I., “Do Presidential Campaigns Matter? Evidence from the 2008 Election.” UVA/Center for Politics, August 2, 2012. Web. http://centerforpolitics.org/crystalb...
Abramowitz, Adam I., “Transformation and Polarization: The 2008 Presidential Election and the New American Electorate.” Science Digest, April 16, 2010. Web. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Collier, Victoria, “How to Rig an Election.” Harper’s Magazine, October 6, 2012. Web. https://harpers.org/archive/2012/11/h...
Egan, Mark, “Obama Accuses McCain of Smear Campaign.” Reuters, October 4, 2008. Web. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-us...
Nelson, Michael, “Barack Obama: Campaigns and Elections.” UVA Miller Center. Web. https://millercenter.org/president/ob...
Nowicki, Dan, “'It Was Never Meant to Be' — John McCain Fails in 2nd Presidential bid.” The Republic, April 2, 2018. Web. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/...
Nowicki, Dan, “John McCain Reaches Long-Sought Goal, Runs for President against Obama.” The Republic, April 2, 2018. Web. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/...
Turner, Patricia A., “Respecting the Smears: Anti-Obama Folklore Anticipates Fake News.” Journal of American Folklore, Volume 131, Number 522, Fall 2018. Web. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/707447/pdf
September 13, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2008 Election -- Heart of the Campaigns
Obama fit the American mood in many ways that McCain did not. The "Hope and Change" candidate offered a clean break from Bush. He had opposed the Iraq War from the start, declaring it "a rash war" in an Oct. 2, 2002, speech in Chicago, and promised to end it.
Obama energized young people and built a powerful Democratic coalition that included blacks and Hispanics. He also was an excellent orator and a fundraising juggernaut. Artist Shepard Fairey's stylized blue-and-red "Hope" poster, designed from an Associated Press portrait of Obama, was instantly iconic.
…
Obama, who was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961, had faced false rumors, smears and racist innuendo, including in the 2008 primaries. Ever mindful of how history might judge him, McCain vowed to keep "that kind of ugliness out of this political campaign."
It put McCain, time and again, in the awkward position of having to denounce various attacks on Obama from the right that didn't meet his standard of civility.
…
… McCain decried a North Carolina Republican Party TV ad that put a spotlight on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., Obama's former pastor, who had made inflammatory statements about the United States in his fiery sermons. McCain did not want to make an issue of Wright, who had said things such as, "No, no, no, not 'God bless America' — God damn America!"
Soren Dayton, a McCain campaign aide, likewise found himself in hot water after promoting what the gossip website Gawker called "an inflammatory YouTube mashup of Barack Obama's recent speech on race," which also featured Wright.
In a new era of independent spending by outside, third-party groups, McCain knew he couldn't stop everything that would be thrown at Obama on his behalf.
"I've pledged to conduct my campaign in an honorable fashion," McCain said in June. "I will do everything that I can to make sure that this campaign is respectful, but I can't be a referee, and I can't judge every piece that's run and be the judge of it."
…
[Sarah] Palin's limitations as a national candidate had become apparent. Though she had managed to get through the convention and had won acclaim for her speech, she was not ready to address policy.
Palin was responsible for resuscitating the McCain campaign in the polls – their ticket had surged past Obama and Biden — but after the convention, McCain aides didn't know what to do with her. She was largely sequestered from the media, keeping her away from hard-hitting questions about foreign policy she couldn't answer. NBC's "Saturday Night Live" mocked her mercilessly. "SNL" star Tina Fey's spot-on impersonation defined her in the public consciousness. To this day, many Americans believe it was Palin that said "I can see Russia from my house" when in fact it came from one of Fey’s send-ups of her.
The real test came when Palin started giving interviews to high-profile journalists such as Katie Couric of CBS News.
She failed that test and bombed, famously bungling even a softball question about what newspapers and magazines she would read to keep up with world events.
“I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media,” Palin said. “Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years” (Nowicki 6-8).
"Sen. McCain and his operatives are gambling that they can distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance. They'd rather try to tear our campaign down than lift this country up," Obama said at an event in Asheville, North Carolina.
"That's what you do when you're out of touch, out of ideas, and running out of time," he said.
The comments come a day after Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate, claimed that Obama associated "with terrorists who targeted our own country.”
The McCain campaign shot back on Sunday, saying its accusations are "true facts," and not "smears."
"The last four weeks of this election will be about whether the American people are willing to turn our economy and national security over to Barack Obama, a man with little record, questionable judgment, and ties to radical figures like unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers," McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said in a statement.
"Americans need to ask themselves if they've ever befriended an unrepentant terrorist, or had a convicted felon help them buy their house -- because those aren't smears, those are true facts about Barack Obama" (Obama 1-2)
The Statement: Republican vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin said Saturday, October 4, that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is "someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."
The Facts: In making the charge at a fund-raising event in Englewood, Colorado, and a rally in Carson, California, Palin was referring at least in part to William Ayers, a 1960s radical. In both appearances, Palin cited a front-page article in Saturday's New York Times detailing the working relationship between Obama and Ayers.
In the 1960s, Ayers was a founding member of the radical Weather Underground group that carried out a string of bombings of federal buildings, including the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, in protest against the Vietnam War. The now-defunct group was labeled a "domestic terrorist group" by the FBI, and Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn - also a Weather Underground member - spent 10 years as fugitives in the 1970s. Federal charges against them were dropped due to FBI misconduct in gathering evidence against them, and they resurfaced in 1980. Both Ayers and Dohrn ultimately became university professors in Chicago, with Ayers, 63, now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Obama's Chicago home is in the same neighborhood where Ayers and Dohrn live. Beginning in 1995, Ayers and Obama worked with the non-profit Chicago Annenberg Challenge on a huge school improvement project. The Annenberg Challenge was for cities to compete for $50 million grants to improve public education. Ayers fought to bring the grant to Chicago, and Obama was recruited onto the board. Also from 1999 through 2001 both were board members on the Woods Fund, a charitable foundation that gave money to various causes, including the Trinity United Church that Obama attended and Northwestern University Law Schools' Children and Family Justice Center, where Dohrn worked.
CNN's review of project records found nothing to suggest anything inappropriate in the volunteer projects in which the two men were involved.
Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt told CNN that after meeting Obama through the Annenberg project, Ayers hosted a campaign event for him that same year when then-Illinois state Sen. Alice Palmer, who planned to run for Congress, introduced the young community organizer as her chosen successor. LaBolt also said the two have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Obama came to the U.S. Senate in 2005 and last met more than a year ago when they encountered each other on the street in their Hyde Park neighborhood.
The extent of Obama's relationship with Ayers came up during the Democratic presidential primaries earlier this year, and Obama explained it by saying, "This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood ... the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago - when I was 8 years old - somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense."
…
Verdict: False. There is no indication that Ayers and Obama are now "palling around," or that they have had an ongoing relationship in the past three years. Also, there is nothing to suggest that Ayers is now involved in terrorist activity or that other Obama associates are. (Fact 1).
Republican Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida said on ABC’s “This Week” it was not what Obama did when he was 8 but “what occurred when he was 35 - 38 years old and was initiating his political campaign.”
“It’s about his judgment and who he associated with during those years and right on into his political campaign,” he said.
“It is fair game,” Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut who supports McCain, said on “Fox News Sunday” (Egan 1-2).
The campaign generated enormous enthusiasm, with millions of new registrants joining the voting rolls (though the McCain campaign alleged that many of these were registered illegally, after allegations surfaced that several employees hired by ACORN, an interest group that lobbies on behalf of lower-income families, had submitted falsified registrations). McCain hosted numerous town hall meetings (a format in which he excelled) throughout the country, in which attendees could question the candidate; however, some of these meetings came under media scrutiny when some audience members became heated in their criticism of Obama. Obama rallies consistently attracted large crowds—including some 100,000 at a rally in St. Louis, Mo., in mid-October—and tens of thousands often came out to see Palin on the stump (the campaign had provided only limited access to Palin for the media). Although some commentators, including conservative ones, questioned her readiness for the vice presidency and presidency, she proved enormously popular … (Editors 1-6).
On what should have been the most controversial issue of the day — the Iraq War — McCain agreed with George Bush and continued to be a vocal advocate of the escalation strategy known as the "surge" that Bush implemented to turn the war around.
Notwithstanding, smear tactics continued.
… viewers in battleground states were assaulted by deceptive claims, among them that Arizona Senator and Republican Party nominee John McCain wanted to cut Social Security and stay in Iraq for one hundred years and that Illinois Senator and Democratic Party nominee Barack Obama did not take Iran seriously and had a close relationship with former Weather Underground leader William Ayers. The two most prevalent distortions, each backed by multimillion dollar ad buys, involved taxation. Specifically, the Democrats alleged that McCain would impose a net tax on health care benefits, and the Republicans insisted that Obama would raise taxes on working families including “yours” (Jamieson and Gottfried 1).
There was this.
The McCain campaign has come under fire for an Internet ad that accuses Obama of calling Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin "a pig."
In fact, Obama last week likened the Republican ticket plans for government reform to putting "lipstick on a pig."
Even the Arizona senator admitted today that Obama didn't call Palin a pig, but defended the ad anyway.
…
The Obama campaign has also complained about a McCain ad that claims the Illinois senator supports sex education for kindergartners, referring to Illinois Senate legislation that would teach young children age-appropriate sex education and how to reject advances by sexual predators.
The ad has been widely criticized by independent groups and longtime journalists.
Reporter Jonathan Alter, Newsweek's senior editor and columnist and author of the book "Between The Lines: A View Inside American Politics, People and Culture," said the tenor of McCain's ads have reached a new low in the seven presidential campaigns he's covered.
"The latest one accuses Obama in the Illinois legislature of supporting sex-ed for kindergartners, which is a total lie about the nature of that piece of legislation in Illinois; to me it set a new low," Alter said on "Charlie Rose" Thursday.
Called "527" groups, Alter said, "These are the first lies that I have ever seen that come directly from one candidate in a presidential election."
Obama responded. “Enough of this. We can't afford to let them make another big election about small things... We are up against a very powerful entrenched status quo in Washington. They will say anything and they will do anything."
The 527 group ads continued.
A new group with ties to the Swift Boast Veterans for Truth campaign against Kerry has amassed a multimillion-dollar fund and is putting the finishing touches on television ads attacking Obama.
The group, known as the American Issues Project, brags it has run ads 7,307 times in 14 markets, calling into question the longstanding relationship between Obama and William Ayers.
"American Issues Project clearly has struck a nerve inside the Obama campaign, but even more important is the reaction of the American people, who are starting to question why Senator Obama would have such a close relationship with an unrepentant domestic terrorist," said Ed Martin, American Issues Project president, on the group’s Web site (Parker 1-3).
He’s a Muslim. He was sworn into office on the Koran. He doesn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance. His pastor is an anti-Semite. He’s a tool of Louis Farrakhan. He’s anti-Israel. His advisers are anti-Israel. He’s friends with terrorists. The terrorists want him to win. He’s the Antichrist.
…
Among conservatives, Fox News has endlessly amplified such rumors. Karl Rove, a new hire by the network, recently speculated that Obama would withdraw funding for Israel. Sean Hannity has asked if Obama has a “race problem.” Fox News radio host Tom Sullivan compared Obama to Hitler. “Fox News are on to him and all the arguments our ‘smear’ camping [sic] is making and for the most part it is running with them,” right-wing blogger Ted Belman, of Israpundit, wrote in a recent e-mail (Berman (1-4).
Meanwhile, the national economy had begun to collapse.
There had been warnings about mass mortgage failures and a potential housing bubble. Concern grew to the banking system and its "toxic assets." By September 2008, the United States was in the midst of a financial meltdown.
The federal government on Sept. 7, 2008, seized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant mortgage lenders. After Lehman Brothers Holdings filed for bankruptcy Sept. 15, real fear gripped Wall Street. The Federal Reserve on Sept. 16 bailed out the giant insurance company American International Group, or AIG, as "too big to fail" became a catchphrase of the rescue effort. Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke eventually would ask Congress for an emergency $700 billion financial bailout.
The economy was not McCain's forte. Even as the crisis deepened, McCain continued to repeat a stock stump line of his about the strength of the "fundamentals" of the economy. And even if the economy had been his expertise, voters saw Bush and the Republicans as responsible for the crisis.
… no poll after the week of Sept. 21— as the economy spiraled down — showed McCain with a lead.
Understanding the stakes, McCain made the remarkable decision to suspend his campaign for two days so he could return to Capitol Hill to address the financial crisis. It was another "maverick" move that would show his commitment to putting the health of the country over his personal political interests. The only problem: McCain had no clear idea what to do about the economy and already was a latecomer to negotiations over the proposed $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
"I asked, 'Are you sure that you want to do that?' Because nobody knows how this is going to work out," Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., a McCain ally who'd spoken by telephone with McCain, told The Republic at the time. "But you know John. He's willing to take big risks if he thinks it's for a big cause."
…
A subsequent, combative Sept. 25 White House meeting that included Bush, McCain, Obama and other congressional leaders yielded no deal. Footage of McCain silently sitting at the table didn't help his image as having a poor grasp on economic issues. McCain also was under pressure from his fellow congressional Republicans not to make the situation worse for them. House Republicans were also on the ballot in November, and they worried their party's presidential nominee might throw them under the bus by savaging whatever bailout package emerged from the discussions.
Quoting sources, CNN reported that McCain said little during the White House summit and didn't say anything for the first 43 minutes.
…
McCain later would tell The Republic that it was Bush who had called him in from the campaign trail. According to McCain's later account, made to the newspaper's editorial board in February 2010, Bush asked for his help to avoid a looming worldwide economic disaster.
"I don't know of any American, when the president of the United States calls you and tells you something like that, who wouldn't respond," McCain said. "And I came back and tried to sit down and work with Republicans and say, 'What can we do?' "
McCain eventually went along with the TARP bailout, a vote that would haunt him for years (Nowicki 15-19).
McCain announced the suspension of his campaign for a few days in September to return to Washington, D.C., to address the financial crisis and suggested that the first debate be postponed. Obama played more of a behind-the-scenes role and insisted that the debate take place, saying “It is going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at once.” Obama was also aided by his decision to opt out of the federal [campaign] financing system, which would have limited his campaign to $84 million in spending. … The Obama campaign’s decision paid off, as it attracted more than three million donors and raised an astounding $150 million in the month of September alone, enabling the campaign to outspend the McCain campaign by significant margins in the battleground states and to purchase 30 minutes of prime-time television six days prior to the election (more than 33 million Americans watched the Obama infomercials) (Editors 1-5).
Works cited:
Berman, Ari, “Smearing Obama.” The Nation, March 13, 2008. Web. https://www.thenation.com/article/arc...
Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “United States Presidential Election of 2008.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Web. https://www.britannica.com/event/Unit...
Egan, Mark, “Obama Accuses McCain of Smear Campaign.” Reuters, October 4, 2008. Web. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-us...
“Fact Check: ‘Is Obama Palling around with Terrorists?’” CNN Politics, October 5, 2008. Web. https://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com...
Jamieson, Kathleen Hall and Gottfried, Jefrey A., “Are There Lessons for the Future of News from the 2008 Presidential Campaign? Daedalus, Summer 2010. Web. https://www.amacad.org/publication/ar...
Nowicki, Dan, “John McCain Reaches Long-Sought Goal, Runs for President against Obama.” The Republic, April 2, 2018. Web. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/...
“Obama Accuses McCain of Looking for Distractions.” CNN Politics October 5, 2008. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/...
Parker, Jennifer, “John McCain Admits Barack Obama Didn't Call Palin "a Pig." ABC News, September 15, 2008. Web. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2...
Obama energized young people and built a powerful Democratic coalition that included blacks and Hispanics. He also was an excellent orator and a fundraising juggernaut. Artist Shepard Fairey's stylized blue-and-red "Hope" poster, designed from an Associated Press portrait of Obama, was instantly iconic.
…
Obama, who was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961, had faced false rumors, smears and racist innuendo, including in the 2008 primaries. Ever mindful of how history might judge him, McCain vowed to keep "that kind of ugliness out of this political campaign."
It put McCain, time and again, in the awkward position of having to denounce various attacks on Obama from the right that didn't meet his standard of civility.
…
… McCain decried a North Carolina Republican Party TV ad that put a spotlight on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., Obama's former pastor, who had made inflammatory statements about the United States in his fiery sermons. McCain did not want to make an issue of Wright, who had said things such as, "No, no, no, not 'God bless America' — God damn America!"
Soren Dayton, a McCain campaign aide, likewise found himself in hot water after promoting what the gossip website Gawker called "an inflammatory YouTube mashup of Barack Obama's recent speech on race," which also featured Wright.
In a new era of independent spending by outside, third-party groups, McCain knew he couldn't stop everything that would be thrown at Obama on his behalf.
"I've pledged to conduct my campaign in an honorable fashion," McCain said in June. "I will do everything that I can to make sure that this campaign is respectful, but I can't be a referee, and I can't judge every piece that's run and be the judge of it."
…
[Sarah] Palin's limitations as a national candidate had become apparent. Though she had managed to get through the convention and had won acclaim for her speech, she was not ready to address policy.
Palin was responsible for resuscitating the McCain campaign in the polls – their ticket had surged past Obama and Biden — but after the convention, McCain aides didn't know what to do with her. She was largely sequestered from the media, keeping her away from hard-hitting questions about foreign policy she couldn't answer. NBC's "Saturday Night Live" mocked her mercilessly. "SNL" star Tina Fey's spot-on impersonation defined her in the public consciousness. To this day, many Americans believe it was Palin that said "I can see Russia from my house" when in fact it came from one of Fey’s send-ups of her.
The real test came when Palin started giving interviews to high-profile journalists such as Katie Couric of CBS News.
She failed that test and bombed, famously bungling even a softball question about what newspapers and magazines she would read to keep up with world events.
“I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media,” Palin said. “Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years” (Nowicki 6-8).
"Sen. McCain and his operatives are gambling that they can distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance. They'd rather try to tear our campaign down than lift this country up," Obama said at an event in Asheville, North Carolina.
"That's what you do when you're out of touch, out of ideas, and running out of time," he said.
The comments come a day after Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate, claimed that Obama associated "with terrorists who targeted our own country.”
The McCain campaign shot back on Sunday, saying its accusations are "true facts," and not "smears."
"The last four weeks of this election will be about whether the American people are willing to turn our economy and national security over to Barack Obama, a man with little record, questionable judgment, and ties to radical figures like unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers," McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said in a statement.
"Americans need to ask themselves if they've ever befriended an unrepentant terrorist, or had a convicted felon help them buy their house -- because those aren't smears, those are true facts about Barack Obama" (Obama 1-2)
The Statement: Republican vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin said Saturday, October 4, that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is "someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."
The Facts: In making the charge at a fund-raising event in Englewood, Colorado, and a rally in Carson, California, Palin was referring at least in part to William Ayers, a 1960s radical. In both appearances, Palin cited a front-page article in Saturday's New York Times detailing the working relationship between Obama and Ayers.
In the 1960s, Ayers was a founding member of the radical Weather Underground group that carried out a string of bombings of federal buildings, including the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, in protest against the Vietnam War. The now-defunct group was labeled a "domestic terrorist group" by the FBI, and Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn - also a Weather Underground member - spent 10 years as fugitives in the 1970s. Federal charges against them were dropped due to FBI misconduct in gathering evidence against them, and they resurfaced in 1980. Both Ayers and Dohrn ultimately became university professors in Chicago, with Ayers, 63, now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Obama's Chicago home is in the same neighborhood where Ayers and Dohrn live. Beginning in 1995, Ayers and Obama worked with the non-profit Chicago Annenberg Challenge on a huge school improvement project. The Annenberg Challenge was for cities to compete for $50 million grants to improve public education. Ayers fought to bring the grant to Chicago, and Obama was recruited onto the board. Also from 1999 through 2001 both were board members on the Woods Fund, a charitable foundation that gave money to various causes, including the Trinity United Church that Obama attended and Northwestern University Law Schools' Children and Family Justice Center, where Dohrn worked.
CNN's review of project records found nothing to suggest anything inappropriate in the volunteer projects in which the two men were involved.
Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt told CNN that after meeting Obama through the Annenberg project, Ayers hosted a campaign event for him that same year when then-Illinois state Sen. Alice Palmer, who planned to run for Congress, introduced the young community organizer as her chosen successor. LaBolt also said the two have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Obama came to the U.S. Senate in 2005 and last met more than a year ago when they encountered each other on the street in their Hyde Park neighborhood.
The extent of Obama's relationship with Ayers came up during the Democratic presidential primaries earlier this year, and Obama explained it by saying, "This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood ... the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago - when I was 8 years old - somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense."
…
Verdict: False. There is no indication that Ayers and Obama are now "palling around," or that they have had an ongoing relationship in the past three years. Also, there is nothing to suggest that Ayers is now involved in terrorist activity or that other Obama associates are. (Fact 1).
Republican Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida said on ABC’s “This Week” it was not what Obama did when he was 8 but “what occurred when he was 35 - 38 years old and was initiating his political campaign.”
“It’s about his judgment and who he associated with during those years and right on into his political campaign,” he said.
“It is fair game,” Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut who supports McCain, said on “Fox News Sunday” (Egan 1-2).
The campaign generated enormous enthusiasm, with millions of new registrants joining the voting rolls (though the McCain campaign alleged that many of these were registered illegally, after allegations surfaced that several employees hired by ACORN, an interest group that lobbies on behalf of lower-income families, had submitted falsified registrations). McCain hosted numerous town hall meetings (a format in which he excelled) throughout the country, in which attendees could question the candidate; however, some of these meetings came under media scrutiny when some audience members became heated in their criticism of Obama. Obama rallies consistently attracted large crowds—including some 100,000 at a rally in St. Louis, Mo., in mid-October—and tens of thousands often came out to see Palin on the stump (the campaign had provided only limited access to Palin for the media). Although some commentators, including conservative ones, questioned her readiness for the vice presidency and presidency, she proved enormously popular … (Editors 1-6).
On what should have been the most controversial issue of the day — the Iraq War — McCain agreed with George Bush and continued to be a vocal advocate of the escalation strategy known as the "surge" that Bush implemented to turn the war around.
Notwithstanding, smear tactics continued.
… viewers in battleground states were assaulted by deceptive claims, among them that Arizona Senator and Republican Party nominee John McCain wanted to cut Social Security and stay in Iraq for one hundred years and that Illinois Senator and Democratic Party nominee Barack Obama did not take Iran seriously and had a close relationship with former Weather Underground leader William Ayers. The two most prevalent distortions, each backed by multimillion dollar ad buys, involved taxation. Specifically, the Democrats alleged that McCain would impose a net tax on health care benefits, and the Republicans insisted that Obama would raise taxes on working families including “yours” (Jamieson and Gottfried 1).
There was this.
The McCain campaign has come under fire for an Internet ad that accuses Obama of calling Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin "a pig."
In fact, Obama last week likened the Republican ticket plans for government reform to putting "lipstick on a pig."
Even the Arizona senator admitted today that Obama didn't call Palin a pig, but defended the ad anyway.
…
The Obama campaign has also complained about a McCain ad that claims the Illinois senator supports sex education for kindergartners, referring to Illinois Senate legislation that would teach young children age-appropriate sex education and how to reject advances by sexual predators.
The ad has been widely criticized by independent groups and longtime journalists.
Reporter Jonathan Alter, Newsweek's senior editor and columnist and author of the book "Between The Lines: A View Inside American Politics, People and Culture," said the tenor of McCain's ads have reached a new low in the seven presidential campaigns he's covered.
"The latest one accuses Obama in the Illinois legislature of supporting sex-ed for kindergartners, which is a total lie about the nature of that piece of legislation in Illinois; to me it set a new low," Alter said on "Charlie Rose" Thursday.
Called "527" groups, Alter said, "These are the first lies that I have ever seen that come directly from one candidate in a presidential election."
Obama responded. “Enough of this. We can't afford to let them make another big election about small things... We are up against a very powerful entrenched status quo in Washington. They will say anything and they will do anything."
The 527 group ads continued.
A new group with ties to the Swift Boast Veterans for Truth campaign against Kerry has amassed a multimillion-dollar fund and is putting the finishing touches on television ads attacking Obama.
The group, known as the American Issues Project, brags it has run ads 7,307 times in 14 markets, calling into question the longstanding relationship between Obama and William Ayers.
"American Issues Project clearly has struck a nerve inside the Obama campaign, but even more important is the reaction of the American people, who are starting to question why Senator Obama would have such a close relationship with an unrepentant domestic terrorist," said Ed Martin, American Issues Project president, on the group’s Web site (Parker 1-3).
He’s a Muslim. He was sworn into office on the Koran. He doesn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance. His pastor is an anti-Semite. He’s a tool of Louis Farrakhan. He’s anti-Israel. His advisers are anti-Israel. He’s friends with terrorists. The terrorists want him to win. He’s the Antichrist.
…
Among conservatives, Fox News has endlessly amplified such rumors. Karl Rove, a new hire by the network, recently speculated that Obama would withdraw funding for Israel. Sean Hannity has asked if Obama has a “race problem.” Fox News radio host Tom Sullivan compared Obama to Hitler. “Fox News are on to him and all the arguments our ‘smear’ camping [sic] is making and for the most part it is running with them,” right-wing blogger Ted Belman, of Israpundit, wrote in a recent e-mail (Berman (1-4).
Meanwhile, the national economy had begun to collapse.
There had been warnings about mass mortgage failures and a potential housing bubble. Concern grew to the banking system and its "toxic assets." By September 2008, the United States was in the midst of a financial meltdown.
The federal government on Sept. 7, 2008, seized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant mortgage lenders. After Lehman Brothers Holdings filed for bankruptcy Sept. 15, real fear gripped Wall Street. The Federal Reserve on Sept. 16 bailed out the giant insurance company American International Group, or AIG, as "too big to fail" became a catchphrase of the rescue effort. Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke eventually would ask Congress for an emergency $700 billion financial bailout.
The economy was not McCain's forte. Even as the crisis deepened, McCain continued to repeat a stock stump line of his about the strength of the "fundamentals" of the economy. And even if the economy had been his expertise, voters saw Bush and the Republicans as responsible for the crisis.
… no poll after the week of Sept. 21— as the economy spiraled down — showed McCain with a lead.
Understanding the stakes, McCain made the remarkable decision to suspend his campaign for two days so he could return to Capitol Hill to address the financial crisis. It was another "maverick" move that would show his commitment to putting the health of the country over his personal political interests. The only problem: McCain had no clear idea what to do about the economy and already was a latecomer to negotiations over the proposed $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
"I asked, 'Are you sure that you want to do that?' Because nobody knows how this is going to work out," Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., a McCain ally who'd spoken by telephone with McCain, told The Republic at the time. "But you know John. He's willing to take big risks if he thinks it's for a big cause."
…
A subsequent, combative Sept. 25 White House meeting that included Bush, McCain, Obama and other congressional leaders yielded no deal. Footage of McCain silently sitting at the table didn't help his image as having a poor grasp on economic issues. McCain also was under pressure from his fellow congressional Republicans not to make the situation worse for them. House Republicans were also on the ballot in November, and they worried their party's presidential nominee might throw them under the bus by savaging whatever bailout package emerged from the discussions.
Quoting sources, CNN reported that McCain said little during the White House summit and didn't say anything for the first 43 minutes.
…
McCain later would tell The Republic that it was Bush who had called him in from the campaign trail. According to McCain's later account, made to the newspaper's editorial board in February 2010, Bush asked for his help to avoid a looming worldwide economic disaster.
"I don't know of any American, when the president of the United States calls you and tells you something like that, who wouldn't respond," McCain said. "And I came back and tried to sit down and work with Republicans and say, 'What can we do?' "
McCain eventually went along with the TARP bailout, a vote that would haunt him for years (Nowicki 15-19).
McCain announced the suspension of his campaign for a few days in September to return to Washington, D.C., to address the financial crisis and suggested that the first debate be postponed. Obama played more of a behind-the-scenes role and insisted that the debate take place, saying “It is going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at once.” Obama was also aided by his decision to opt out of the federal [campaign] financing system, which would have limited his campaign to $84 million in spending. … The Obama campaign’s decision paid off, as it attracted more than three million donors and raised an astounding $150 million in the month of September alone, enabling the campaign to outspend the McCain campaign by significant margins in the battleground states and to purchase 30 minutes of prime-time television six days prior to the election (more than 33 million Americans watched the Obama infomercials) (Editors 1-5).
Works cited:
Berman, Ari, “Smearing Obama.” The Nation, March 13, 2008. Web. https://www.thenation.com/article/arc...
Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “United States Presidential Election of 2008.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Web. https://www.britannica.com/event/Unit...
Egan, Mark, “Obama Accuses McCain of Smear Campaign.” Reuters, October 4, 2008. Web. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-us...
“Fact Check: ‘Is Obama Palling around with Terrorists?’” CNN Politics, October 5, 2008. Web. https://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com...
Jamieson, Kathleen Hall and Gottfried, Jefrey A., “Are There Lessons for the Future of News from the 2008 Presidential Campaign? Daedalus, Summer 2010. Web. https://www.amacad.org/publication/ar...
Nowicki, Dan, “John McCain Reaches Long-Sought Goal, Runs for President against Obama.” The Republic, April 2, 2018. Web. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/...
“Obama Accuses McCain of Looking for Distractions.” CNN Politics October 5, 2008. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/...
Parker, Jennifer, “John McCain Admits Barack Obama Didn't Call Palin "a Pig." ABC News, September 15, 2008. Web. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2...
September 11, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2008 Election -- Reverend Wright, Campaigns
Reverend Wright Controversy
In early March, news organizations and websites showed video recordings of some controversial sermons by Obama’s pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, including one in which Wright blamed the United States for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington and another in which he accused the federal government of “inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.” Obama largely defused the crisis by giving a speech in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, repudiating Wright's statements and thoughtfully outlining his own views on race relations (Nelson 1).
March 13, 2008— -- Sen. Barack Obama's pastor says blacks should not sing "God Bless America" but "God damn America."
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's south side, has a long history of what even Obama's campaign aides concede is "inflammatory rhetoric," including the assertion that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own "terrorism."
…
Rev. Wright married Obama and his wife Michelle, baptized their two daughters and is credited by Obama for the title of his book, "The Audacity of Hope."
An ABC News review of dozens of Rev. Wright's sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans.
"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."
In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001, that the United States had brought on al Qaeda's attacks because of its own terrorism.
"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.
"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he told his congregation.
Sen. Obama told the New York Times he was not at the church on the day of Rev. Wright's 9/11 sermon. "The violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification," Obama said in a recent interview. "It sounds like he was trying to be provocative," Obama told the paper.
…
In a statement to ABCNews.com, Obama's press spokesman Bill Burton said, "Sen. Obama has said repeatedly that personal attacks such as this have no place in this campaign or our politics, whether they're offered from a platform at a rally or the pulpit of a church. Sen. Obama does not think of the pastor of his church in political terms. Like a member of his family, there are things he says with which Sen. Obama deeply disagrees. But now that he is retired, that doesn't detract from Sen. Obama's affection for Rev. Wright or his appreciation for the good works he has done" (Ross and El-Buri 1-3).
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Tuesday he was outraged by the latest divisive comments from his former pastor and rejected the notion that he secretly agrees with him.
Obama is seeking to tamp down the growing fury over Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his incendiary remarks that threaten to undermine his campaign at a tough time. The Illinois senator is coming off a loss in Pennsylvania to rival Hillary Rodham Clinton and trying to win over white working-class voters in Indiana and North Carolina in next Tuesday's primaries.
"I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle that we saw yesterday," Obama told reporters at a news conference.
After weeks of staying out of the public eye while critics lambasted his sermons, Wright made three public appearances in four days to defend himself. The former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago has been combative, providing colorful commentary and feeding the story Obama had hoped was dying down.
On Monday, Wright criticized the U.S. government as imperialist and stood by his suggestion that the United States invented the HIV virus as a means of genocide against minorities.
"Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything," he said.
…
"If Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected," Wright said. "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."
…
"What became clear to me is that he was presenting a world view that contradicts who I am and what I stand for," Obama said. "And what I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I'm about knows that I am about trying to bridge gaps and I see the commonality in all people."
In a highly publicized speech last month, Obama sharply condemned Wright's remarks. But he did not leave the church or repudiate the minister himself, who he said was like a family member.
On Tuesday, Obama sought to distance himself further from Wright.
"I have been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ since 1992, and have known Reverend Wright for 20 years," Obama said. "The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago."
…
Obama said he didn't vet his pastor before deciding to seek the presidency. He said he was particularly distressed that the furor has been a distraction to the purpose of a campaign.
"I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia explaining that he's done enormous good. ... But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS. ... There are no excuses. They offended me. They rightly offend all Americans and they should be denounced" (Associated 1-3).
Campaigns after the Conventions Begin
More than two dozen Republican staffers were camped in Denver last week, spearheading the latest assaults on Barack Obama who was addressing the Democratic convention nearby. 'We came here to piss the Democrats off,' said one Republican aide with a grin.
They have largely succeeded. Each day new adverts have hammered a relentless drumbeat of negativity, painting Obama as too liberal, too inexperienced and practically a danger to America's future. Leading lights of the Republican universe have paraded in front of the cameras in a disciplined display of party message-making. A typical performance came from former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. 'There are still a lot of serious questions about Barack Obama's preparedness to lead the country,' Giuliani said, …The ad attacked Obama as being so ignorant of foreign affairs that he was virtually a security threat himself. It touched on scare issues such as Islamic terrorism and Iranian nukes. Then it represented Obama's positions on national security as naive and weak. 'These are contrast ads,' Giuliani said afterwards. 'And both sides do them.'
That is only half-true. Democrats do launch attack ads and campaign negatively but no one does it like the Republican Party. Under a succession of dark geniuses, the party has perfected the black art of negative campaigning. It has created the most effective attack machine in the Western world, with the sole purpose of destroying opponents and winning elections. For opponents it is a source of shock, misery and more than a little envy. Its tentacles stretch from the McCain campaign into the murky corners of talk radio, the internet and shadowy groups willing to use any outlandish smear.
Now that machine is focused with laser-like intensity on Obama. The clamour is loud and shrill: Obama is vain, inexperienced, liberal and dangerous. It is backed by a clandestine chorus whispering that he has a secretive Islamic past and it uses racially loaded language. It is also only going to get louder. This week, as McCain and the Republicans gather for their party convention in the Minnesota city of St Paul, the noise will become deafening. It has one purpose - to keep the White House in Republican hands at all costs and against the odds.
The current mastermind of the Republican attack machine is known as the Bullet. He is Steve Schmidt, a protégé of Bush's guru, Karl Rove. Nicknamed for his results as much as his bald head, he made his name as commander of the war room that wiped out Democrat John Kerry in 2004. Brought in to shake things up in July, Schmidt imposed discipline on a disorganised campaign. He dissuaded McCain from his off-the-cuff chats with reporters, and honed the lesson of repeating simple messages loudly and often. Ads attack Obama as a 'celebrity' or a faux-messiah. By doing so they hope to turn Obama's greatest strength - his ability to inspire - into a fatal flaw. That is backed up by another line: that Obama is simply not fit to be president.
...
The campaign will happily twist words. In the ad that Giuliani showed, Obama was hit for referring to the 'tiny' threat from a nuclear Iran. In reality Obama had been pointing out that the problem of Iran was '... tiny compared to the Soviet Union'. Others have interspersed footage of the Democrat candidate with images of Britney Spears. One jokey advert painted him as a Moses-type figure capable of parting the Red Sea. Mocking his message of 'hope' and 'change', radio host Rush Limbaugh has taken to referring on-air to Obama as simply 'the Messiah'.
…
Schmidt and his public operations are merely the visible tip of the machine. But the most aggressive ads are not made by the McCain campaign. They are made by so-called '527 groups' - named for a clause in the tax laws - that cannot officially be linked to any campaign. They are privately financed and exist outside the campaigns, like some sort of 'black ops' off the CIA budget. Democrats have been helped by 527 groups too, though Obama has tried to clamp down on their activities. But Republicans have found them to be highly effective. The Swift Boat campaign that raised questions about Kerry's Vietnam service in the 2004 campaign was a 527. It was financed largely by Texan billionaire Harold Simmons. Simmons has now donated £1.5m to a 527 group called the American Issues Project. The AIP last week brought out the most negative ad in the campaign so far. It linked Obama to Bill Ayers, a former radical with the Weather Underground Organisation, which planted bombs in the 1960s. Ayers, now an academic, once sat on the board of an anti-poverty group alongside Obama and they have other minor connections. The ad, however, used the imagery of 9/11 to paint Obama as being friends with terrorists. Many more AIP ads will be in the works.
It’s not just the 527s. There is an industry devoted to publishing anti-Obama screeds. The most popular has been The Obama Nation, by conservative polemicist Jerome Corsi. The book paints a radical picture of Obama as having a secret Islamic past - but critics say the book can be proven to be wrong. Corsi has also called for Obama to take a drugs test and warned that he might create a 'department of hate crimes' if elected. The Obama Nation has been a bestseller, relentlessly promoted by sympathetic media figures such as Fox News's conservative host Sean Hannity. On his show, Hannity allowed Corsi to claim Obama wanted to allow women to have 'abortions' even after their child was born. Instead of refuting the ridiculous claim, Hannity merely expressed shock. The incident forced a liberal media watchdog to issue an analysis showing Obama had never actually supported the murder of newborn children.
Yet Hannity is just one of a pantheon of conservative media figures who echo the claims of the Republican machine and convey them to the general public in their millions. They include TV hosts such as Glenn Beck on CNN (who last week called Obama a 'Marxist'), Matt Drudge on the internet and radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, the most powerful single broadcaster in America with an estimated 20 million listeners a week on 600 stations. Limbaugh frequently paints Obama as benefiting from 'affirmative action' in his political career. He also makes frequent reference to Obama's middle name, Hussein. Both are clumsy ways of inflaming racial and religious issues at the ballot box (Harris 1-4).
In his [nomination] acceptance speech on the last night of the convention, Obama outlined the issues of his general election campaign. Among other things, Obama promised to “cut taxes for 95 percent of all working families,” “end our dependence on oil from the Middle East,” “invest $150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy,” provide “affordable, accessible health care for every single American,” close “corporate loopholes and tax havens that don't help America grow,” “end this war in Iraq responsibly and finish the fight against al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan,” and allow “our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters to visit the person they love in a hospital and live lives free of discrimination.”
Obama left Denver on August 29 enjoying a small lead over McCain in the polls. But on that same day, McCain stole Obama's thunder by selecting Governor Sarah T. Palin of Alaska as his running mate. Palin balanced the Republican ticket in some obvious ways: young rather than old (Palin was forty-four, McCain was seventy-two), a woman rather than a man, a governor rather than a senator, and a social conservative rather than a national security conservative. At the same time, Palin's reform record in Alaska reinforced McCain's longstanding image as a political “maverick” who bucked the Washington establishment. Her rousing acceptance speech at the convention helped to propel the Republican ticket into a small lead over Obama and Biden in early September (Nelson 4-5).
McCain had wanted to make an even bolder pick: his old friend Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who had been Vice President Al Gore's running mate in 2000 and who had crossed party lines the year before to campaign for McCain in New Hampshire.
Lieberman had won his most recent Senate term as an independent. And he would have added an unprecedented bipartisan flavor to McCain's campaign, which had adopted the motto "Country First" to downplay partisanship.
According to the 2010 book "Game Change," a behind-the-scenes account of the 2008 race by journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, a McCain-Lieberman ticket was viewed internally as a way to break with President George W. Bush's unpopular presidency, which was seen as the biggest hurdle to Republicans keeping the White House.
It wasn't to be. While McCain and Lieberman were simpatico on foreign policy, that was about it. Lieberman was an unabashed liberal on most other issues. Most problematic for McCain was Lieberman's support of abortion rights. As speculation swirled that McCain might choose a pro-choice running mate, conservatives were outraged. Per "Game Change," McCain's pollster Bill McInturff tried to gauge the potential impact and found that a McCain-Lieberman ticket would cost more GOP votes than it would swing in independents. And that was assuming there wouldn't be an outright revolt at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.
McCain bowed to that reality and selected Palin, who made her presidential campaign trail debut Aug. 29 in Dayton, Ohio.
Charlie Black, a senior McCain adviser, told The Arizona Republic that McCain was impressed by Palin after meeting her in February at a National Governors Association meeting in Washington, D.C.
"What this brings is a spirit of reform and change that is vital now in our nation's capital," McCain said in an Aug. 31 appearance on "Fox News Sunday."
"By the way, in the last day and a half or whatever it's been, we have raised $4 million on the internet. I wish I had taken her a month ago," McCain added.
The Palin pick was a surprise for many reasons, not the least of which was that nobody outside Alaska, besides die-hard political junkies, had ever heard of her. The choice also seemed to undercut McCain's biggest strength against Obama: his long experience on the national scene and in the military relative to Obama. Obama had tried to counter that perception by tapping Joe Biden, a veteran senator from Delaware who had spent years as either chairman or a senior member of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Now McCain's campaign had opened itself to attacks about Palin's lack of experience in national politics or on foreign policy. Her short record in public office also would reveal a taste for the pork-barrel projects that McCain for years had crusaded against as a waste of taxpayer money.
The first time he heard who McCain had picked, Biden asked, "Who's Sarah Palin?" according to the account in "Game Change."
But Palin was a folksy, intriguing newcomer to national politics and provided some welcome contrasts to McCain.
McCain was the epitome of the moderate GOP establishment; she was an anti-establishment conservative. She was 44 years old; he had turned 72 on the day his Palin pick was revealed. And the initial impression of Palin was that she seemed more down to earth than McCain, who recently had been unable to remember how many homes he and his wife, Cindy, owned around the country. (The answer at the time was eight, though, technically, beer-distributionship heiress Cindy controlled the family fortune and their finances were separate.)
There was even speculation inside the McCain campaign that, as a woman with five young children, Palin might appeal to some female voters who were disappointed by Obama's defeat of Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York in the Democratic primaries.
"John was a maverick, and he said he had picked me because in many ways I'm wired the same," Palin would write later in her 2009 memoir, "Going Rogue: An American Life."
… Palin was the big hit of the convention. She used her speech at St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center to introduce herself to a national audience, to stand up for her small-town roots, and take shots at Obama's past career as a community organizer in Chicago.
"Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves," Palin said. "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities."
She also introduced "hockey mom" into the national lexicon in her acceptance of the vice-presidential nomination. "You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick," she said in one of her speech's most memorable lines.
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"You know, I've been called a maverick, someone who marches to the beat of his own drum," McCain said of his reputation for bucking the GOP at times. "Sometimes, it's meant as a compliment and sometimes it's not. What it really means is I understand who I work for. I don't work for a party. I don't work for a special interest. I don't work for myself. I work for you."
McCain and his team left St. Paul with a feeling the deck had been reshuffled. and they were holding a better hand.
That feeling wouldn't last (Nowici II 1-5).
The 24/7 news cycle and the proliferation of blogs as a means of disseminating information (both factual and erroneous) framed the contest as both campaigns attempted to control the narrative. McCain’s campaign tried to paint Obama as a naive, inexperienced political lightweight who would sit down with the leaders of anti-American regimes in Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela without preconditions, claimed that he was merely a celebrity with little substance (airing an ad comparing Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton), labeled his ideas socialist (hammering away at Obama’s tax policy in particular and pouncing on Obama’s comment to “Joe the Plumber” that he would seek to “spread the wealth”), and attacked his association with Bill Ayers, who had cofounded the Weathermen, a group that carried out bombings in the 1960s. Ayers, in 2008 a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago—and constantly called an “unrepentant domestic terrorist” by the McCain campaign—lived a few blocks from Obama in Chicago, contributed to his reelection campaign for the Illinois Senate, and served on an antipoverty board with Obama from 1999 to 2002. Obama downplayed his acquaintance with Ayers and denounced Ayers’s activities as “detestable” but was quick to note that these activities had occurred 40 years ago when the candidate was eight years old. In addition, on the basis of e-mails and other assertions never proved, a small but still significant percentage of the public erroneously believed Obama (a practicing Christian) to be a Muslim.
To defend against the attacks, Obama’s campaign took the unprecedented step of establishing a Web site, “Fight the Smears,” to “fight back against ‘hateful,’ ‘vicious,’ and ‘desperate’ robocalls and mailers.” In turn, Obama’s campaign attempted to cast doubt on McCain’s maverick persona and diminish his appeal to independent voters by tying him at every opportunity to Pres. George W. Bush, whose popularity was among the lowest of any modern president, and broadcasting ads that showed the two in embrace and often repeating that McCain voted with the Bush administration 90 percent of the time. The Obama campaign also sought to frame McCain as “erratic,” a charge that was often repeated and that some alleged was an oblique reference to McCain’s age, as he would be the oldest person ever to be inaugurated to a first term as president (Editors 1-2).
Works Cited:
Associated Press, “Obama Strongly Denounced Former Pastor.” NBC News, April 29, 2008. Web. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/24371827/ns...
Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “United States Presidential Election of 2008.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Web. https://www.britannica.com/event/Unit...
Harris, Paul, “US Election: It's the Most Vicious Election Campaign Ever - and Here's Why.” The Guardian, August 30, 2008. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...
Nelson, Michael, “Barack Obama: Campaigns and Elections.” UVA Miller Center. Web. https://millercenter.org/president/ob...
Nowicki, Dan, “'It Was Never Meant to Be' — John McCain Fails in 2nd Presidential bid.” The Republic, April 2, 2018. Web. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/...
Ross, Brian and El-Buri, Rehab, “Obama's Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11.” ABC News, May 7, 2008. Web. https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Democr...
In early March, news organizations and websites showed video recordings of some controversial sermons by Obama’s pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, including one in which Wright blamed the United States for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington and another in which he accused the federal government of “inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.” Obama largely defused the crisis by giving a speech in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, repudiating Wright's statements and thoughtfully outlining his own views on race relations (Nelson 1).
March 13, 2008— -- Sen. Barack Obama's pastor says blacks should not sing "God Bless America" but "God damn America."
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's south side, has a long history of what even Obama's campaign aides concede is "inflammatory rhetoric," including the assertion that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own "terrorism."
…
Rev. Wright married Obama and his wife Michelle, baptized their two daughters and is credited by Obama for the title of his book, "The Audacity of Hope."
An ABC News review of dozens of Rev. Wright's sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans.
"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."
In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001, that the United States had brought on al Qaeda's attacks because of its own terrorism.
"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.
"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he told his congregation.
Sen. Obama told the New York Times he was not at the church on the day of Rev. Wright's 9/11 sermon. "The violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification," Obama said in a recent interview. "It sounds like he was trying to be provocative," Obama told the paper.
…
In a statement to ABCNews.com, Obama's press spokesman Bill Burton said, "Sen. Obama has said repeatedly that personal attacks such as this have no place in this campaign or our politics, whether they're offered from a platform at a rally or the pulpit of a church. Sen. Obama does not think of the pastor of his church in political terms. Like a member of his family, there are things he says with which Sen. Obama deeply disagrees. But now that he is retired, that doesn't detract from Sen. Obama's affection for Rev. Wright or his appreciation for the good works he has done" (Ross and El-Buri 1-3).
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Tuesday he was outraged by the latest divisive comments from his former pastor and rejected the notion that he secretly agrees with him.
Obama is seeking to tamp down the growing fury over Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his incendiary remarks that threaten to undermine his campaign at a tough time. The Illinois senator is coming off a loss in Pennsylvania to rival Hillary Rodham Clinton and trying to win over white working-class voters in Indiana and North Carolina in next Tuesday's primaries.
"I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle that we saw yesterday," Obama told reporters at a news conference.
After weeks of staying out of the public eye while critics lambasted his sermons, Wright made three public appearances in four days to defend himself. The former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago has been combative, providing colorful commentary and feeding the story Obama had hoped was dying down.
On Monday, Wright criticized the U.S. government as imperialist and stood by his suggestion that the United States invented the HIV virus as a means of genocide against minorities.
"Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything," he said.
…
"If Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected," Wright said. "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."
…
"What became clear to me is that he was presenting a world view that contradicts who I am and what I stand for," Obama said. "And what I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I'm about knows that I am about trying to bridge gaps and I see the commonality in all people."
In a highly publicized speech last month, Obama sharply condemned Wright's remarks. But he did not leave the church or repudiate the minister himself, who he said was like a family member.
On Tuesday, Obama sought to distance himself further from Wright.
"I have been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ since 1992, and have known Reverend Wright for 20 years," Obama said. "The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago."
…
Obama said he didn't vet his pastor before deciding to seek the presidency. He said he was particularly distressed that the furor has been a distraction to the purpose of a campaign.
"I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia explaining that he's done enormous good. ... But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS. ... There are no excuses. They offended me. They rightly offend all Americans and they should be denounced" (Associated 1-3).
Campaigns after the Conventions Begin
More than two dozen Republican staffers were camped in Denver last week, spearheading the latest assaults on Barack Obama who was addressing the Democratic convention nearby. 'We came here to piss the Democrats off,' said one Republican aide with a grin.
They have largely succeeded. Each day new adverts have hammered a relentless drumbeat of negativity, painting Obama as too liberal, too inexperienced and practically a danger to America's future. Leading lights of the Republican universe have paraded in front of the cameras in a disciplined display of party message-making. A typical performance came from former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. 'There are still a lot of serious questions about Barack Obama's preparedness to lead the country,' Giuliani said, …The ad attacked Obama as being so ignorant of foreign affairs that he was virtually a security threat himself. It touched on scare issues such as Islamic terrorism and Iranian nukes. Then it represented Obama's positions on national security as naive and weak. 'These are contrast ads,' Giuliani said afterwards. 'And both sides do them.'
That is only half-true. Democrats do launch attack ads and campaign negatively but no one does it like the Republican Party. Under a succession of dark geniuses, the party has perfected the black art of negative campaigning. It has created the most effective attack machine in the Western world, with the sole purpose of destroying opponents and winning elections. For opponents it is a source of shock, misery and more than a little envy. Its tentacles stretch from the McCain campaign into the murky corners of talk radio, the internet and shadowy groups willing to use any outlandish smear.
Now that machine is focused with laser-like intensity on Obama. The clamour is loud and shrill: Obama is vain, inexperienced, liberal and dangerous. It is backed by a clandestine chorus whispering that he has a secretive Islamic past and it uses racially loaded language. It is also only going to get louder. This week, as McCain and the Republicans gather for their party convention in the Minnesota city of St Paul, the noise will become deafening. It has one purpose - to keep the White House in Republican hands at all costs and against the odds.
The current mastermind of the Republican attack machine is known as the Bullet. He is Steve Schmidt, a protégé of Bush's guru, Karl Rove. Nicknamed for his results as much as his bald head, he made his name as commander of the war room that wiped out Democrat John Kerry in 2004. Brought in to shake things up in July, Schmidt imposed discipline on a disorganised campaign. He dissuaded McCain from his off-the-cuff chats with reporters, and honed the lesson of repeating simple messages loudly and often. Ads attack Obama as a 'celebrity' or a faux-messiah. By doing so they hope to turn Obama's greatest strength - his ability to inspire - into a fatal flaw. That is backed up by another line: that Obama is simply not fit to be president.
...
The campaign will happily twist words. In the ad that Giuliani showed, Obama was hit for referring to the 'tiny' threat from a nuclear Iran. In reality Obama had been pointing out that the problem of Iran was '... tiny compared to the Soviet Union'. Others have interspersed footage of the Democrat candidate with images of Britney Spears. One jokey advert painted him as a Moses-type figure capable of parting the Red Sea. Mocking his message of 'hope' and 'change', radio host Rush Limbaugh has taken to referring on-air to Obama as simply 'the Messiah'.
…
Schmidt and his public operations are merely the visible tip of the machine. But the most aggressive ads are not made by the McCain campaign. They are made by so-called '527 groups' - named for a clause in the tax laws - that cannot officially be linked to any campaign. They are privately financed and exist outside the campaigns, like some sort of 'black ops' off the CIA budget. Democrats have been helped by 527 groups too, though Obama has tried to clamp down on their activities. But Republicans have found them to be highly effective. The Swift Boat campaign that raised questions about Kerry's Vietnam service in the 2004 campaign was a 527. It was financed largely by Texan billionaire Harold Simmons. Simmons has now donated £1.5m to a 527 group called the American Issues Project. The AIP last week brought out the most negative ad in the campaign so far. It linked Obama to Bill Ayers, a former radical with the Weather Underground Organisation, which planted bombs in the 1960s. Ayers, now an academic, once sat on the board of an anti-poverty group alongside Obama and they have other minor connections. The ad, however, used the imagery of 9/11 to paint Obama as being friends with terrorists. Many more AIP ads will be in the works.
It’s not just the 527s. There is an industry devoted to publishing anti-Obama screeds. The most popular has been The Obama Nation, by conservative polemicist Jerome Corsi. The book paints a radical picture of Obama as having a secret Islamic past - but critics say the book can be proven to be wrong. Corsi has also called for Obama to take a drugs test and warned that he might create a 'department of hate crimes' if elected. The Obama Nation has been a bestseller, relentlessly promoted by sympathetic media figures such as Fox News's conservative host Sean Hannity. On his show, Hannity allowed Corsi to claim Obama wanted to allow women to have 'abortions' even after their child was born. Instead of refuting the ridiculous claim, Hannity merely expressed shock. The incident forced a liberal media watchdog to issue an analysis showing Obama had never actually supported the murder of newborn children.
Yet Hannity is just one of a pantheon of conservative media figures who echo the claims of the Republican machine and convey them to the general public in their millions. They include TV hosts such as Glenn Beck on CNN (who last week called Obama a 'Marxist'), Matt Drudge on the internet and radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, the most powerful single broadcaster in America with an estimated 20 million listeners a week on 600 stations. Limbaugh frequently paints Obama as benefiting from 'affirmative action' in his political career. He also makes frequent reference to Obama's middle name, Hussein. Both are clumsy ways of inflaming racial and religious issues at the ballot box (Harris 1-4).
In his [nomination] acceptance speech on the last night of the convention, Obama outlined the issues of his general election campaign. Among other things, Obama promised to “cut taxes for 95 percent of all working families,” “end our dependence on oil from the Middle East,” “invest $150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy,” provide “affordable, accessible health care for every single American,” close “corporate loopholes and tax havens that don't help America grow,” “end this war in Iraq responsibly and finish the fight against al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan,” and allow “our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters to visit the person they love in a hospital and live lives free of discrimination.”
Obama left Denver on August 29 enjoying a small lead over McCain in the polls. But on that same day, McCain stole Obama's thunder by selecting Governor Sarah T. Palin of Alaska as his running mate. Palin balanced the Republican ticket in some obvious ways: young rather than old (Palin was forty-four, McCain was seventy-two), a woman rather than a man, a governor rather than a senator, and a social conservative rather than a national security conservative. At the same time, Palin's reform record in Alaska reinforced McCain's longstanding image as a political “maverick” who bucked the Washington establishment. Her rousing acceptance speech at the convention helped to propel the Republican ticket into a small lead over Obama and Biden in early September (Nelson 4-5).
McCain had wanted to make an even bolder pick: his old friend Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who had been Vice President Al Gore's running mate in 2000 and who had crossed party lines the year before to campaign for McCain in New Hampshire.
Lieberman had won his most recent Senate term as an independent. And he would have added an unprecedented bipartisan flavor to McCain's campaign, which had adopted the motto "Country First" to downplay partisanship.
According to the 2010 book "Game Change," a behind-the-scenes account of the 2008 race by journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, a McCain-Lieberman ticket was viewed internally as a way to break with President George W. Bush's unpopular presidency, which was seen as the biggest hurdle to Republicans keeping the White House.
It wasn't to be. While McCain and Lieberman were simpatico on foreign policy, that was about it. Lieberman was an unabashed liberal on most other issues. Most problematic for McCain was Lieberman's support of abortion rights. As speculation swirled that McCain might choose a pro-choice running mate, conservatives were outraged. Per "Game Change," McCain's pollster Bill McInturff tried to gauge the potential impact and found that a McCain-Lieberman ticket would cost more GOP votes than it would swing in independents. And that was assuming there wouldn't be an outright revolt at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.
McCain bowed to that reality and selected Palin, who made her presidential campaign trail debut Aug. 29 in Dayton, Ohio.
Charlie Black, a senior McCain adviser, told The Arizona Republic that McCain was impressed by Palin after meeting her in February at a National Governors Association meeting in Washington, D.C.
"What this brings is a spirit of reform and change that is vital now in our nation's capital," McCain said in an Aug. 31 appearance on "Fox News Sunday."
"By the way, in the last day and a half or whatever it's been, we have raised $4 million on the internet. I wish I had taken her a month ago," McCain added.
The Palin pick was a surprise for many reasons, not the least of which was that nobody outside Alaska, besides die-hard political junkies, had ever heard of her. The choice also seemed to undercut McCain's biggest strength against Obama: his long experience on the national scene and in the military relative to Obama. Obama had tried to counter that perception by tapping Joe Biden, a veteran senator from Delaware who had spent years as either chairman or a senior member of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Now McCain's campaign had opened itself to attacks about Palin's lack of experience in national politics or on foreign policy. Her short record in public office also would reveal a taste for the pork-barrel projects that McCain for years had crusaded against as a waste of taxpayer money.
The first time he heard who McCain had picked, Biden asked, "Who's Sarah Palin?" according to the account in "Game Change."
But Palin was a folksy, intriguing newcomer to national politics and provided some welcome contrasts to McCain.
McCain was the epitome of the moderate GOP establishment; she was an anti-establishment conservative. She was 44 years old; he had turned 72 on the day his Palin pick was revealed. And the initial impression of Palin was that she seemed more down to earth than McCain, who recently had been unable to remember how many homes he and his wife, Cindy, owned around the country. (The answer at the time was eight, though, technically, beer-distributionship heiress Cindy controlled the family fortune and their finances were separate.)
There was even speculation inside the McCain campaign that, as a woman with five young children, Palin might appeal to some female voters who were disappointed by Obama's defeat of Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York in the Democratic primaries.
"John was a maverick, and he said he had picked me because in many ways I'm wired the same," Palin would write later in her 2009 memoir, "Going Rogue: An American Life."
… Palin was the big hit of the convention. She used her speech at St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center to introduce herself to a national audience, to stand up for her small-town roots, and take shots at Obama's past career as a community organizer in Chicago.
"Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves," Palin said. "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities."
She also introduced "hockey mom" into the national lexicon in her acceptance of the vice-presidential nomination. "You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick," she said in one of her speech's most memorable lines.
…
"You know, I've been called a maverick, someone who marches to the beat of his own drum," McCain said of his reputation for bucking the GOP at times. "Sometimes, it's meant as a compliment and sometimes it's not. What it really means is I understand who I work for. I don't work for a party. I don't work for a special interest. I don't work for myself. I work for you."
McCain and his team left St. Paul with a feeling the deck had been reshuffled. and they were holding a better hand.
That feeling wouldn't last (Nowici II 1-5).
The 24/7 news cycle and the proliferation of blogs as a means of disseminating information (both factual and erroneous) framed the contest as both campaigns attempted to control the narrative. McCain’s campaign tried to paint Obama as a naive, inexperienced political lightweight who would sit down with the leaders of anti-American regimes in Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela without preconditions, claimed that he was merely a celebrity with little substance (airing an ad comparing Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton), labeled his ideas socialist (hammering away at Obama’s tax policy in particular and pouncing on Obama’s comment to “Joe the Plumber” that he would seek to “spread the wealth”), and attacked his association with Bill Ayers, who had cofounded the Weathermen, a group that carried out bombings in the 1960s. Ayers, in 2008 a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago—and constantly called an “unrepentant domestic terrorist” by the McCain campaign—lived a few blocks from Obama in Chicago, contributed to his reelection campaign for the Illinois Senate, and served on an antipoverty board with Obama from 1999 to 2002. Obama downplayed his acquaintance with Ayers and denounced Ayers’s activities as “detestable” but was quick to note that these activities had occurred 40 years ago when the candidate was eight years old. In addition, on the basis of e-mails and other assertions never proved, a small but still significant percentage of the public erroneously believed Obama (a practicing Christian) to be a Muslim.
To defend against the attacks, Obama’s campaign took the unprecedented step of establishing a Web site, “Fight the Smears,” to “fight back against ‘hateful,’ ‘vicious,’ and ‘desperate’ robocalls and mailers.” In turn, Obama’s campaign attempted to cast doubt on McCain’s maverick persona and diminish his appeal to independent voters by tying him at every opportunity to Pres. George W. Bush, whose popularity was among the lowest of any modern president, and broadcasting ads that showed the two in embrace and often repeating that McCain voted with the Bush administration 90 percent of the time. The Obama campaign also sought to frame McCain as “erratic,” a charge that was often repeated and that some alleged was an oblique reference to McCain’s age, as he would be the oldest person ever to be inaugurated to a first term as president (Editors 1-2).
Works Cited:
Associated Press, “Obama Strongly Denounced Former Pastor.” NBC News, April 29, 2008. Web. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/24371827/ns...
Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “United States Presidential Election of 2008.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Web. https://www.britannica.com/event/Unit...
Harris, Paul, “US Election: It's the Most Vicious Election Campaign Ever - and Here's Why.” The Guardian, August 30, 2008. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...
Nelson, Michael, “Barack Obama: Campaigns and Elections.” UVA Miller Center. Web. https://millercenter.org/president/ob...
Nowicki, Dan, “'It Was Never Meant to Be' — John McCain Fails in 2nd Presidential bid.” The Republic, April 2, 2018. Web. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/...
Ross, Brian and El-Buri, Rehab, “Obama's Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11.” ABC News, May 7, 2008. Web. https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Democr...
September 8, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2008 Election -- Results, Pre-Convention Smears
The 56th quadrennial United States presidential election was held on November 4, 2008. Outgoing Republican President George W. Bush's policies and actions and the American public's desire for change were key issues throughout the campaign. During the presidential election campaign, the major-party candidates ran on a platform of change and reform in Washington. Domestic policy and the economy eventually emerged as the main themes in the last few months of the election campaign after the onset of the 2008 economic crisis.
Democrat Barack Obama, then junior United States Senator from Illinois, defeated Republican John McCain. Nine states changed allegiance from the 2004 election. Each had voted for the Republican nominee in 2004 and contributed to Obama's sizable Electoral College victory. …
There were several unique aspects of the 2008 election. The election was the first in which an African American was elected President. It was also the first time two sitting senators ran against each other. The 2008 election was the first in 56 years in which neither an incumbent president nor a vice president ran — Bush was constitutionally limited from seeking a third term by the Twenty-second Amendment; Vice President Dick Cheney chose not to seek the presidency. It was also the first time the Republican Party nominated a woman for Vice President (Sarah Palin, then-Governor of Alaska). Additionally, it was the first election in which both major parties nominated candidates who were born outside of the contiguous United States. Voter turnout for the 2008 election was the highest in at least 40 years (2008 1).
In the last three general elections – 2004, 2006, and 2008 — young voters have given the Democratic Party a majority of their votes, and for all three cycles they have been the party’s most supportive age group. This year, 66% of those under age 30 voted for Barack Obama making the disparity between young voters and other age groups larger than in any presidential election since exit polling began in 1972.
This pattern of votes, along with other evidence about the political leanings of young voters, suggests that a significant generational shift in political allegiance is occurring. This pattern has been building for several years, and is underscored among voters this year. Among voters ages 18-29, a 19-point gap now separates Democratic party affiliation (45%) and Republican affiliation (26%). In 2000, party affiliation was split nearly evenly among the young.
Young voters are more diverse racially and ethnically than older voters and more secular in their religious orientation. These characteristics, as well as the climate in which they have come of age politically, incline them not only toward Democratic Party affiliation but also toward greater support of activist government, greater opposition to the war in Iraq, less social conservatism, and a greater willingness to describe themselves as liberal politically.
Young people were not, however, crucial to Barack Obama’s victory, according to the exit polls. Obama would have lost Indiana and North Carolina, but carried other key states such as Ohio and Florida, as well as the national vote. But young people provided not only their votes but also many enthusiastic campaign volunteers. Some may have helped persuade parents and older relatives to consider Obama’s candidacy. And far more young people than older voters reported attending a campaign event while nearly one-in-ten donated money to a presidential candidate.
While Obama captured 66% of the youth vote, compared with McCain’s 31%, voters age 30 and older divided roughly evenly between the two candidates. Among those ages 18-29, Obama took a majority among whites (54%-44%), and captured more than three-fourths of young Hispanic voters (76%-19%). However, among both younger and older voters, there was no difference in the vote of those with college experience and those without.
…
One of the most striking features of young voters is their racial and ethnic diversity. Just 62% of voters age 18-29 identify as white, while 18% are black and 14% Hispanic. Four years ago, this age group was 68% white. In 2000, nearly three-quarters (74%) of young voters were white.
Women significantly outnumber men among younger voters, constituting 55% of those 18-29 and 30-44. Among voters ages 45-64, 52% are female, while 51% of voters age 65 and older are women.
Compared with those age 30 and older, fewer young voters say they are affiliated with a religious tradition (16% vs. 12% overall), and fewer report regular attendance at worship services. Among all voters, 40% attend religious services weekly or more often; among those 18-29, just 33% do so (Rosentiel 1-2).
5 Reasons Why the 2008 Election Is Historic
1. Barack Obama is the first African-American ever to be elected president of the United States.
2. Joe Biden is the first Roman Catholic ever to serve as vice president.
3. It is estimated that 136.6 million Americans voted for president this election, up from 122.3 million in 2004. That would give 2008 a 64.1 percent voter turnout rate, the highest since 1908.
4. States achieved record voter turnout numbers of African-Americans and Hispanics. Whites are estimated to have made up 74 percent of the 2008 electorate, down from 81 percent in 2008 because of the increase in black and Hispanic voting. In North Carolina, blacks make up 22 percent of the population, but 31 percent of newly registered voters were black.
5. Obama raised more money in this election than any candidate in history.
Pre-Nomination Character Assassination
There are copious anti-Obama texts from the earliest days of his campaign … “proving” that Obama wouldn’t sing the national anthem or salute the flag, had an American flag removed from the exterior of his campaign plane, wouldn’t wear a flag pin, and dissed the Boy Scouts of America.
…
There are the beliefs that … he’s gay and had arranged for numerous lovers who referred to him as “Bathhouse Barry” to be killed so that they couldn’t out him. …
In the early days of the campaign following Obama’s announcement of his candidacy on December 10, 2007, very few of these texts were covered by the mainstream media. The Obama campaign took the position that to deny them in any kind of a conspicuous way would be to plant them in the minds of people who hadn’t yet heard them (Turner 422-423).
…
However, an inquiry from a reporter caused the Obama campaign in June 2008 to create a “Fight The Smears” tab on their campaign website (Pickler 2008). It wasn’t a rumor about Barack Obama that prompted the course correction; it was about Michelle, and the accusation was that she had used the word “whitey” from the pulpit of Jeremiah Wright’s church. And for the duration of the campaign, if you went to the website for Obama, this feature worked like a campaign-specific Snopes. But prior to the election, the Obamas rarely addressed the texts head-on. Instead, they clearly attempted to debunk the rumors by showcasing behaviors and practices that would negate them. Although his use of a flag pin had been irregular during the early days of the campaign, Obama soon made it a permanent fixture on his lapel. To this day, it is hard to find an image of him that doesn’t contain the flag pin or abundant patriotic iconography. The entire January 2009 inauguration ceremony can be read as an attempt by Obama and his team to discredit the slurs that had accumulated during the campaign. From his overcoat during the parade to his tuxedo at the inauguration balls, every garment he wore had a flag pin. Much to the consternation of many of his supporters, he chose an evangelical faith leader, Pastor Rick Warren, to read the invocation, and, no doubt to stifle any concerns that he was being sworn in with the Quran, he requested to be sworn in with the Bible used by Abraham Lincoln. ...
When the controversy over Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright reached critical mass last week, it was the political equivalent of the green flag at a NASCAR race. The conservative strategists and talkers had been slowly circling the track, feet itchy on the accelerator, just waiting for the signal to floor it. But now, as The Politico reported in a story titled "GOP sees Rev. Wright as path to victory," the Republican strategists know exactly what must be done …
… these kinds of attacks have their greatest power when they tap into pre-existing archetypes voters already carry with them, and the deeper they reside in our lizard brains the better. So they will make sure white Americans know that Obama is not Tiger Woods. He's not the unthreatening black man, he's the scary black man. He's Al Sharpton, he's Malcom X, he's Huey Newton. He'll throw grievance in your face, make you feel guilty, and who knows, maybe kill you and rape your wife. …
Pre-Nomination Character Assassination
There are copious anti-Obama texts from the earliest days of his campaign … “proving” that Obama wouldn’t sing the national anthem or salute the flag, had an American flag removed from the exterior of his campaign plane, wouldn’t wear a flag pin, and dissed the Boy Scouts of America.
…
There are the beliefs that … he’s gay and had arranged for numerous lovers who referred to him as “Bathhouse Barry” to be killed so that they couldn’t out him. …
In the early days of the campaign following Obama’s announcement of his candidacy on December 10, 2007, very few of these texts were covered by the mainstream media. The Obama campaign took the position that to deny them in any kind of a conspicuous way would be to plant them in the minds of people who hadn’t yet heard them (Turner 422-423).
…
However, an inquiry from a reporter caused the Obama campaign in June 2008 to create a “Fight The Smears” tab on their campaign website (Pickler 2008). It wasn’t a rumor about Barack Obama that prompted the course correction; it was about Michelle, and the accusation was that she had used the word “whitey” from the pulpit of Jeremiah Wright’s church. And for the duration of the campaign, if you went to the website for Obama, this feature worked like a campaign-specific Snopes. But prior to the election, the Obamas rarely addressed the texts head-on. Instead, they clearly attempted to debunk the rumors by showcasing behaviors and practices that would negate them. Although his use of a flag pin had been irregular during the early days of the campaign, Obama soon made it a permanent fixture on his lapel. To this day, it is hard to find an image of him that doesn’t contain the flag pin or abundant patriotic iconography. The entire January 2009 inauguration ceremony can be read as an attempt by Obama and his team to discredit the slurs that had accumulated during the campaign. From his overcoat during the parade to his tuxedo at the inauguration balls, every garment he wore had a flag pin. Much to the consternation of many of his supporters, he chose an evangelical faith leader, Pastor Rick Warren, to read the invocation, and, no doubt to stifle any concerns that he was being sworn in with the Quran, he requested to be sworn in with the Bible used by Abraham Lincoln. ...
When the controversy over Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright reached critical mass last week, it was the political equivalent of the green flag at a NASCAR race. The conservative strategists and talkers had been slowly circling the track, feet itchy on the accelerator, just waiting for the signal to floor it. But now, as The Politico reported in a story titled "GOP sees Rev. Wright as path to victory," the Republican strategists know exactly what must be done …
… these kinds of attacks have their greatest power when they tap into pre-existing archetypes voters already carry with them, and the deeper they reside in our lizard brains the better. So they will make sure white Americans know that Obama is not Tiger Woods. He's not the unthreatening black man, he's the scary black man. He's Al Sharpton, he's Malcom X, he's Huey Newton. He'll throw grievance in your face, make you feel guilty, and who knows, maybe kill you and rape your wife. …
…
The e-mails aren’t a well-funded, faux-grassroots smear like the attacks on John Kerry's war record.
Instead, most observers believe, it's a largely organic expression of a dark place in the American consciousness. And the campaign is aware it is operating in a changed media landscape in which a powerful, false idea can spread deep into the American psyche, almost entirely under the radar of the mainstream media and with no authoritative broadcast voice to put it to rest.
…
"We have no way of tracing where these e-mails come from, but what I know is they come in waves, and they somehow appear magically wherever the next primary or caucus is, although they're also being distributed all across the country. But the volume increases as we get closer to particular elections," he [Obama] said. "That indicates to me that this is something that is being used to try to raise doubts or suspicions about my candidacy."
The campaign's first public test in regards to the e-mail came on Jan. 17, 2007, not long after the researchers were first hired, when Insight Magazine, followed by Fox News, reported, falsely, that Obama had attended a radical Islamic madrassa as a child in Indonesia.
…
When Politico looked into the e-mails in mid-October [2007], reporters found that "Obama Muslim" had risen nearly to the top of Google Suggest, which tracks the frequency of Internet searches. Public polls suggested that substantial numbers of Americans would guess, if asked, that Obama was a Muslim.
By November, the campaign recognized it had a problem. Staffers were getting copies of the similar e-mails forwarded to them by concerned friends and family members. And the issue had begun to pick up steam on the ground in Iowa, where Obama had staked his campaign.
"Our field organizers started to raise some alarms," said Hildebrand. "They said, 'It's really, really out there. People are starting to ask about it.'"
His staff developed a set of talking points to debunk the claims. They printed copies of two letters from local religious leaders, attesting to Obama's faith. And they sent an e-mail to their lists of supporters in the four early primary states warning of and debunking the e-mailed smears, which also include claims that Obama's Chicago church is virulently anti-white and that Obama refuses to cover his heart to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
The e-mails were not confined to the early states—they ricocheted across almost every imaginable e-mail list. One copy went to a national list of family members of September 11 victims. One mass e-mail from a Department of Defense computer prompted the military to release a memorandum specifically banning the e-mail (Smith and Brown 1-3).
Here is an example of such an e-mail, declared false by snopes.com.
If you do not ever forward anything else, please forward this to all your contacts…this is very scary to think of what lies ahead of us here in our own United States…better heed this and pray about it and share it.
Who is Barack Obama?
Probable U. S. presidential candidate, Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., a black MUSLIM from Nyangoma-Kogel, Kenya and Ann Dunham, a white ATHEIST from Wichita, Kansas. Obama’s parents met at the University of Hawaii.
When Obama was two years old, his parents divorced. His father returned to Kenya. His mother then married Lolo Soetoro, a RADICAL Muslim from Indonesia. When Obama was 6 years old, the family relocated to Indonesia. Obama attended a MUSLIM school in Jakarta. He also spent two years in a Catholic school.
Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim. He is quick to point out that, “He was once a Muslim, but that he also attended Catholic school.” Obama’s political handlers are attempting to make it appear that he is not a radical.
Lolo Soetoro, the second husband of Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, introduced his stepson to Islam. Obama was enrolled in a Wahabi school in Jakarta. Wahabism is the RADICAL teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the western world. Since it is politically expedient to be a CHRISTIAN when seeking major public office in the United States, Barack Hussein Obama has joined the United Church of Christ in an attempt to downplay his Muslim background. ALSO, keep in mind that when he was sworn into office he DID NOT use the Holy Bible, but instead the Koran.
Barack Hussein Obama will NOT recite the Pledge of Allegiance nor will he show any reverence for our flag. While others place their hands over their hearts, Obama turns his back to the flag and slouches.
Let us all remain alert concerning Obama’s expected presidential candidacy.
The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the US from the inside out, what better way to start than at the highest level – through the President of the United States, one of their own!!!! (Mikkelson 1)
Fact: Obama’s introduction to Islam came via his father, and this influence was temporary at best. In reality, the senior Obama returned to Kenya soon after the divorce, and never again had any direct influence over his son’s education.
Willie Hortoncampaign ad maker Floyd Brown and a couple of other conservative activists are creating a YouTube and viral e-mail campaign against Barack Obama.
Image: Exposeobama.com –This new effort is a viral e-mail campaign that aims to frame Obama as a disastrous-for-the-country left-of-left liberal. It is on view at a website called ExposeObama.com.
…
… studies have shown that peer-to-peer communication of political ideas and opinions is more influential than TV ads in swaying voters' perceptions of candidates.
"ExposeObama.com is trying to create doubt, and trying to create momentum behind that doubt to hit at gut level," says Jeffrey Feldman, a cultural anthropologist and author of a couple of books on political rhetoric. "People won't necessarily think Barack Obama is a terrorist, but they will come to the conclusion: 'I just don't know about this Barack Obama guy.'"
"I think that these ideas will be imprinted in the public’s mind and [if Obama's elected] will cause problems to the Obama administration and to the Democratic party," he adds.
Obama's campaign created a counter-viral campaign this January when it attempted to fight back against the anonymous smear e-mails that have been circulating widely during this campaign cycle. The smear e-mails question Obama's religious and political leanings. To counter those, the Obama campaign created a web page with the facts about Obama’s background, and it allowed users to upload their e-mail address books to send those facts around.
…
"We are a committed group of conservatives concerned that Barack Hussein Obama would be the worst possible President for America at this time, or any time," write the site's authors. "Obama is a liberal, only slightly more stylish than Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, but equally dedicated to the same causes. He will not bring unity or harmony rather he will bring back the confusion, depression and humiliation of the dismal Carter era."
ExposeObama.com's executive director Bruce Hawkins writes:
We have also created a network, where thousands, even tens of thousands of people, can become Publishers, receive our messages and in turn pass them on to their own lists. The objective is to cause our messages to go “viral” and to reach millions of people who otherwise may not see our traditional television ad spots. This is a radically new and innovative approach to political marketing.
...
The group is the creation of the National Campaign Fund, a political action committee set up to help the Republican's presumptive presidential nominee John McCain bid for the White House (Stirland 1-3).
Works cited:
“2008 Presidential Election.” 270 to Win. Web. https://www.270towin.com/2008_Election/
Mikkelson, David, “Who Is Barack Obama? Snopes, March 15, 2007. Web.https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/who...
Rosentiel, Tom, “Young Voters in the 2008 Election.” Pew Research , November 13, 2008. Web. https://www.pewresearch.org/2008/11/1...
Stirland, Sara Lai, “Willie Horton Ad Maker Goes Web 2.0 With Attacks Against Obama.”Wired, June 9, 2008. Web. https://www.wired.com/2008/06/willie-...
Turner, Patricia A., “Respecting the Smears: Anti-Obama Folklore Anticipates Fake News.” Journal of American Folklore, Volume 131, Number 522, Fall 2018. Web. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/707447/pdf
Waldman, Paul, “Conservatives' Hate-Based Campaign Against Obama.” Vanity Fair, March 25, 2008. Web. https://prospect.org/article/conserva...
Democrat Barack Obama, then junior United States Senator from Illinois, defeated Republican John McCain. Nine states changed allegiance from the 2004 election. Each had voted for the Republican nominee in 2004 and contributed to Obama's sizable Electoral College victory. …
There were several unique aspects of the 2008 election. The election was the first in which an African American was elected President. It was also the first time two sitting senators ran against each other. The 2008 election was the first in 56 years in which neither an incumbent president nor a vice president ran — Bush was constitutionally limited from seeking a third term by the Twenty-second Amendment; Vice President Dick Cheney chose not to seek the presidency. It was also the first time the Republican Party nominated a woman for Vice President (Sarah Palin, then-Governor of Alaska). Additionally, it was the first election in which both major parties nominated candidates who were born outside of the contiguous United States. Voter turnout for the 2008 election was the highest in at least 40 years (2008 1).
In the last three general elections – 2004, 2006, and 2008 — young voters have given the Democratic Party a majority of their votes, and for all three cycles they have been the party’s most supportive age group. This year, 66% of those under age 30 voted for Barack Obama making the disparity between young voters and other age groups larger than in any presidential election since exit polling began in 1972.
This pattern of votes, along with other evidence about the political leanings of young voters, suggests that a significant generational shift in political allegiance is occurring. This pattern has been building for several years, and is underscored among voters this year. Among voters ages 18-29, a 19-point gap now separates Democratic party affiliation (45%) and Republican affiliation (26%). In 2000, party affiliation was split nearly evenly among the young.
Young voters are more diverse racially and ethnically than older voters and more secular in their religious orientation. These characteristics, as well as the climate in which they have come of age politically, incline them not only toward Democratic Party affiliation but also toward greater support of activist government, greater opposition to the war in Iraq, less social conservatism, and a greater willingness to describe themselves as liberal politically.
Young people were not, however, crucial to Barack Obama’s victory, according to the exit polls. Obama would have lost Indiana and North Carolina, but carried other key states such as Ohio and Florida, as well as the national vote. But young people provided not only their votes but also many enthusiastic campaign volunteers. Some may have helped persuade parents and older relatives to consider Obama’s candidacy. And far more young people than older voters reported attending a campaign event while nearly one-in-ten donated money to a presidential candidate.
While Obama captured 66% of the youth vote, compared with McCain’s 31%, voters age 30 and older divided roughly evenly between the two candidates. Among those ages 18-29, Obama took a majority among whites (54%-44%), and captured more than three-fourths of young Hispanic voters (76%-19%). However, among both younger and older voters, there was no difference in the vote of those with college experience and those without.
…
One of the most striking features of young voters is their racial and ethnic diversity. Just 62% of voters age 18-29 identify as white, while 18% are black and 14% Hispanic. Four years ago, this age group was 68% white. In 2000, nearly three-quarters (74%) of young voters were white.
Women significantly outnumber men among younger voters, constituting 55% of those 18-29 and 30-44. Among voters ages 45-64, 52% are female, while 51% of voters age 65 and older are women.
Compared with those age 30 and older, fewer young voters say they are affiliated with a religious tradition (16% vs. 12% overall), and fewer report regular attendance at worship services. Among all voters, 40% attend religious services weekly or more often; among those 18-29, just 33% do so (Rosentiel 1-2).
5 Reasons Why the 2008 Election Is Historic
1. Barack Obama is the first African-American ever to be elected president of the United States.
2. Joe Biden is the first Roman Catholic ever to serve as vice president.
3. It is estimated that 136.6 million Americans voted for president this election, up from 122.3 million in 2004. That would give 2008 a 64.1 percent voter turnout rate, the highest since 1908.
4. States achieved record voter turnout numbers of African-Americans and Hispanics. Whites are estimated to have made up 74 percent of the 2008 electorate, down from 81 percent in 2008 because of the increase in black and Hispanic voting. In North Carolina, blacks make up 22 percent of the population, but 31 percent of newly registered voters were black.
5. Obama raised more money in this election than any candidate in history.
Pre-Nomination Character Assassination
There are copious anti-Obama texts from the earliest days of his campaign … “proving” that Obama wouldn’t sing the national anthem or salute the flag, had an American flag removed from the exterior of his campaign plane, wouldn’t wear a flag pin, and dissed the Boy Scouts of America.
…
There are the beliefs that … he’s gay and had arranged for numerous lovers who referred to him as “Bathhouse Barry” to be killed so that they couldn’t out him. …
In the early days of the campaign following Obama’s announcement of his candidacy on December 10, 2007, very few of these texts were covered by the mainstream media. The Obama campaign took the position that to deny them in any kind of a conspicuous way would be to plant them in the minds of people who hadn’t yet heard them (Turner 422-423).
…
However, an inquiry from a reporter caused the Obama campaign in June 2008 to create a “Fight The Smears” tab on their campaign website (Pickler 2008). It wasn’t a rumor about Barack Obama that prompted the course correction; it was about Michelle, and the accusation was that she had used the word “whitey” from the pulpit of Jeremiah Wright’s church. And for the duration of the campaign, if you went to the website for Obama, this feature worked like a campaign-specific Snopes. But prior to the election, the Obamas rarely addressed the texts head-on. Instead, they clearly attempted to debunk the rumors by showcasing behaviors and practices that would negate them. Although his use of a flag pin had been irregular during the early days of the campaign, Obama soon made it a permanent fixture on his lapel. To this day, it is hard to find an image of him that doesn’t contain the flag pin or abundant patriotic iconography. The entire January 2009 inauguration ceremony can be read as an attempt by Obama and his team to discredit the slurs that had accumulated during the campaign. From his overcoat during the parade to his tuxedo at the inauguration balls, every garment he wore had a flag pin. Much to the consternation of many of his supporters, he chose an evangelical faith leader, Pastor Rick Warren, to read the invocation, and, no doubt to stifle any concerns that he was being sworn in with the Quran, he requested to be sworn in with the Bible used by Abraham Lincoln. ...
When the controversy over Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright reached critical mass last week, it was the political equivalent of the green flag at a NASCAR race. The conservative strategists and talkers had been slowly circling the track, feet itchy on the accelerator, just waiting for the signal to floor it. But now, as The Politico reported in a story titled "GOP sees Rev. Wright as path to victory," the Republican strategists know exactly what must be done …
… these kinds of attacks have their greatest power when they tap into pre-existing archetypes voters already carry with them, and the deeper they reside in our lizard brains the better. So they will make sure white Americans know that Obama is not Tiger Woods. He's not the unthreatening black man, he's the scary black man. He's Al Sharpton, he's Malcom X, he's Huey Newton. He'll throw grievance in your face, make you feel guilty, and who knows, maybe kill you and rape your wife. …
Pre-Nomination Character Assassination
There are copious anti-Obama texts from the earliest days of his campaign … “proving” that Obama wouldn’t sing the national anthem or salute the flag, had an American flag removed from the exterior of his campaign plane, wouldn’t wear a flag pin, and dissed the Boy Scouts of America.
…
There are the beliefs that … he’s gay and had arranged for numerous lovers who referred to him as “Bathhouse Barry” to be killed so that they couldn’t out him. …
In the early days of the campaign following Obama’s announcement of his candidacy on December 10, 2007, very few of these texts were covered by the mainstream media. The Obama campaign took the position that to deny them in any kind of a conspicuous way would be to plant them in the minds of people who hadn’t yet heard them (Turner 422-423).
…
However, an inquiry from a reporter caused the Obama campaign in June 2008 to create a “Fight The Smears” tab on their campaign website (Pickler 2008). It wasn’t a rumor about Barack Obama that prompted the course correction; it was about Michelle, and the accusation was that she had used the word “whitey” from the pulpit of Jeremiah Wright’s church. And for the duration of the campaign, if you went to the website for Obama, this feature worked like a campaign-specific Snopes. But prior to the election, the Obamas rarely addressed the texts head-on. Instead, they clearly attempted to debunk the rumors by showcasing behaviors and practices that would negate them. Although his use of a flag pin had been irregular during the early days of the campaign, Obama soon made it a permanent fixture on his lapel. To this day, it is hard to find an image of him that doesn’t contain the flag pin or abundant patriotic iconography. The entire January 2009 inauguration ceremony can be read as an attempt by Obama and his team to discredit the slurs that had accumulated during the campaign. From his overcoat during the parade to his tuxedo at the inauguration balls, every garment he wore had a flag pin. Much to the consternation of many of his supporters, he chose an evangelical faith leader, Pastor Rick Warren, to read the invocation, and, no doubt to stifle any concerns that he was being sworn in with the Quran, he requested to be sworn in with the Bible used by Abraham Lincoln. ...
When the controversy over Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright reached critical mass last week, it was the political equivalent of the green flag at a NASCAR race. The conservative strategists and talkers had been slowly circling the track, feet itchy on the accelerator, just waiting for the signal to floor it. But now, as The Politico reported in a story titled "GOP sees Rev. Wright as path to victory," the Republican strategists know exactly what must be done …
… these kinds of attacks have their greatest power when they tap into pre-existing archetypes voters already carry with them, and the deeper they reside in our lizard brains the better. So they will make sure white Americans know that Obama is not Tiger Woods. He's not the unthreatening black man, he's the scary black man. He's Al Sharpton, he's Malcom X, he's Huey Newton. He'll throw grievance in your face, make you feel guilty, and who knows, maybe kill you and rape your wife. …
…
The e-mails aren’t a well-funded, faux-grassroots smear like the attacks on John Kerry's war record.
Instead, most observers believe, it's a largely organic expression of a dark place in the American consciousness. And the campaign is aware it is operating in a changed media landscape in which a powerful, false idea can spread deep into the American psyche, almost entirely under the radar of the mainstream media and with no authoritative broadcast voice to put it to rest.
…
"We have no way of tracing where these e-mails come from, but what I know is they come in waves, and they somehow appear magically wherever the next primary or caucus is, although they're also being distributed all across the country. But the volume increases as we get closer to particular elections," he [Obama] said. "That indicates to me that this is something that is being used to try to raise doubts or suspicions about my candidacy."
The campaign's first public test in regards to the e-mail came on Jan. 17, 2007, not long after the researchers were first hired, when Insight Magazine, followed by Fox News, reported, falsely, that Obama had attended a radical Islamic madrassa as a child in Indonesia.
…
When Politico looked into the e-mails in mid-October [2007], reporters found that "Obama Muslim" had risen nearly to the top of Google Suggest, which tracks the frequency of Internet searches. Public polls suggested that substantial numbers of Americans would guess, if asked, that Obama was a Muslim.
By November, the campaign recognized it had a problem. Staffers were getting copies of the similar e-mails forwarded to them by concerned friends and family members. And the issue had begun to pick up steam on the ground in Iowa, where Obama had staked his campaign.
"Our field organizers started to raise some alarms," said Hildebrand. "They said, 'It's really, really out there. People are starting to ask about it.'"
His staff developed a set of talking points to debunk the claims. They printed copies of two letters from local religious leaders, attesting to Obama's faith. And they sent an e-mail to their lists of supporters in the four early primary states warning of and debunking the e-mailed smears, which also include claims that Obama's Chicago church is virulently anti-white and that Obama refuses to cover his heart to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
The e-mails were not confined to the early states—they ricocheted across almost every imaginable e-mail list. One copy went to a national list of family members of September 11 victims. One mass e-mail from a Department of Defense computer prompted the military to release a memorandum specifically banning the e-mail (Smith and Brown 1-3).
Here is an example of such an e-mail, declared false by snopes.com.
If you do not ever forward anything else, please forward this to all your contacts…this is very scary to think of what lies ahead of us here in our own United States…better heed this and pray about it and share it.
Who is Barack Obama?
Probable U. S. presidential candidate, Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., a black MUSLIM from Nyangoma-Kogel, Kenya and Ann Dunham, a white ATHEIST from Wichita, Kansas. Obama’s parents met at the University of Hawaii.
When Obama was two years old, his parents divorced. His father returned to Kenya. His mother then married Lolo Soetoro, a RADICAL Muslim from Indonesia. When Obama was 6 years old, the family relocated to Indonesia. Obama attended a MUSLIM school in Jakarta. He also spent two years in a Catholic school.
Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim. He is quick to point out that, “He was once a Muslim, but that he also attended Catholic school.” Obama’s political handlers are attempting to make it appear that he is not a radical.
Lolo Soetoro, the second husband of Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, introduced his stepson to Islam. Obama was enrolled in a Wahabi school in Jakarta. Wahabism is the RADICAL teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the western world. Since it is politically expedient to be a CHRISTIAN when seeking major public office in the United States, Barack Hussein Obama has joined the United Church of Christ in an attempt to downplay his Muslim background. ALSO, keep in mind that when he was sworn into office he DID NOT use the Holy Bible, but instead the Koran.
Barack Hussein Obama will NOT recite the Pledge of Allegiance nor will he show any reverence for our flag. While others place their hands over their hearts, Obama turns his back to the flag and slouches.
Let us all remain alert concerning Obama’s expected presidential candidacy.
The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the US from the inside out, what better way to start than at the highest level – through the President of the United States, one of their own!!!! (Mikkelson 1)
Fact: Obama’s introduction to Islam came via his father, and this influence was temporary at best. In reality, the senior Obama returned to Kenya soon after the divorce, and never again had any direct influence over his son’s education.
Willie Hortoncampaign ad maker Floyd Brown and a couple of other conservative activists are creating a YouTube and viral e-mail campaign against Barack Obama.
Image: Exposeobama.com –This new effort is a viral e-mail campaign that aims to frame Obama as a disastrous-for-the-country left-of-left liberal. It is on view at a website called ExposeObama.com.
…
… studies have shown that peer-to-peer communication of political ideas and opinions is more influential than TV ads in swaying voters' perceptions of candidates.
"ExposeObama.com is trying to create doubt, and trying to create momentum behind that doubt to hit at gut level," says Jeffrey Feldman, a cultural anthropologist and author of a couple of books on political rhetoric. "People won't necessarily think Barack Obama is a terrorist, but they will come to the conclusion: 'I just don't know about this Barack Obama guy.'"
"I think that these ideas will be imprinted in the public’s mind and [if Obama's elected] will cause problems to the Obama administration and to the Democratic party," he adds.
Obama's campaign created a counter-viral campaign this January when it attempted to fight back against the anonymous smear e-mails that have been circulating widely during this campaign cycle. The smear e-mails question Obama's religious and political leanings. To counter those, the Obama campaign created a web page with the facts about Obama’s background, and it allowed users to upload their e-mail address books to send those facts around.
…
"We are a committed group of conservatives concerned that Barack Hussein Obama would be the worst possible President for America at this time, or any time," write the site's authors. "Obama is a liberal, only slightly more stylish than Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, but equally dedicated to the same causes. He will not bring unity or harmony rather he will bring back the confusion, depression and humiliation of the dismal Carter era."
ExposeObama.com's executive director Bruce Hawkins writes:
We have also created a network, where thousands, even tens of thousands of people, can become Publishers, receive our messages and in turn pass them on to their own lists. The objective is to cause our messages to go “viral” and to reach millions of people who otherwise may not see our traditional television ad spots. This is a radically new and innovative approach to political marketing.
...
The group is the creation of the National Campaign Fund, a political action committee set up to help the Republican's presumptive presidential nominee John McCain bid for the White House (Stirland 1-3).
Works cited:
“2008 Presidential Election.” 270 to Win. Web. https://www.270towin.com/2008_Election/
Mikkelson, David, “Who Is Barack Obama? Snopes, March 15, 2007. Web.https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/who...
Rosentiel, Tom, “Young Voters in the 2008 Election.” Pew Research , November 13, 2008. Web. https://www.pewresearch.org/2008/11/1...
Stirland, Sara Lai, “Willie Horton Ad Maker Goes Web 2.0 With Attacks Against Obama.”Wired, June 9, 2008. Web. https://www.wired.com/2008/06/willie-...
Turner, Patricia A., “Respecting the Smears: Anti-Obama Folklore Anticipates Fake News.” Journal of American Folklore, Volume 131, Number 522, Fall 2018. Web. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/707447/pdf
Waldman, Paul, “Conservatives' Hate-Based Campaign Against Obama.” Vanity Fair, March 25, 2008. Web. https://prospect.org/article/conserva...
September 6, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2004 Election -- Stolen Election?
My Investigation
In the fall of 2012, during my last year as chair of the Florence [Oregon]Area Democratic Club, fearing that presidential returns of 2012 might be flipped to elect Mitt Romney, I researched extensively articles that concluded that John Kerry had been deprived of victory in Ohio in 2004. What follows is my summation of what I discovered, information that I reported at a club meeting shortly before the 2012 election.
There are strong indications that enough votes were taken away from John Kerry to give George W. Bush Ohio’s electoral votes and victory in the 2004 presidential election. Officially, Kerry lost Ohio by just 118,000 votes out of some 5.5 million votes cast. Exit polls had Kerry winning. Getting to the official result from the exit polls result was a 6.7% flip.
Michigan Rep. John Conyers’ report, Preserving Democracy, What Went Wrong in Ohio, presented on January 5, 2005, was the result of a five-week investigation conducted by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic Party members, their staffers, and volunteers pursuant to thousands of complaints of fraud, malfeasance, and incompetence. More than 200 witnesses had been questioned at public hearings in Columbus, Toledo, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. Republican congressmen and their staff members did not join in the inquiry.
The Conyers committee reported three phases of Republican chicanery.
The first phase was the run-up to the election. There was a wide discrepancy between the availability of voting machines in more minority, Democratic, and urban areas than in more Republican, suburban. and exurban areas. Few machines allocated for use in Democratic-majority precinct polls caused long lines of voters, who had to wait 3 to 5 hours to express officially their preference. Many people quit and went home. This tactic negated the Ohio Democratic Party’s considerable success that year of registering new voters.
Additionally, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell sent a directive to county election officials to ignore voter registration cards not printed on 80-pound stock paper. There was no substantive reason for requiring the heavy paper other than to exclude as many newly registered voters as he could from voting. Public pressure forced Blackwell three weeks later to rescind his directive. During the interum an unknown number of Ohioans were disenfranchised.
Blackwell attempted also to limit voter access to provisional ballots. He allowed election officials at the polls to decide who would be permitted to cast them, a contradiction of The Help America Vote Act of 2002. A federal judge did order him to revise his directive; he refused; a federal court revised the directive.
Under Blackwell the state Republican Party tried to disenfranchise still more Democratic voters through a technique known as “caging.” The Republican Party sent registered letters to 35,000 new voters requesting that they sign and return them. Those citizens who did not comply were removed from the voting rolls.
Altogether, approximately 300,000 voters were purged from voting rolls. Thousands of eligible voters were kicked off the voting rolls simply because they hadn't voted in the previous election. In Cleveland, which broke 5-to-1 for John Kerry, 1-in-4 voters were purged from voting lists. In one specific precinct in Cleveland, the turnout was only 7% - the lowest in the state – thanks to this voter purge. 28,000 voters were "erased" from the Lucas County voter registration rolls.
The second phase of Republican chicanery occurred during the election.
Blackwell barred reporters from the polls. Ohio law forbade “loitering” near voting places. Media representatives conducting exit polls had to remain 100 feet away from the polls – to protect voters from intense media scrutiny was the given excuse. This directive was struck down by a federal court based on First Amendment rights. Foreign observers in Ohio were also prevented from watching the opening of the polling places, the counting of the ballots, and, in some cases, the election itself.
Secondly, a significant number of statistical anomalies occurred – all taking votes away from Kerry.
In Butler County the Democratic candidate for the State Supreme Court received 5,347 more votes than Kerry did.
In Cuyahoga County ten Cleveland precincts reported an incredibly high number of votes for third party candidates. In past elections third party candidates had received only a handful of votes. These increased votes would logically have gone to Kerry.
In Franklin County, Bush received nearly 4,000 extra votes from one computer.
In Miami County, just over 13,000 votes appeared in Bush’s column after all precincts had reported.
In Cuyahoga County and in Franklin County—both Democratic strongholds—the arrows on the absentee ballots were not properly aligned with their respective punch holes, so that countless votes were miscast.
In Mercer County some 4,000 votes for president—representing nearly 7 percent of the electorate — mysteriously dropped out of the final count.
The machines in heavily Democratic Lucas County kept going haywire, prompting the county’s election director to admit that prior tests of the machines had failed.
One polling place in Lucas County never opened because all the machines were locked up somewhere and no one had the key.
In Hamilton County many absentee voters could not cast a Democratic vote for president because county workers, in taking Ralph Nader’s name off many ballots, also removed John Kerry’s name.
The Washington Post reported that in Mahoning County “25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush column.
In Franklin County in Columbus, in the inner city, on their touch-screen machines, people pushed “Kerry” and “Bush” lit up.
A county in southeaster Ohio proclaimed a Homeland Security alert. They locked down the building and kept out the media. The ballots that had been casted suddenly disappeared.
In Lucas Count precincts unsuspecting voters were issued faulty markers, which ruined the ballots they marked. Inner city voters left thinking they had voted. Instead, their ballots were trashed.
Dirty tricks were employed. “Literally thousands upon thousands” of such incidents occurred, the Conyers report noted.
Voters were told, falsely, that their polling place had changed, the news conveyed by phone calls, “door-hangers,” and party workers going door to door.
Phone calls and fake “voter bulletins” instructed Democrats that they were not to cast their votes until Wednesday, November 3, the day after Election Day.
At several polling places, election personnel or bused in hired goons “challenged” voters — black voters in particular — to produce documents confirming their eligibility to vote.
The third phase of Republican chicanery was the massive post-election cover-up of what had occurred, in particular the prevention of countywide hand recounts.
Here was the procedure to be used for recounting votes.
Each of the state’s eighty-eight counties had to select randomly precincts in its county whose ballots added up collectively to approximately 3 percent of the county’s total vote. Those ballots had to be hand counted and machine counted simultaneously. If the hand count and the new machine count matched, the remaining 97 percent of the selected ballots would be counted by machine. If, however, the totals varied by as little as a single vote, all the other votes had to be hand counted, and the results, once reconfirmed, had to be accepted as the new official total.
In certain precincts of several counties hand counts and machine counts had been deliberately adjusted to correspond.
After the election Sherole Eaton, deputy director of elections for Hocking County, filed an affidavit stating that the computer that operated the tabulating machine in her county had been “modified” by Michael Barbian Jr., an employee of Triad GSI, the corporate manufacturer of the county’s voting machinery. Barbian, upon the announcement that the Hocking County precinct was planned to be a subject of the initial Ohio test recount, made further alterations. Barbian advised election officials how to manipulate voting machinery to ensure that [the] preliminary hand recount matched the machine count. Barbian said that he had examined machines not only in Hocking County but also in Lorain, Muskingum, Clark, Harrison, and Guernsey counties.
It strongly appears that Triad and its employees engaged in a course of behavior to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the ballots.
Some 1,300 Libertarian and Green Party volunteers monitored the vote count in Ohio.
In Allen, Clermont, Cuyahoga, Morrow, Hocking, Vinton, Summit, and Medina counties, the precincts for the 3 percent hand recount were preselected, not picked at random. In Fairfield County the 3 percent hand recount yielded a total that diverged from the machine count. In Washington and Lucas counties, ballots were marked or altered. In Ashland, Portage, and Coshocton counties, ballots were improperly unsealed or stored. Belmont County “hired an independent programmer (‘at great expense’) to reprogram the counting machines so that they would only count votes for President during the recount.
Democratic and/or Green Party observers were denied access to absentee, and/or provisional ballots, or were not allowed to monitor the recount process in numerous counties.
Fifty-six of eighty-eight counties in Ohio destroyed their election ballots, destroyed all their election records, or most of them, making a pure recount impossible.
What was done about such blatant election fraud?
The Congressional challenge of the Ohio election results by Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones of Ohio and Senator Barbara Boxer of California was defeated 267 to 31 in the House and 74 to 1 in the Senate.
The election chicanery, the Conyers Report, and the defeat of the Congressional challenge gained little traction with the public. Kerry and national Democrats conceded defeat without protest.
Republicans attacked stridently the allegations made against them. Democrats were troublemakers and cynical manipulators—spinning “fantasies” and “conspiracy theories” to “distract” the people. Tom DeLay asserted that Democratic allegations were “an assault against the institutions of our representative democracy.” There was no evidence of electoral fraud, Republicans maintained.
The press had little to say about most of the strange details of the election—except to ridicule all efforts to discuss them.
“Election paranoia surfaces: Conspiracy theorists call results rigged,” chuckled the Baltimore Sun on November 5.
“Internet Buzz on Vote Fraud Is Dismissed,” proclaimed the Boston Globe on November 10.
“Latest Conspiracy Theory—Kerry Won—Hits the Ether,” the Washington Post chortled on November 11.
Mitofsky International, the company responsible for exit polling for the National Election Pool and its member news organizations, released a report detailing the 2004 election's exit polling. They concluded that discrepancies between the exit polls and the official results were "most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters." The NEP report further stated that "Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment.”
When, on March 31, the National Election Data Archive Project released its study demonstrating that the exit polls had probably been right, it made news only in the Akron Beacon-Journal.
Most sinister of all is the fact that Blackwell’s electronic reporting operation was designed by a highly partisan Republican tech firm, GovTech, and linked directly to servers at the premier Republican tech company, SmarTech, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The programmers who worked for Ken Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State and the co-chair of the state's committee to re-elect Bush/Cheney, were Republicans who did websites for the Bush administration. The widespread use of electronic voting machines from ES&S, and of Diebold software maintained by Triad, allowed Blackwell to flip electronically a 4% Kerry lead to a 2% Bush victory – critics of the election result assert.
The shift of more than 300,000 votes after 12:20 a.m. election night was a virtual statistical impossibility. It was engineered by Michael Connell, an IT (Information Technology) specialist long affiliated with the Bush Family. The Ohio vote tally was done on servers that also carried the e-mail for Karl Rove and the national Republican Party. Diebold's founder, Walden O'Dell, had vowed to deliver Ohio's electoral votes -- -and thus the presidency --- to his friend George W. Bush. Michael Connell died in a mysterious plane crash on December 19, 2008, after being subpoenaed in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit focused on how the 2004 election was decided.
A group of academic researchers functioning under the rubric of ePluribus Media discovered and reported, shortly after the 2006 election, that a partisan Republican company, SmarTech, had hosted the Ohio Secretary of State's vote count for both the 2004/2006 elections. New filings in the King Lincoln Bronzeville case show that SmarTech was not hired to be a back-up but as a "man in the middle" operation, meaning they were set up to intentionally hack Blackwell's operation to alter the vote count. Important affidavit testimony of IT expert and whistleblower Stephen Spoonamore was used by attorneys in the King Lincoln Bronzeville case. He had spoken to IT expert MIke Connell, who had worked for twenty years for the Bush family, had done the IT work for Ken Blackwell, and had set up the Ohio election reporting system including the link to SmarTech.
Spoonamore testified: “The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control."
"...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."
Connell told Spoonamore that SmarTech had complete access to the results and had the capability to change the vote count.
The media used the numbers reported on SMARTech's servers as the actual results of the election. The actual ballots in most of the Buckeye State were never allowed to be reviewed by the citizenry. Whatever the private Republican company reported, accurately or inaccurately, to be the results that night were generally regarded as the official results of the election.
Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, Ohio’s Secretary of State from 2007 to 2011, authorized an investigation that reported Dec. 14, 2007, that all the electronic methods of counting the votes that were used in Ohio in 2004 were easily flipped. Anybody with a simple electronic machine could have turned the election.
Sources used to produce my report:
Collier, Victoria, “America’s Media Just Made Vote-Rigging Easier,” truthout, October 19, 2012.
Fitrakis, Bob and Wassermann, Harvey, “Will Bain-Linked E-Voting Machines Give Romney the White House?” The Free Press, October 16, 2012.
Fitrakis, Bob and Wassermann, Harvey, “Ohio Governor’s Ethics Violations Expose Money Trail to Stolen 2004 Election,” The Free Press, August 30, 2005.
Freidman, Brad, “About That Voting Machine Company Tied to Mitt Romney and Bain Capital, “Bradblog.com, October 12, 2012.
Hartmann, Thom and Sacks, Sam, “Election 2012: They Will Steal It!” The Daily Take, November 1, 2012.
Karoli, “New Evidence of Vote Hacking Emerges in Ohio 2004 General Election Lawsuit,” CrooksandLiars.com, July 24, 2011.
McCowan, Tim, “Shocking New Evidence Republicans Have Been Stealing Elections,” www.examiner.com, November 7, 2011.
Miller, Mark Crispin, “None Dare Call It Stolen,” Harper’s Magazine, August 2005.
“Mysterious Death of Mike Connell – Karl Rove’s Election Thief,” projectcensored.org, May 8, 2010.
Wasserman, Harvey, “Harvey Wasserman on New Ohio Voting Report “The 2004 Election Was Stolen … Finally We Have Irrefutable Confirmation,” DemocracyNow.Org, December 17, 2007.
I checked recently on the internet what several journalists had to say about whether or not voter fraud in Ohio had determined the outcome of the 2004 presdiential election. Here are excerpts of what two of them wrote.
Certainly the election had its share of irregularities, especially in Ohio, the battleground state each side had to win. In the days after the election, newspapers nationwide carried accounts of how voters in and around Columbus, the state capital, had to stand in line for hours before casting ballots. It turns out the Franklin County Board of Elections had reduced the number of voting machines in urban precincts—which held more African American voters and were likely to favor John Kerry—and increased the number of machines in white suburban precincts, which tended to favor the president. As a result, as many as 15,000 voters in Franklin County left without casting ballots, the Washington Post estimated—a significant amount in an election that Bush won by only 118,775 votes (out of 5.6 million cast). But except for one-day stories in the Washington Post and New York Times, these revelations triggered no broader investigations, or if they did, the results went unpublished.
It didn’t help that Kerry conceded immediately, despite questions about Ohio. The American press is less an independent truth seeker than a transmission belt for the opinions of movers and shakers in Washington. If the Democratic candidate wasn’t going to cry foul, the press certainly wasn’t going to do it for him. Thus the job of raising questions was largely left to mavericks—most of them from the left wing of the Democratic Party and beyond. For a year now, they have been probing, analyzing, and agitating on the Internet, and several books based on their research are being published in time for the election’s first anniversary this November.
...
... According to the Free Press, 15 percent of Ohio’s ballots—a number seven times greater than Bush’s victory margin—were cast on electronic machines provided or programmed by companies with ties to the Republican Party, including Triad. True, a limited hand recount was held afterward, but it was a sham, the skeptics argue. They point to the indictment this past September of two Cuyahoga County election officials for offenses that include failing to randomly select the recount precincts. [Sherole] Eaton made a similar accusation in her [Hocking] county—and, as if to clinch the case, was later fired. When her affidavit was posted at one of the websites claiming that Bush stole Ohio, one blogger commented, “This speaks for itself.”
Except it doesn’t. Talk with Eaton and she is quick to volunteer that Barbian never used the phrase “cheat sheet”—those were her own words, dashed down in a rush after a lawyer advised her she had witnessed illegal activity and should testify at the Conyers hearings. Eaton says that no one took Barbian’s cheat sheet advice seriously and adds that “I still don’t know if there was fraud,” though she does find his visit suspicious. …
…
The discrepancy between exit polls and the official results is a key part of the skeptics’ argument: Kerry was projected to win nationwide by a close but comfortable 3 percent, and in Ohio by 6.5 percent. But the skeptics betray a poor grasp of exit polling, starting with their claim that exit polls are invariably accurate within tenths of a percentage point. In truth, the exit polls were wrong by much more than that in the 1988 and 1992 presidential elections.
Warren Mitofsky and Joe Lenski, the pollsters who oversaw the 2004 exit polls, concluded that one source of their incorrect forecast was an apparent tendency for some pro-Bush voters to shun exit pollsters’ questions. “Preposterous,” claims Mark Crispin Miller, who also sees trickery in the adjusting of exit polls after the election, though that is utterly routine. And is it really so strange to imagine that Bush supporters—who tend to distrust the supposedly liberal news media—might not answer questions from pollsters bearing the logos of CBS, CNN, and the other news organizations financing the polling operation?
…
But the skeptics have plenty of solid claims as well—starting with the long lines that plagued voters in Franklin County and elsewhere. As the Post reported, voting-machine shortages were the exception in strongly pro-Bush areas but the rule in strongly pro-Kerry districts. The Conyers report calls that an apparent violation of the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution’s equal protection safeguards.
...
Blackwell’s two most potent acts of disenfranchisement, skeptics say, were the purging of 133,000 mostly Democratic voters from the rolls and the non-counting of 92,000 ballots rejected by voting machines as unreadable. “It’s clear to me that somebody thought long and hard back in 2001 about how to win this thing,” says Fitrakis. “Somebody had the foresight to check an obscure statute that allows you to cancel people’s voter registrations if they haven’t voted in two presidential elections.” Fitrakis notes that newspapers reported the purging of 105,000 voters in Cincinnati and another 28,000 in Toledo. But because the purging was conducted gradually between 2001 and 2004, no one saw the big picture until the Free Press connected the dots.
…
In the end, reasonable people may differ about the strength of the skeptics’ case. Personally I came away persuaded there was indeed something rotten in the state of Ohio in 2004. Whether by intent or negligence, authorities took actions that prevented many thousands of citizens from casting votes and having them counted. The irregularities were sufficiently widespread to call into question Bush’s margin of victory. This was not a fair election, and it deserves the scrutiny skeptics have brought to it. They shouldered a task that mainstream media and the government should have assumed—and still should take on, especially since some key questions can only be settled by invoking subpoena power.
Yet it remains far from clear that Bush stole the election, and I say that as someone who has written that Bush did steal Florida and the White House in 2000 (and who—full disclosure—is friendly with skeptics Miller and Wasserman). First, some of the most far-reaching acts of potential disenfranchisement, such as the purging of voter rolls, were legal—which is why one lesson of Ohio 2004 is that voting systems throughout the nation need fundamental reform. Second, even if Kerry had won Ohio, the national vote went to Bush by 3 million votes. Ohio would have given Kerry the presidency by the same unholy route that Bush traveled in 2000 and that led so many Democrats to urge, rightly, the abolishment of the Electoral College. Third, the skeptics’ position is weakened by the one-sidedness of their arguments and their know-it-all tone. They have a plausible case to make, but they act like it’s a slam dunk and imply that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is either stupid, bought, or on the other side—not the best way to win people over (Hertsgaard 1-5).
Machines are fallible and so are humans, and shit happens, to be sure, and no doubt many Ohio voters were able to record their choices promptly and without grotesque anomalies. But what strikes my eye is this: in practically every case where lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a Democratic county or precinct, and in practically every case where machines produced impossible or improbable outcomes it was the challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic undervoters or as sudden converts to fringe-party losers.
This might argue in itself against any conspiracy or organized rigging, since surely anyone clever enough to pre-fix a vote would make sure, just for the look of the thing, that the discrepancies and obstructions were more evenly distributed. I called all my smartest conservative friends to ask them about this. Back came their answer: Look at what happened in Warren County.
On Election Night, citing unspecified concerns about terrorism and homeland security, officials "locked down" the Warren County administration building and prevented any reporters from monitoring the vote count. It was announced, using who knows what "scale," that on a scale of 1 to 10 the terrorist threat was a 10. It was also claimed that the information came from an F.B.I. agent, even though the F.B.I. denies that.
Warren County is certainly a part of Republican territory in Ohio: it went only 28 percent for Gore last time and 28 percent for Kerry this time. On the face of it, therefore, not a county where the G.O.P. would have felt the need to engage in any voter "suppression." A point for the anti-conspiracy side, then. Yet even those exact-same voting totals have their odd aspect. In 2000, Gore stopped running television commercials in Ohio some weeks before the election. He also faced a Nader challenge. Kerry put huge resources into Ohio, did not face any Nader competition, and yet got exactly the same proportion of the Warren County votes.
Whichever way you shake it, or hold it to the light, there is something about the Ohio election that refuses to add up. The sheer number of irregularities compelled a formal recount, which was completed in late December and which came out much the same as the original one, with 176 fewer votes for George Bush. But this was a meaningless exercise in reassurance, since there is simply no means of checking, for example, how many "vote hops" the computerized machines might have performed unnoticed.
… there is one soothing explanation that I don't trust anymore. It was often said, in reply to charges of vote tampering, that it would have had to be "a conspiracy so immense" as to involve a dangerously large number of people. Indeed, some Ohio Democrats themselves laughed off some of the charges, saying that they too would have had to have been part of the plan. The stakes here are very high: one defector or turncoat with hard evidence could send the principals to jail forever and permanently discredit the party that had engaged in fraud.
I had the chance to spend quality time with someone who came to me well recommended, who did not believe that fraud had yet actually been demonstrated, whose background was in the manufacture of the machines, and who wanted to be anonymous. It certainly could be done, she said, and only a very, very few people would have to be "in on it." This is because of the small number of firms engaged in the manufacturing and the even smaller number of people, subject as they are to the hiring practices of these firms, who understand the technology. "Machines were put in place with no sampling to make sure they were 'in control' and no comparison studies," she explained. "The code of the machines is not public knowledge, and none of these machines has since been impounded." In these circumstances, she continued, it's possible to manipulate both the count and the proportions of votes.
… had there been a biased "setting" on the new machines it could be uncovered—if a few of them could be impounded. The Ohio courts are currently refusing all motions to put the state's voting machines, punch-card or touch-screen, in the public domain. It's not clear to me, or to anyone else, who is tending the machines in the meanwhile …
I asked her, finally, what would be the logical grounds for deducing that any tampering had in fact occurred. "Well, I understand from what I have read," she said, "that the early exit polls on the day were believed by both parties." That, I was able to tell her from direct experience, was indeed true. But it wasn't quite enough, either. So I asked, "What if all the anomalies and malfunctions, to give them a neutral name, were distributed along one axis of consistency: in other words, that they kept on disadvantaging only one candidate?" My question was hypothetical, as she had made no particular study of Ohio, but she replied at once: "Then that would be quite serious" (Hitchens 1-6).
Works cited:
Hertsgaard, Mark, “Recounting Ohio.” Mother Jones. November 2005. Web. https://www.motherjones.com/media/200...
Hitchens, Christopher, “Ohio’s Odd Numbers.” Vanity Fair, October 17, 2006. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2005/...
In the fall of 2012, during my last year as chair of the Florence [Oregon]Area Democratic Club, fearing that presidential returns of 2012 might be flipped to elect Mitt Romney, I researched extensively articles that concluded that John Kerry had been deprived of victory in Ohio in 2004. What follows is my summation of what I discovered, information that I reported at a club meeting shortly before the 2012 election.
There are strong indications that enough votes were taken away from John Kerry to give George W. Bush Ohio’s electoral votes and victory in the 2004 presidential election. Officially, Kerry lost Ohio by just 118,000 votes out of some 5.5 million votes cast. Exit polls had Kerry winning. Getting to the official result from the exit polls result was a 6.7% flip.
Michigan Rep. John Conyers’ report, Preserving Democracy, What Went Wrong in Ohio, presented on January 5, 2005, was the result of a five-week investigation conducted by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic Party members, their staffers, and volunteers pursuant to thousands of complaints of fraud, malfeasance, and incompetence. More than 200 witnesses had been questioned at public hearings in Columbus, Toledo, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. Republican congressmen and their staff members did not join in the inquiry.
The Conyers committee reported three phases of Republican chicanery.
The first phase was the run-up to the election. There was a wide discrepancy between the availability of voting machines in more minority, Democratic, and urban areas than in more Republican, suburban. and exurban areas. Few machines allocated for use in Democratic-majority precinct polls caused long lines of voters, who had to wait 3 to 5 hours to express officially their preference. Many people quit and went home. This tactic negated the Ohio Democratic Party’s considerable success that year of registering new voters.
Additionally, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell sent a directive to county election officials to ignore voter registration cards not printed on 80-pound stock paper. There was no substantive reason for requiring the heavy paper other than to exclude as many newly registered voters as he could from voting. Public pressure forced Blackwell three weeks later to rescind his directive. During the interum an unknown number of Ohioans were disenfranchised.
Blackwell attempted also to limit voter access to provisional ballots. He allowed election officials at the polls to decide who would be permitted to cast them, a contradiction of The Help America Vote Act of 2002. A federal judge did order him to revise his directive; he refused; a federal court revised the directive.
Under Blackwell the state Republican Party tried to disenfranchise still more Democratic voters through a technique known as “caging.” The Republican Party sent registered letters to 35,000 new voters requesting that they sign and return them. Those citizens who did not comply were removed from the voting rolls.
Altogether, approximately 300,000 voters were purged from voting rolls. Thousands of eligible voters were kicked off the voting rolls simply because they hadn't voted in the previous election. In Cleveland, which broke 5-to-1 for John Kerry, 1-in-4 voters were purged from voting lists. In one specific precinct in Cleveland, the turnout was only 7% - the lowest in the state – thanks to this voter purge. 28,000 voters were "erased" from the Lucas County voter registration rolls.
The second phase of Republican chicanery occurred during the election.
Blackwell barred reporters from the polls. Ohio law forbade “loitering” near voting places. Media representatives conducting exit polls had to remain 100 feet away from the polls – to protect voters from intense media scrutiny was the given excuse. This directive was struck down by a federal court based on First Amendment rights. Foreign observers in Ohio were also prevented from watching the opening of the polling places, the counting of the ballots, and, in some cases, the election itself.
Secondly, a significant number of statistical anomalies occurred – all taking votes away from Kerry.
In Butler County the Democratic candidate for the State Supreme Court received 5,347 more votes than Kerry did.
In Cuyahoga County ten Cleveland precincts reported an incredibly high number of votes for third party candidates. In past elections third party candidates had received only a handful of votes. These increased votes would logically have gone to Kerry.
In Franklin County, Bush received nearly 4,000 extra votes from one computer.
In Miami County, just over 13,000 votes appeared in Bush’s column after all precincts had reported.
In Cuyahoga County and in Franklin County—both Democratic strongholds—the arrows on the absentee ballots were not properly aligned with their respective punch holes, so that countless votes were miscast.
In Mercer County some 4,000 votes for president—representing nearly 7 percent of the electorate — mysteriously dropped out of the final count.
The machines in heavily Democratic Lucas County kept going haywire, prompting the county’s election director to admit that prior tests of the machines had failed.
One polling place in Lucas County never opened because all the machines were locked up somewhere and no one had the key.
In Hamilton County many absentee voters could not cast a Democratic vote for president because county workers, in taking Ralph Nader’s name off many ballots, also removed John Kerry’s name.
The Washington Post reported that in Mahoning County “25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush column.
In Franklin County in Columbus, in the inner city, on their touch-screen machines, people pushed “Kerry” and “Bush” lit up.
A county in southeaster Ohio proclaimed a Homeland Security alert. They locked down the building and kept out the media. The ballots that had been casted suddenly disappeared.
In Lucas Count precincts unsuspecting voters were issued faulty markers, which ruined the ballots they marked. Inner city voters left thinking they had voted. Instead, their ballots were trashed.
Dirty tricks were employed. “Literally thousands upon thousands” of such incidents occurred, the Conyers report noted.
Voters were told, falsely, that their polling place had changed, the news conveyed by phone calls, “door-hangers,” and party workers going door to door.
Phone calls and fake “voter bulletins” instructed Democrats that they were not to cast their votes until Wednesday, November 3, the day after Election Day.
At several polling places, election personnel or bused in hired goons “challenged” voters — black voters in particular — to produce documents confirming their eligibility to vote.
The third phase of Republican chicanery was the massive post-election cover-up of what had occurred, in particular the prevention of countywide hand recounts.
Here was the procedure to be used for recounting votes.
Each of the state’s eighty-eight counties had to select randomly precincts in its county whose ballots added up collectively to approximately 3 percent of the county’s total vote. Those ballots had to be hand counted and machine counted simultaneously. If the hand count and the new machine count matched, the remaining 97 percent of the selected ballots would be counted by machine. If, however, the totals varied by as little as a single vote, all the other votes had to be hand counted, and the results, once reconfirmed, had to be accepted as the new official total.
In certain precincts of several counties hand counts and machine counts had been deliberately adjusted to correspond.
After the election Sherole Eaton, deputy director of elections for Hocking County, filed an affidavit stating that the computer that operated the tabulating machine in her county had been “modified” by Michael Barbian Jr., an employee of Triad GSI, the corporate manufacturer of the county’s voting machinery. Barbian, upon the announcement that the Hocking County precinct was planned to be a subject of the initial Ohio test recount, made further alterations. Barbian advised election officials how to manipulate voting machinery to ensure that [the] preliminary hand recount matched the machine count. Barbian said that he had examined machines not only in Hocking County but also in Lorain, Muskingum, Clark, Harrison, and Guernsey counties.
It strongly appears that Triad and its employees engaged in a course of behavior to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the ballots.
Some 1,300 Libertarian and Green Party volunteers monitored the vote count in Ohio.
In Allen, Clermont, Cuyahoga, Morrow, Hocking, Vinton, Summit, and Medina counties, the precincts for the 3 percent hand recount were preselected, not picked at random. In Fairfield County the 3 percent hand recount yielded a total that diverged from the machine count. In Washington and Lucas counties, ballots were marked or altered. In Ashland, Portage, and Coshocton counties, ballots were improperly unsealed or stored. Belmont County “hired an independent programmer (‘at great expense’) to reprogram the counting machines so that they would only count votes for President during the recount.
Democratic and/or Green Party observers were denied access to absentee, and/or provisional ballots, or were not allowed to monitor the recount process in numerous counties.
Fifty-six of eighty-eight counties in Ohio destroyed their election ballots, destroyed all their election records, or most of them, making a pure recount impossible.
What was done about such blatant election fraud?
The Congressional challenge of the Ohio election results by Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones of Ohio and Senator Barbara Boxer of California was defeated 267 to 31 in the House and 74 to 1 in the Senate.
The election chicanery, the Conyers Report, and the defeat of the Congressional challenge gained little traction with the public. Kerry and national Democrats conceded defeat without protest.
Republicans attacked stridently the allegations made against them. Democrats were troublemakers and cynical manipulators—spinning “fantasies” and “conspiracy theories” to “distract” the people. Tom DeLay asserted that Democratic allegations were “an assault against the institutions of our representative democracy.” There was no evidence of electoral fraud, Republicans maintained.
The press had little to say about most of the strange details of the election—except to ridicule all efforts to discuss them.
“Election paranoia surfaces: Conspiracy theorists call results rigged,” chuckled the Baltimore Sun on November 5.
“Internet Buzz on Vote Fraud Is Dismissed,” proclaimed the Boston Globe on November 10.
“Latest Conspiracy Theory—Kerry Won—Hits the Ether,” the Washington Post chortled on November 11.
Mitofsky International, the company responsible for exit polling for the National Election Pool and its member news organizations, released a report detailing the 2004 election's exit polling. They concluded that discrepancies between the exit polls and the official results were "most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters." The NEP report further stated that "Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment.”
When, on March 31, the National Election Data Archive Project released its study demonstrating that the exit polls had probably been right, it made news only in the Akron Beacon-Journal.
Most sinister of all is the fact that Blackwell’s electronic reporting operation was designed by a highly partisan Republican tech firm, GovTech, and linked directly to servers at the premier Republican tech company, SmarTech, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The programmers who worked for Ken Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State and the co-chair of the state's committee to re-elect Bush/Cheney, were Republicans who did websites for the Bush administration. The widespread use of electronic voting machines from ES&S, and of Diebold software maintained by Triad, allowed Blackwell to flip electronically a 4% Kerry lead to a 2% Bush victory – critics of the election result assert.
The shift of more than 300,000 votes after 12:20 a.m. election night was a virtual statistical impossibility. It was engineered by Michael Connell, an IT (Information Technology) specialist long affiliated with the Bush Family. The Ohio vote tally was done on servers that also carried the e-mail for Karl Rove and the national Republican Party. Diebold's founder, Walden O'Dell, had vowed to deliver Ohio's electoral votes -- -and thus the presidency --- to his friend George W. Bush. Michael Connell died in a mysterious plane crash on December 19, 2008, after being subpoenaed in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit focused on how the 2004 election was decided.
A group of academic researchers functioning under the rubric of ePluribus Media discovered and reported, shortly after the 2006 election, that a partisan Republican company, SmarTech, had hosted the Ohio Secretary of State's vote count for both the 2004/2006 elections. New filings in the King Lincoln Bronzeville case show that SmarTech was not hired to be a back-up but as a "man in the middle" operation, meaning they were set up to intentionally hack Blackwell's operation to alter the vote count. Important affidavit testimony of IT expert and whistleblower Stephen Spoonamore was used by attorneys in the King Lincoln Bronzeville case. He had spoken to IT expert MIke Connell, who had worked for twenty years for the Bush family, had done the IT work for Ken Blackwell, and had set up the Ohio election reporting system including the link to SmarTech.
Spoonamore testified: “The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control."
"...the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers."
Connell told Spoonamore that SmarTech had complete access to the results and had the capability to change the vote count.
The media used the numbers reported on SMARTech's servers as the actual results of the election. The actual ballots in most of the Buckeye State were never allowed to be reviewed by the citizenry. Whatever the private Republican company reported, accurately or inaccurately, to be the results that night were generally regarded as the official results of the election.
Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, Ohio’s Secretary of State from 2007 to 2011, authorized an investigation that reported Dec. 14, 2007, that all the electronic methods of counting the votes that were used in Ohio in 2004 were easily flipped. Anybody with a simple electronic machine could have turned the election.
Sources used to produce my report:
Collier, Victoria, “America’s Media Just Made Vote-Rigging Easier,” truthout, October 19, 2012.
Fitrakis, Bob and Wassermann, Harvey, “Will Bain-Linked E-Voting Machines Give Romney the White House?” The Free Press, October 16, 2012.
Fitrakis, Bob and Wassermann, Harvey, “Ohio Governor’s Ethics Violations Expose Money Trail to Stolen 2004 Election,” The Free Press, August 30, 2005.
Freidman, Brad, “About That Voting Machine Company Tied to Mitt Romney and Bain Capital, “Bradblog.com, October 12, 2012.
Hartmann, Thom and Sacks, Sam, “Election 2012: They Will Steal It!” The Daily Take, November 1, 2012.
Karoli, “New Evidence of Vote Hacking Emerges in Ohio 2004 General Election Lawsuit,” CrooksandLiars.com, July 24, 2011.
McCowan, Tim, “Shocking New Evidence Republicans Have Been Stealing Elections,” www.examiner.com, November 7, 2011.
Miller, Mark Crispin, “None Dare Call It Stolen,” Harper’s Magazine, August 2005.
“Mysterious Death of Mike Connell – Karl Rove’s Election Thief,” projectcensored.org, May 8, 2010.
Wasserman, Harvey, “Harvey Wasserman on New Ohio Voting Report “The 2004 Election Was Stolen … Finally We Have Irrefutable Confirmation,” DemocracyNow.Org, December 17, 2007.
I checked recently on the internet what several journalists had to say about whether or not voter fraud in Ohio had determined the outcome of the 2004 presdiential election. Here are excerpts of what two of them wrote.
Certainly the election had its share of irregularities, especially in Ohio, the battleground state each side had to win. In the days after the election, newspapers nationwide carried accounts of how voters in and around Columbus, the state capital, had to stand in line for hours before casting ballots. It turns out the Franklin County Board of Elections had reduced the number of voting machines in urban precincts—which held more African American voters and were likely to favor John Kerry—and increased the number of machines in white suburban precincts, which tended to favor the president. As a result, as many as 15,000 voters in Franklin County left without casting ballots, the Washington Post estimated—a significant amount in an election that Bush won by only 118,775 votes (out of 5.6 million cast). But except for one-day stories in the Washington Post and New York Times, these revelations triggered no broader investigations, or if they did, the results went unpublished.
It didn’t help that Kerry conceded immediately, despite questions about Ohio. The American press is less an independent truth seeker than a transmission belt for the opinions of movers and shakers in Washington. If the Democratic candidate wasn’t going to cry foul, the press certainly wasn’t going to do it for him. Thus the job of raising questions was largely left to mavericks—most of them from the left wing of the Democratic Party and beyond. For a year now, they have been probing, analyzing, and agitating on the Internet, and several books based on their research are being published in time for the election’s first anniversary this November.
...
... According to the Free Press, 15 percent of Ohio’s ballots—a number seven times greater than Bush’s victory margin—were cast on electronic machines provided or programmed by companies with ties to the Republican Party, including Triad. True, a limited hand recount was held afterward, but it was a sham, the skeptics argue. They point to the indictment this past September of two Cuyahoga County election officials for offenses that include failing to randomly select the recount precincts. [Sherole] Eaton made a similar accusation in her [Hocking] county—and, as if to clinch the case, was later fired. When her affidavit was posted at one of the websites claiming that Bush stole Ohio, one blogger commented, “This speaks for itself.”
Except it doesn’t. Talk with Eaton and she is quick to volunteer that Barbian never used the phrase “cheat sheet”—those were her own words, dashed down in a rush after a lawyer advised her she had witnessed illegal activity and should testify at the Conyers hearings. Eaton says that no one took Barbian’s cheat sheet advice seriously and adds that “I still don’t know if there was fraud,” though she does find his visit suspicious. …
…
The discrepancy between exit polls and the official results is a key part of the skeptics’ argument: Kerry was projected to win nationwide by a close but comfortable 3 percent, and in Ohio by 6.5 percent. But the skeptics betray a poor grasp of exit polling, starting with their claim that exit polls are invariably accurate within tenths of a percentage point. In truth, the exit polls were wrong by much more than that in the 1988 and 1992 presidential elections.
Warren Mitofsky and Joe Lenski, the pollsters who oversaw the 2004 exit polls, concluded that one source of their incorrect forecast was an apparent tendency for some pro-Bush voters to shun exit pollsters’ questions. “Preposterous,” claims Mark Crispin Miller, who also sees trickery in the adjusting of exit polls after the election, though that is utterly routine. And is it really so strange to imagine that Bush supporters—who tend to distrust the supposedly liberal news media—might not answer questions from pollsters bearing the logos of CBS, CNN, and the other news organizations financing the polling operation?
…
But the skeptics have plenty of solid claims as well—starting with the long lines that plagued voters in Franklin County and elsewhere. As the Post reported, voting-machine shortages were the exception in strongly pro-Bush areas but the rule in strongly pro-Kerry districts. The Conyers report calls that an apparent violation of the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution’s equal protection safeguards.
...
Blackwell’s two most potent acts of disenfranchisement, skeptics say, were the purging of 133,000 mostly Democratic voters from the rolls and the non-counting of 92,000 ballots rejected by voting machines as unreadable. “It’s clear to me that somebody thought long and hard back in 2001 about how to win this thing,” says Fitrakis. “Somebody had the foresight to check an obscure statute that allows you to cancel people’s voter registrations if they haven’t voted in two presidential elections.” Fitrakis notes that newspapers reported the purging of 105,000 voters in Cincinnati and another 28,000 in Toledo. But because the purging was conducted gradually between 2001 and 2004, no one saw the big picture until the Free Press connected the dots.
…
In the end, reasonable people may differ about the strength of the skeptics’ case. Personally I came away persuaded there was indeed something rotten in the state of Ohio in 2004. Whether by intent or negligence, authorities took actions that prevented many thousands of citizens from casting votes and having them counted. The irregularities were sufficiently widespread to call into question Bush’s margin of victory. This was not a fair election, and it deserves the scrutiny skeptics have brought to it. They shouldered a task that mainstream media and the government should have assumed—and still should take on, especially since some key questions can only be settled by invoking subpoena power.
Yet it remains far from clear that Bush stole the election, and I say that as someone who has written that Bush did steal Florida and the White House in 2000 (and who—full disclosure—is friendly with skeptics Miller and Wasserman). First, some of the most far-reaching acts of potential disenfranchisement, such as the purging of voter rolls, were legal—which is why one lesson of Ohio 2004 is that voting systems throughout the nation need fundamental reform. Second, even if Kerry had won Ohio, the national vote went to Bush by 3 million votes. Ohio would have given Kerry the presidency by the same unholy route that Bush traveled in 2000 and that led so many Democrats to urge, rightly, the abolishment of the Electoral College. Third, the skeptics’ position is weakened by the one-sidedness of their arguments and their know-it-all tone. They have a plausible case to make, but they act like it’s a slam dunk and imply that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is either stupid, bought, or on the other side—not the best way to win people over (Hertsgaard 1-5).
Machines are fallible and so are humans, and shit happens, to be sure, and no doubt many Ohio voters were able to record their choices promptly and without grotesque anomalies. But what strikes my eye is this: in practically every case where lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a Democratic county or precinct, and in practically every case where machines produced impossible or improbable outcomes it was the challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic undervoters or as sudden converts to fringe-party losers.
This might argue in itself against any conspiracy or organized rigging, since surely anyone clever enough to pre-fix a vote would make sure, just for the look of the thing, that the discrepancies and obstructions were more evenly distributed. I called all my smartest conservative friends to ask them about this. Back came their answer: Look at what happened in Warren County.
On Election Night, citing unspecified concerns about terrorism and homeland security, officials "locked down" the Warren County administration building and prevented any reporters from monitoring the vote count. It was announced, using who knows what "scale," that on a scale of 1 to 10 the terrorist threat was a 10. It was also claimed that the information came from an F.B.I. agent, even though the F.B.I. denies that.
Warren County is certainly a part of Republican territory in Ohio: it went only 28 percent for Gore last time and 28 percent for Kerry this time. On the face of it, therefore, not a county where the G.O.P. would have felt the need to engage in any voter "suppression." A point for the anti-conspiracy side, then. Yet even those exact-same voting totals have their odd aspect. In 2000, Gore stopped running television commercials in Ohio some weeks before the election. He also faced a Nader challenge. Kerry put huge resources into Ohio, did not face any Nader competition, and yet got exactly the same proportion of the Warren County votes.
Whichever way you shake it, or hold it to the light, there is something about the Ohio election that refuses to add up. The sheer number of irregularities compelled a formal recount, which was completed in late December and which came out much the same as the original one, with 176 fewer votes for George Bush. But this was a meaningless exercise in reassurance, since there is simply no means of checking, for example, how many "vote hops" the computerized machines might have performed unnoticed.
… there is one soothing explanation that I don't trust anymore. It was often said, in reply to charges of vote tampering, that it would have had to be "a conspiracy so immense" as to involve a dangerously large number of people. Indeed, some Ohio Democrats themselves laughed off some of the charges, saying that they too would have had to have been part of the plan. The stakes here are very high: one defector or turncoat with hard evidence could send the principals to jail forever and permanently discredit the party that had engaged in fraud.
I had the chance to spend quality time with someone who came to me well recommended, who did not believe that fraud had yet actually been demonstrated, whose background was in the manufacture of the machines, and who wanted to be anonymous. It certainly could be done, she said, and only a very, very few people would have to be "in on it." This is because of the small number of firms engaged in the manufacturing and the even smaller number of people, subject as they are to the hiring practices of these firms, who understand the technology. "Machines were put in place with no sampling to make sure they were 'in control' and no comparison studies," she explained. "The code of the machines is not public knowledge, and none of these machines has since been impounded." In these circumstances, she continued, it's possible to manipulate both the count and the proportions of votes.
… had there been a biased "setting" on the new machines it could be uncovered—if a few of them could be impounded. The Ohio courts are currently refusing all motions to put the state's voting machines, punch-card or touch-screen, in the public domain. It's not clear to me, or to anyone else, who is tending the machines in the meanwhile …
I asked her, finally, what would be the logical grounds for deducing that any tampering had in fact occurred. "Well, I understand from what I have read," she said, "that the early exit polls on the day were believed by both parties." That, I was able to tell her from direct experience, was indeed true. But it wasn't quite enough, either. So I asked, "What if all the anomalies and malfunctions, to give them a neutral name, were distributed along one axis of consistency: in other words, that they kept on disadvantaging only one candidate?" My question was hypothetical, as she had made no particular study of Ohio, but she replied at once: "Then that would be quite serious" (Hitchens 1-6).
Works cited:
Hertsgaard, Mark, “Recounting Ohio.” Mother Jones. November 2005. Web. https://www.motherjones.com/media/200...
Hitchens, Christopher, “Ohio’s Odd Numbers.” Vanity Fair, October 17, 2006. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2005/...
September 4, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2004 Election -- Why Kerry Lost
Here are a few opinions offered by media writers soon after the election concluded.
Gary Langer, director of polling for ABC News, put it bluntly. President George W. Bush won the 2004 election for two reasons: 9/11 and women voters.
…
"[Bush's] image of leadership, his focus on security, the fact that 9/11 hasn't happened again within this country's borders convinced Americans, especially women with families to protect, that this president should be returned to the White House," Langer said. …
Marking a major change from 2000 when Al Gore won women voters by 11 points, Kerry scored only a 3-point lead over Bush, Langer said. And although single women remained a core Democratic group, the president won married women by 11 percent, a block that was evenly split in 2000. "The shift that occurred in this election was among women," the polling expert said.
…
During the opening session, Mark Mellman, Sen. John Kerry's top pollster, and Jan van Lohuizen, the pollster for the Bush re-election effort, analyzed their campaigns. "Voters were not feeling a level of sufficient pain to reject the incumbent," Mellman said. "As we got closer to Election Day, there was a somewhat more positive feeling in the country, and that helped the incumbent."
Mellman said a majority of Americans think Bush has made the country safer during the last four years. "The Bush campaign used fear very well to make voters risk averse," he said. "It was clear to us that people wanted stability in leadership, [they] wanted stability in politics. We were at something of a loss. We tried [slogans such as] 'time for change,' we tried 'time for new direction,' but neither of these were as compelling as steady, consistent leadership."
…
Van Lohuizen said presidential campaigns are different from other campaigns because advertising has less of an impact than conventions and televised debates. This year, he said, an increasing number of voters received decision-making information from television news, the debates and the Internet. "The role of newspaper coverage declined dramatically," he said. Furthermore, although both parties put a lot of time and money into person-to-person contact, "it didn't pay off, it barely registered," he said.
The Bush campaign also courted the so-called "Hispanic vote." This year, the number of voters in this group increased 2 percent, with Bush receiving a 6 percent jump in support. "It was a major focus of our campaign," van Lohuizen said. But he noted that "huge differences" exist between Cuban Americans and Mexican Americans, and between recent arrivals and longtime residents: "It is not one vote" (Trei 1-3).
President Bush put forward a powerful and compelling philosophy of what the government should do at home and abroad: Expand liberty. You can disagree with Bush’s implementation of that vision, but objecting to it as a matter of principle isn’t a political winner. John Kerry, on the other hand, campaigned as a technocrat, a man who would be better at “managing” the war and the economy. But for voters faced with a mediocre economy rather than a miserable one, and with a difficult war that’s hopefully not a disastrous one, that message—packaged as “change”—wasn’t compelling enough to persuade them to vote for Kerry.
Without reliable exit-poll data, it’s hard to know exactly which voters and issues decided the election, but my guess is that the Democrats will ultimately conclude that they did what they thought was necessary on the ground to win the election. Karl Rove and the Republicans just did more. … The Democratic confidence during the early afternoon and evening was based on more than faulty poll data. The Kerry campaign was confident that high turnout from the party base would swing the election their way.
But this election wasn’t a swing, or a pendulum. There was no fairly evenly divided group in the middle of the electorate that ultimately broke for one side and made the difference. The 2004 campaign was not a tug of war between two sides trying to yank the center toward them. Instead, it was a battle over an electorate perched on a seesaw. Each campaign furiously tried to find new voters to add so that it could outweigh the other side. Both sides performed capably: Kerry received more votes than Al Gore did four years ago, and he even received more votes than the previous all-time leader, Ronald Reagan in 1984. President Bush just did even better.
Rove’s gamble that he could find more Bush supporters from among nonvoting social conservatives than from the small number of undecideds in the usual voting public worked exactly as designed. The question for Democrats is whether Rove’s formula will turn out to be a one-time trick tied to Bush’s personal popularity and the emotional bond the nation formed with him after the trauma of 9/11, or whether the Democratic Party has been relegated to permanent, if competitive, minority status. Are the Democrats once again a regional party, the new Eisenhower Republicans of the Northeast? For seven consecutive presidential elections, the Democratic candidate has failed to garner 50 percent of the vote. Not since Jimmy Carter in 1976 has a Democrat won a majority, and even Watergate could get Carter only 50.1 percent. (Sullentrio 1-2).
Kerry understood the issues, but had not harnessed them to a greater vision. He had not compiled an impressive record of legislative achievements in the Senate. Nor had he been an influential or consistent voice in the conversation over the direction of the Democratic Party, a debate that overlapped precisely with his Senate career. In the public mind, he stood for no particular ideas beyond a mild and conventional brand of liberalism. His advisers believed that Kerry's primary claim on the presidency was his personal biography. In this, they were indulging an obsessive desire of the political world, and reporters most of all, for a familiar plot line, in which a heroic life climaxes in a rendezvous with history at the White House. …
A candidate who runs principally on his or her biography is acutely vulnerable to the accusation that this biography is embellished. Such a candidate, in other words, is a fat target for the Freak Show. One signature of Freak Show politics is a fixation on personality and alleged hypocrisy. Another is the ease with which shrewd political operatives can manipulate the Freak Show's attention to hijack the public image of an opponent.
Kerry and his political team knew exactly the story they would impart to voters. To paraphrase Henry Kissinger's famous line, the story had the added advantage of being largely true. It began with a bright, earnest young man whose interest in politics was sparked in the early 1960s by John F. Kennedy, and whose idealism led him to don a Navy uniform and fight heroically in Vietnam. Coming home, and recognizing that the war had become a terrible national tragedy, he stood on principle to oppose that war, and in so doing revealed his patriotism as valiantly as when he was fighting. Devotion to public service carried him to the United States Senate. The 2004 presidential campaign would bring this forty-five-year journey full circle, as the legacy of one JFK in the White House would be honored by a new JFK in the White House -- a nearly mystical convergence of history. It was a powerful enough narrative to help make Kerry the Democrats' consensus front-runner for the presidential nomination from late 2002 through the spring of 2003.
But there was another way to tell the story. It was of a man who had been nakedly ambitious since his youth and had been willing to trim his sails to suit the moment ever since. The decision to go to Vietnam had been an obvious stepping-stone to politics. His tales of combat valor had been deliberately inflated, perhaps even manufactured.
Sensing an opportunity to preen for the cameras in the antiwar moment, Kerry made a big show of discarding his war medals, but secretly hung on to a prized few. He affected a Kennedyesque accent and went before a Senate committee and prattled on fallaciously about alleged war crimes by his fellow servicemen. Elected to the Senate, Kerry found a natural home for himself as a vain and, thanks to two advantageous marriages, wealthy politician, with his finger in the wind and his hair under a blow-dryer.
Would the real John Kerry please stand up? Of course, both versions of his life had truth to them. Whenever Kerry's self-image tried to stand up, it was knocked over by a Freak Show interpretation. Every positive element of Kerry's existence was neutralized or turned into a weakness. Every vulnerability was maximized. By the end, this proud man was lying on the bloodied ice like a freshly clubbed harp seal (Halperin and Harris 10-11).
Bush triumphed in a popularity contest: 93 percent of Republicans voted for him, while only 89 percent of Democrats favored Kerry. Exit polls indicated that a vote for Bush was primarily an affirmation; 81 percent of the president’s supporters said they voted for him, rather than against his opponent. In contrast, only 55 percent of Democrats voted for Kerry; 35 percent cast their vote because they were against a continuation of the Bush regime.
This relative lack of enthusiasm for Kerry showed up dramatically when pollsters asked voters for reasons they voted for and against Kerry and Bush. The strongest justification to vote for Kerry was “health care,” which was mentioned by 26 percent of those polled. On the other hand 37 percent said the strongest reason to vote for Bush was “response to 9/11,” followed by “the war against terrorism” (32 percent), “decisive leader” (31 percent) and “his religious faith” (29 percent). When asked for reasons to not support Kerry, 36 percent of those polled responded, “flip-flopping on issues,” whereas 32 percent opined their justification for not supporting Bush was “Iraq and foreign policy.”
… While voters tended to see Kerry as more intelligent than Bush, and better able to express himself, Bush was viewed as the stronger leader and the most honest and religious.
Thus, in the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. borrowed a page from Ronald Reagan: Voters tended to separate their favorable personal feelings for him from their unfavorable opinions of his policies.
Voters found Bush to be more likable because he conveyed a “common man” persona, whereas Kerry came across as aloof—professorial. If the polls had contained the question, “Who would you rather go to a ballgame with, George Bush or John Kerry?” no doubt a strong majority would have preferred Bush.
Exit polls showed a strong relationship between the level of education and candidate choice; the less education the voter had, the more likely he or she was to choose Bush. What appeared to be the “dumbing down” of the president was actually a strategy to make him more likable.
The Kerry campaign was at a disadvantage because of the relative lack of appeal of their candidate. They further weakened the campaign by making three critical mistakes: First, they failed to make an issue of the Bush administration’s mishandling of pre-9/11 intelligence. There was a case to be made that from the moment they took office, George W. and his advisers were obsessed with Saddam Hussein and, therefore, committed a series of blunders: discounting intelligence that indicated that Al Qaeda was planning a major terrorist attack on the United States, following the wrong strategy in the invasion of Afghanistan that facilitated the escape of the top Al Qaeda leaders and the destabilization of the country, and rushing into an ill-conceived war in Iraq without a plan for the occupation. By attacking George W. on the issue of security, Kerry could have made a mockery of the notion that Bush “kept us safe.”
The second mistake was in not responding swiftly, and effectively, to the Swift-boat ads. These ads, and the accompanying book, Unfit for Command, called Kerry’s honesty and patriotism into question, and tarnished his heroic image.
Finally, the Kerry campaign never settled on a central campaign theme. For example, they touched on the issue of moral values and then backed away. At the Democratic convention, Kerry expressed what could have been a central theme in the campaign, “It is time for those who talk about family values to start valuing families,” which highlighted core progressive values such as fairness, protection, and equal opportunity. Then the campaign dropped the concept of “valuing families” and talked primarily about policies.
In October, when George W. lambasted Kerry as a liberal, the Democratic challenger seemed unable to mount a defense; he did not offer a clear expression of progressive values or attack the Bush administration for investing in the powerful rather than in the people. The Kerry campaign ignored the reality that the label, liberal, does have a negative connotation to many voters who listen to Rush Limbaugh, watch Fox News, or read Ann Coulter. To these Americans being a liberal means being the bearer of a contagious immorality that subverts youth, weakens the family, and undermines the defense of the nation.
For many Democrats, Kerry was a satisfactory rather than optimal candidate. Ultimately, his personality was not strong enough to compensate for the mistakes made by his campaign (Burnett 1-2).
Most Kerry supporters assumed that there was no candidate more contemptuous of the American voter than George W. Bush. After all, he stole the 2000 election and seeing as none of the previous four presidents who won in the electoral college while losing the popular vote had ever won re-election, and in three of those cases the winner of the popular vote in the first election came back to win four years later, Al Gore archly assumed that he could come back and win in 2004. But actually, Gore was just as contemptuous of the voters as Bush was, if not more, for refusing to fight for his victory all the way through the electoral college and congress; but agreed to throw in the towel and accept the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision over the decision of the 538,000 more voters who voted for him than for Bush, not to mention that the Supreme Court is not mentioned in the constitution in reference to disputed presidential elections.
So Gore could not run again. Kerry, on the other hand, had spent his entire life running for president, but unlike George W. Bush, was too coy to admit it. He may or may not have married Teresa Heinz Kerry to advance his presidential ambitions; but he wrote a campaign biography which left no footprints. After finishing the book, the reader had no idea where Kerry grew up, where he went to high school, what he did during his summers as a child, etc. There was no personal biographical information. In Ronald Reagan's autobiography, in contrast, the book opens with his childhood and the reader knows all about his summer jobs before he attended college. So, Kerry was contemptuous enough of the 121 million voters not to trust them with the truth about himself. Kerry should have rubbed everyone's nose in his international background and his father's diplomatic experience as a way of highlighting his own negotiating skills.
Kerry made other errors, too. He ran a backwards looking rather than a forward looking campaign. He chose John Edwards, a clone rather than an asset, to be his Vice-Presidential running mate. Edwards, a handsome Senator from an east coast state was, like Kerry himself, short on any substantive accomplishments in government. Kerry was trying to evoke the aura of his initial clone JFK by choosing a southern Senator to balance the ticket. And balanced it was, for 50 years ago.
…
Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, had an uncontrollable mouth. What the wife of the president says is important. People in high office need to have self-discipline. Loose lips sink ships.
Kerry's gratuitous inclusion of Cheney's daughter's sexual orientation in one of the debates with Bush was shockingly insensitive and showed a total lack of judgment.
The late speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, who came from Kerry's state of Massachusetts, wrote a book called MAN OF THE HOUSE. In it, he says that people like to be asked for their votes. George W. Bush explained his loss in his 1978 House race by his refusal to ask people for their votes. Many politicians find this hard to do, for various reasons.
At the end of the final presidential debate, Bush's final words were a very clearly articulated, "I'm asking for your vote." Pan to Kerry. I can't even remember what he said, but I never heard him ask for a single vote during the whole campaign.
… the Democrats' excessive focus on the missing munitions in Iraq in the final week of the campaign as if the American voters were too sieve brained to remember the previous four years was typical of the arrogant, condescending attitude toward the voters that doomed the Kerry campaign (Leinsdorf 1-2).
Missing from these opinions is any mention that Bush and his supporters might also have stolen the election.
Worked cited:
Burnett, Bob, “Election 2004: Why Kerry Lost." The Berkeley Daily Planet, December 10, 2004. Web. http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/is...
Halperin, Mark and Harris, John F., Excerpts from The Way to Win and the ABC internet article: “Political Pundits on How to Win the White House.” ABC News, October 30, 2006. Web. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Books...
Leinsdorf, Joshua, “Why Kerry Lost.” Web. http://www.leinsdorf.com/2004/why_ker...
Suellentrio, Chris, “Why Kerry Lost.” Slate, November 3, 2004. Web. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2...
Trei, Lisa, “Why Bush Won in 2004.” Stanford, November 17, 2004. Web. https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2004/pol...
Gary Langer, director of polling for ABC News, put it bluntly. President George W. Bush won the 2004 election for two reasons: 9/11 and women voters.
…
"[Bush's] image of leadership, his focus on security, the fact that 9/11 hasn't happened again within this country's borders convinced Americans, especially women with families to protect, that this president should be returned to the White House," Langer said. …
Marking a major change from 2000 when Al Gore won women voters by 11 points, Kerry scored only a 3-point lead over Bush, Langer said. And although single women remained a core Democratic group, the president won married women by 11 percent, a block that was evenly split in 2000. "The shift that occurred in this election was among women," the polling expert said.
…
During the opening session, Mark Mellman, Sen. John Kerry's top pollster, and Jan van Lohuizen, the pollster for the Bush re-election effort, analyzed their campaigns. "Voters were not feeling a level of sufficient pain to reject the incumbent," Mellman said. "As we got closer to Election Day, there was a somewhat more positive feeling in the country, and that helped the incumbent."
Mellman said a majority of Americans think Bush has made the country safer during the last four years. "The Bush campaign used fear very well to make voters risk averse," he said. "It was clear to us that people wanted stability in leadership, [they] wanted stability in politics. We were at something of a loss. We tried [slogans such as] 'time for change,' we tried 'time for new direction,' but neither of these were as compelling as steady, consistent leadership."
…
Van Lohuizen said presidential campaigns are different from other campaigns because advertising has less of an impact than conventions and televised debates. This year, he said, an increasing number of voters received decision-making information from television news, the debates and the Internet. "The role of newspaper coverage declined dramatically," he said. Furthermore, although both parties put a lot of time and money into person-to-person contact, "it didn't pay off, it barely registered," he said.
The Bush campaign also courted the so-called "Hispanic vote." This year, the number of voters in this group increased 2 percent, with Bush receiving a 6 percent jump in support. "It was a major focus of our campaign," van Lohuizen said. But he noted that "huge differences" exist between Cuban Americans and Mexican Americans, and between recent arrivals and longtime residents: "It is not one vote" (Trei 1-3).
President Bush put forward a powerful and compelling philosophy of what the government should do at home and abroad: Expand liberty. You can disagree with Bush’s implementation of that vision, but objecting to it as a matter of principle isn’t a political winner. John Kerry, on the other hand, campaigned as a technocrat, a man who would be better at “managing” the war and the economy. But for voters faced with a mediocre economy rather than a miserable one, and with a difficult war that’s hopefully not a disastrous one, that message—packaged as “change”—wasn’t compelling enough to persuade them to vote for Kerry.
Without reliable exit-poll data, it’s hard to know exactly which voters and issues decided the election, but my guess is that the Democrats will ultimately conclude that they did what they thought was necessary on the ground to win the election. Karl Rove and the Republicans just did more. … The Democratic confidence during the early afternoon and evening was based on more than faulty poll data. The Kerry campaign was confident that high turnout from the party base would swing the election their way.
But this election wasn’t a swing, or a pendulum. There was no fairly evenly divided group in the middle of the electorate that ultimately broke for one side and made the difference. The 2004 campaign was not a tug of war between two sides trying to yank the center toward them. Instead, it was a battle over an electorate perched on a seesaw. Each campaign furiously tried to find new voters to add so that it could outweigh the other side. Both sides performed capably: Kerry received more votes than Al Gore did four years ago, and he even received more votes than the previous all-time leader, Ronald Reagan in 1984. President Bush just did even better.
Rove’s gamble that he could find more Bush supporters from among nonvoting social conservatives than from the small number of undecideds in the usual voting public worked exactly as designed. The question for Democrats is whether Rove’s formula will turn out to be a one-time trick tied to Bush’s personal popularity and the emotional bond the nation formed with him after the trauma of 9/11, or whether the Democratic Party has been relegated to permanent, if competitive, minority status. Are the Democrats once again a regional party, the new Eisenhower Republicans of the Northeast? For seven consecutive presidential elections, the Democratic candidate has failed to garner 50 percent of the vote. Not since Jimmy Carter in 1976 has a Democrat won a majority, and even Watergate could get Carter only 50.1 percent. (Sullentrio 1-2).
Kerry understood the issues, but had not harnessed them to a greater vision. He had not compiled an impressive record of legislative achievements in the Senate. Nor had he been an influential or consistent voice in the conversation over the direction of the Democratic Party, a debate that overlapped precisely with his Senate career. In the public mind, he stood for no particular ideas beyond a mild and conventional brand of liberalism. His advisers believed that Kerry's primary claim on the presidency was his personal biography. In this, they were indulging an obsessive desire of the political world, and reporters most of all, for a familiar plot line, in which a heroic life climaxes in a rendezvous with history at the White House. …
A candidate who runs principally on his or her biography is acutely vulnerable to the accusation that this biography is embellished. Such a candidate, in other words, is a fat target for the Freak Show. One signature of Freak Show politics is a fixation on personality and alleged hypocrisy. Another is the ease with which shrewd political operatives can manipulate the Freak Show's attention to hijack the public image of an opponent.
Kerry and his political team knew exactly the story they would impart to voters. To paraphrase Henry Kissinger's famous line, the story had the added advantage of being largely true. It began with a bright, earnest young man whose interest in politics was sparked in the early 1960s by John F. Kennedy, and whose idealism led him to don a Navy uniform and fight heroically in Vietnam. Coming home, and recognizing that the war had become a terrible national tragedy, he stood on principle to oppose that war, and in so doing revealed his patriotism as valiantly as when he was fighting. Devotion to public service carried him to the United States Senate. The 2004 presidential campaign would bring this forty-five-year journey full circle, as the legacy of one JFK in the White House would be honored by a new JFK in the White House -- a nearly mystical convergence of history. It was a powerful enough narrative to help make Kerry the Democrats' consensus front-runner for the presidential nomination from late 2002 through the spring of 2003.
But there was another way to tell the story. It was of a man who had been nakedly ambitious since his youth and had been willing to trim his sails to suit the moment ever since. The decision to go to Vietnam had been an obvious stepping-stone to politics. His tales of combat valor had been deliberately inflated, perhaps even manufactured.
Sensing an opportunity to preen for the cameras in the antiwar moment, Kerry made a big show of discarding his war medals, but secretly hung on to a prized few. He affected a Kennedyesque accent and went before a Senate committee and prattled on fallaciously about alleged war crimes by his fellow servicemen. Elected to the Senate, Kerry found a natural home for himself as a vain and, thanks to two advantageous marriages, wealthy politician, with his finger in the wind and his hair under a blow-dryer.
Would the real John Kerry please stand up? Of course, both versions of his life had truth to them. Whenever Kerry's self-image tried to stand up, it was knocked over by a Freak Show interpretation. Every positive element of Kerry's existence was neutralized or turned into a weakness. Every vulnerability was maximized. By the end, this proud man was lying on the bloodied ice like a freshly clubbed harp seal (Halperin and Harris 10-11).
Bush triumphed in a popularity contest: 93 percent of Republicans voted for him, while only 89 percent of Democrats favored Kerry. Exit polls indicated that a vote for Bush was primarily an affirmation; 81 percent of the president’s supporters said they voted for him, rather than against his opponent. In contrast, only 55 percent of Democrats voted for Kerry; 35 percent cast their vote because they were against a continuation of the Bush regime.
This relative lack of enthusiasm for Kerry showed up dramatically when pollsters asked voters for reasons they voted for and against Kerry and Bush. The strongest justification to vote for Kerry was “health care,” which was mentioned by 26 percent of those polled. On the other hand 37 percent said the strongest reason to vote for Bush was “response to 9/11,” followed by “the war against terrorism” (32 percent), “decisive leader” (31 percent) and “his religious faith” (29 percent). When asked for reasons to not support Kerry, 36 percent of those polled responded, “flip-flopping on issues,” whereas 32 percent opined their justification for not supporting Bush was “Iraq and foreign policy.”
… While voters tended to see Kerry as more intelligent than Bush, and better able to express himself, Bush was viewed as the stronger leader and the most honest and religious.
Thus, in the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. borrowed a page from Ronald Reagan: Voters tended to separate their favorable personal feelings for him from their unfavorable opinions of his policies.
Voters found Bush to be more likable because he conveyed a “common man” persona, whereas Kerry came across as aloof—professorial. If the polls had contained the question, “Who would you rather go to a ballgame with, George Bush or John Kerry?” no doubt a strong majority would have preferred Bush.
Exit polls showed a strong relationship between the level of education and candidate choice; the less education the voter had, the more likely he or she was to choose Bush. What appeared to be the “dumbing down” of the president was actually a strategy to make him more likable.
The Kerry campaign was at a disadvantage because of the relative lack of appeal of their candidate. They further weakened the campaign by making three critical mistakes: First, they failed to make an issue of the Bush administration’s mishandling of pre-9/11 intelligence. There was a case to be made that from the moment they took office, George W. and his advisers were obsessed with Saddam Hussein and, therefore, committed a series of blunders: discounting intelligence that indicated that Al Qaeda was planning a major terrorist attack on the United States, following the wrong strategy in the invasion of Afghanistan that facilitated the escape of the top Al Qaeda leaders and the destabilization of the country, and rushing into an ill-conceived war in Iraq without a plan for the occupation. By attacking George W. on the issue of security, Kerry could have made a mockery of the notion that Bush “kept us safe.”
The second mistake was in not responding swiftly, and effectively, to the Swift-boat ads. These ads, and the accompanying book, Unfit for Command, called Kerry’s honesty and patriotism into question, and tarnished his heroic image.
Finally, the Kerry campaign never settled on a central campaign theme. For example, they touched on the issue of moral values and then backed away. At the Democratic convention, Kerry expressed what could have been a central theme in the campaign, “It is time for those who talk about family values to start valuing families,” which highlighted core progressive values such as fairness, protection, and equal opportunity. Then the campaign dropped the concept of “valuing families” and talked primarily about policies.
In October, when George W. lambasted Kerry as a liberal, the Democratic challenger seemed unable to mount a defense; he did not offer a clear expression of progressive values or attack the Bush administration for investing in the powerful rather than in the people. The Kerry campaign ignored the reality that the label, liberal, does have a negative connotation to many voters who listen to Rush Limbaugh, watch Fox News, or read Ann Coulter. To these Americans being a liberal means being the bearer of a contagious immorality that subverts youth, weakens the family, and undermines the defense of the nation.
For many Democrats, Kerry was a satisfactory rather than optimal candidate. Ultimately, his personality was not strong enough to compensate for the mistakes made by his campaign (Burnett 1-2).
Most Kerry supporters assumed that there was no candidate more contemptuous of the American voter than George W. Bush. After all, he stole the 2000 election and seeing as none of the previous four presidents who won in the electoral college while losing the popular vote had ever won re-election, and in three of those cases the winner of the popular vote in the first election came back to win four years later, Al Gore archly assumed that he could come back and win in 2004. But actually, Gore was just as contemptuous of the voters as Bush was, if not more, for refusing to fight for his victory all the way through the electoral college and congress; but agreed to throw in the towel and accept the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision over the decision of the 538,000 more voters who voted for him than for Bush, not to mention that the Supreme Court is not mentioned in the constitution in reference to disputed presidential elections.
So Gore could not run again. Kerry, on the other hand, had spent his entire life running for president, but unlike George W. Bush, was too coy to admit it. He may or may not have married Teresa Heinz Kerry to advance his presidential ambitions; but he wrote a campaign biography which left no footprints. After finishing the book, the reader had no idea where Kerry grew up, where he went to high school, what he did during his summers as a child, etc. There was no personal biographical information. In Ronald Reagan's autobiography, in contrast, the book opens with his childhood and the reader knows all about his summer jobs before he attended college. So, Kerry was contemptuous enough of the 121 million voters not to trust them with the truth about himself. Kerry should have rubbed everyone's nose in his international background and his father's diplomatic experience as a way of highlighting his own negotiating skills.
Kerry made other errors, too. He ran a backwards looking rather than a forward looking campaign. He chose John Edwards, a clone rather than an asset, to be his Vice-Presidential running mate. Edwards, a handsome Senator from an east coast state was, like Kerry himself, short on any substantive accomplishments in government. Kerry was trying to evoke the aura of his initial clone JFK by choosing a southern Senator to balance the ticket. And balanced it was, for 50 years ago.
…
Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, had an uncontrollable mouth. What the wife of the president says is important. People in high office need to have self-discipline. Loose lips sink ships.
Kerry's gratuitous inclusion of Cheney's daughter's sexual orientation in one of the debates with Bush was shockingly insensitive and showed a total lack of judgment.
The late speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, who came from Kerry's state of Massachusetts, wrote a book called MAN OF THE HOUSE. In it, he says that people like to be asked for their votes. George W. Bush explained his loss in his 1978 House race by his refusal to ask people for their votes. Many politicians find this hard to do, for various reasons.
At the end of the final presidential debate, Bush's final words were a very clearly articulated, "I'm asking for your vote." Pan to Kerry. I can't even remember what he said, but I never heard him ask for a single vote during the whole campaign.
… the Democrats' excessive focus on the missing munitions in Iraq in the final week of the campaign as if the American voters were too sieve brained to remember the previous four years was typical of the arrogant, condescending attitude toward the voters that doomed the Kerry campaign (Leinsdorf 1-2).
Missing from these opinions is any mention that Bush and his supporters might also have stolen the election.
Worked cited:
Burnett, Bob, “Election 2004: Why Kerry Lost." The Berkeley Daily Planet, December 10, 2004. Web. http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/is...
Halperin, Mark and Harris, John F., Excerpts from The Way to Win and the ABC internet article: “Political Pundits on How to Win the White House.” ABC News, October 30, 2006. Web. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Books...
Leinsdorf, Joshua, “Why Kerry Lost.” Web. http://www.leinsdorf.com/2004/why_ker...
Suellentrio, Chris, “Why Kerry Lost.” Slate, November 3, 2004. Web. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2...
Trei, Lisa, “Why Bush Won in 2004.” Stanford, November 17, 2004. Web. https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2004/pol...
September 1, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2004 Election -- Jim Rassmann
The [Swift Boat Veterans for Truth] adverts show several sailors who served on a US Navy swift boat during Vietnam saying that Senator Kerry was "no war hero", but was a man who lied to get his Purple Heart medal and could not be trusted.
"When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry," a veteran, Larry Thurlow, said in one of the advertisements.
But none of the men in the adverts actually served on the same Swift boat as Senator Kerry, who has invited Vietnam veterans to share his campaign platform several times and told his party that he was "reporting for duty" when he accepted the Democratic nomination for president.
The adverts were funded by a Vietnam veterans group and a Republican property developer from Houston, Bob Perry, who donated $100,000 towards their cost.
Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, attempted to distance the president from the advertisements.
"The Bush-Cheney campaign has never and will never question John Kerry's service during Vietnam," Mr Schmidt said. "The election will not be about the past, it will be about the future."
But Senator McCain said in an interview that the Bush camp had attacked his war record during the Republican primaries in 2000. "It was the same kind of deal that was pulled on me," he told Associated Press.
Later, Senator McCain said the Bush campaign had denied any involvement but then added: "I can't believe the president would pull such a cheap stunt."
The advertisements will run in Ohio, West Virginia and Wisconsin - three so-called swing states, where the electoral outcome is uncertain.
The Kerry camp said the adverts were showing on a very limited basis in cheaper TV markets, a practice known as a "vanity buying" because the real value in the advertisements is the media attention they attract (Brook 1-2).
As polls began to suggest that the charges were beginning to damage Mr Kerry's presidential chances, his campaign headquarters hit back, screening an advertisement accusing the Bush campaign of masterminding the veterans' campaign.
The Kerry camp also organised for other veterans who had served with him to give their accounts. "He deserved every one of his medals," said Del Sandusky, who piloted Mr Kerry's Swift boat (a 50-foot aluminum patrol craft) for nearly three months in the Mekong delta.
Another former navy veteran, Jim Baker, told journalists: "He was the most aggressive officer in charge of Swift boats."
Mr Bush was intensively questioned by reporters on the issue as he emerged from a military strategy meeting at his Texas holiday home in Crawford. "I think Senator Kerry served admirably and he ought to be proud of his record," he said.
"But the question is who is best to lead the country in the war on terror?"
…
The Kerry campaign has taken its claims that the Bush camp is behind the Swift Boat Veterans to the federal election commission, arguing that the Republicans are illegally coordinating the veterans' efforts. It claims that Bush campaign workers were found handing out flyers about the veterans (Borger 2-3).
Factcheck.Org: Swift Boat Claims “Are Contradicted” By Former Crewmen, Navy Records. Factcheck.org reviewed several of the claims made by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and found that they were “contradicted by Kerry's former crewmen, and by Navy records”:
A group funded by the biggest Republican campaign donor in Texas began running an attack ad Aug. 5 in which former Swift Boat veterans claim Kerry lied to get one of his two decorations for bravery and two of his three purple hearts.
But the veterans who accuse Kerry are contradicted by Kerry's former crewmen, and by Navy records.
One of the accusers says he was on another boat “a few yards” away during the incident which won Kerry the Bronze Star, but the former Army lieutenant whom Kerry plucked from the water that day backs Kerry's account. In an Aug. 10 opinion piece in the conservative Wall Street Journal, [Jim] Rassmann (a Republican himself) wrote that the ad was “launched by people without decency” who are “lying” and “should hang their heads in shame.”
Jim Rassmann, a veteran who served with Kerry in Vietnam, defended Kerry's record and affirmed “John Kerry's courage and leadership saved my life.” Rassmann went on to condemn the “Republican-financed Swift Boat Veterans for Bush” who “are suddenly lying about John Kerry's service in Vietnam”:
[Rassmann:] Now, 35 years after the fact, some Republican-financed Swift Boat Veterans for Bush are suddenly lying about John Kerry's service in Vietnam; they are calling him a traitor because he spoke out against the Nixon administration's failed policies in Vietnam. Some of these Republican sponsored veterans are the same ones who spoke out against John at the behest of the Nixon administration in 1971. But this time their attacks are more vicious, their lies cut deep and are directed not just at John Kerry, but at me and each of his crewmates as well. This hate-filled ad asserts that I was not under fire; it questions my words and Navy records. This smear campaign has been launched by people without decency, people who don't understand the bond of those who serve in combat. [The Wall Street Journal, 8/10/04] ((Feldman and Grouch-Begley12).
Early in September 2004 our Florence Area Democratic Club President, Betty Crooks, persuaded Jim Rassmann to speak about his experiences with John Kerry during the Vietnam War and his impressions of the presidential campaigns that Kerry and George Bush were waging. Rassmann was and remains a resident of Dunes City, nine miles south of Florence. Standing in the back of the room, I (Harold Titus, then secretary of the Democratic Club) videotaped his presentation. I noticed while doing so that there appeared to be no press coverage. The next morning I phoned the local newspaper, the Siuslaw News, to ask if they had had a reporter at the event. No, they had not. The person they had assigned to cover the event had been unable to attend. “Then it falls upon us to report what was said,” I answered.
The following is what I submitted to the newspaper.
Rassmann Tells Florence Citizens the Facts
Jim Rassmann, former Special Forces officer whose life John Kerry saved in Vietnam, retired Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy, local resident and international orchid authority, spoke last Friday to interested citizens at the Events Center. His appearance was sponsored by the Florence Area Democratic Club.
Mr. Rassmann became involved in Senator Kerry’s campaign because of his particular concern about the forthcoming election. “I felt for the first time in my life I had to do something [politically].” A registered Republican until this year, Rassmann has always voted for the man he believed was the best presidential candidate. This year George Bush is not that candidate.
Attending orchid conferences throughout the world, Rassmann has witnessed both the apprehension and the disdain that foreigners harbor toward the president. “How have you and the U. S. gotten into this situation? You’ve got a cowboy in the White House. He is incompetent,” Rassmann has been told. In Germany, England, France, Japan, South America, everywhere that he has gone the reaction has been the same. These people are “looking to us for the same sorts of ideals that we’ve put forward ever since World War I. We are a country that stands for justice, … law, … fair play. We are a country that does not torture prisoners.” People are frightened of us. The decision we make Nov. 2 “is going to show the rest of the world what we are all about.” They will “be watching very, very closely.”
Rassmann spoke at length about his Swift Boat experiences.
In March of 1969, in charge of 30 Chinese and Vietnam nationals at the very southernmost tip of South Vietnam, Rassmann conducted military operations for thirty days with Navy Seals and several swift boat commanders, one of whom was John Kerry, with whom he would be associated for two weeks. The boats were operating at the confluence of two large rivers and the many canals running perpendicular to them. The area was largely mangrove swamp. Jungle came right to the edge of the rivers. It was a very dangerous area. “I got ambushed a lot. I got in a lot of fire fights.”
On March 13 Rassmann was on John Kerry’s boat. They discovered amongst a few huts a large cache of rice buried in the ground. He and Kerry blew up much of the cache by dropping into a hole four hand grenades. One of Rassmann’s mercenaries was blown to pieces. “John Kerry among some of his crew policed up all the parts … [He] was not an officer who was afraid to get his hands dirty."
They motored off to an adjacent area and came under fire. The boat to Kerry’s left hit a mine. Five to seven seconds later Kerry’s bow gunner had his M-16 disabled. He yelled for another weapon. Rassmann, carrying a spare, moved toward him along the narrow left side of the boat. A smaller explosion under the boat sent Rassmann sailing into the river and Kerry hurtling across the pilothouse into the bulkhead.
Rassmann went to the bottom of the river to wait for the other swift boats to pass. “As soon as I cleared the surface, I started getting fired at.” He headed under water for one of the banks. “Every time I’d come up for air I’d get shot at … They were AK’s [the enemy’s weapon, not the sailors’ M-16s] … I could hear the AK’s fire [an unmistakable sound]. Five or six breaths later I came up and here are the boats coming back towards me. I distinctly remember two boats. I didn’t see any of the others.”
Critics have claimed that other boats were ten feet to ten yards behind him.
Rassmann swam toward the center of the river. “I didn’t see any other boats other than” the two, Kerry’s boat in the lead. “I grabbed a hold of the boat’s scrabble net on the bow” and started climbing. Because of the shape of the hull, Rassmann was not able to get over the top. Under fire, Kerry ran out of the pilothouse, got down on his hands and knees, reached under the bow and pulled Rassmann aboard. “A lot of things that have been said since then about that incident,” – for instance, that the boat had not been under fire -- have “been shown to be fabrications.”
Rassmann believes that the problem that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and other Kerry critics have has nothing to do with the way Kerry performed his duty in Vietnam. It has to do with “the fact that John … spoke out against [the war and] the Nixon administration’s policies” saying that “American troops had admitted to committing atrocities.”
Certain Vietnam veterans have called Kerry a traitor. Rassmann stated, “Kerry didn’t commit treason. [He] exercised his First Amendment right to criticize our government.” Kerry said that American servicemen were committing war crimes. “He didn’t say that all of them were, like some people would have you believe. He quoted people who had talked to him and told him what they had done themselves. He talked about things he knew about firsthand. He talked about what he had done in regard to free fire zones.”
“We have books [written by] people that have spent years researching all of this and they say to a man that these acts were going on.” Kerry did what needed to be done.
Rassmann spoke about a young MP named Darby who had worked at Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad. Analogous of Kerry’s speech before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Darby had made a copy of the CD containing photographs of prisoner abuse. He slipped it, subsequently, under the door of an investigator charged with uncovering evidence of alleged abuse. Darby’s house and that of his sister have been vandalized. “Terrible things have been said about him in print … Is he a traitor? If you believe he is a traitor, you’re in the wrong country,” Rassmann forthrightly declared.
Last week a group of retired senior officers criticized the investigations about prisoner abuse thus far completed. They said that the findings are essentially “a cover-up.” They say that there is such a thing as command responsibility. About the president’s conduct of the Iraq War, Rassmann stated that “George Bush is directing things for political reasons. And it’s to our detriment. We have 140,000 people over there, and every single one of them is either our son, our daughter, our brother or sister, our father or mother, and we’re responsible for them. The only way we can effect that responsibility is when we vote on Nov. 2.”
Answering questions from individuals in the audience, Rassmann discussed the incident that earned Kerry the Silver Star. An enemy soldier had fired a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) at Kerry’s boat, wounding a crewman. Kerry drove the boat into the bank and chased after, fired at, and killed the retreating soldier. Rassmann explained that an RPG “has to go a certain distance before it becomes armed.” Acting as he did, Kerry had denied the enemy soldier that distance, thereby saving his boat and the lives of his crewmen.
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have lied about that incident, too. They “know that John Kerry lied. [But] none of them were there.”
Former Special Forces friends have told Rassmann that the Republican opposition has targeted him. “People are seeking any possible way … to discredit me.” People looking for discrepancies in what he says have followed him from presentation to presentation. He has been accused of being gay. They have claimed that “Teresa Kerry has paid me a lot of money to do this for John Kerry.” The latest accusation is that thirty-five years ago he and Kerry agreed to “scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” in other words, that he agreed to put in for Kerry’s citation and Kerry to put in for Rassmann’s purple heart.
Rassmann is understandably angry about the lying. He is additionally upset that people are “not working harder to learn about what’s going on. … They don’t seem to care. A lot of them have made up their minds already. You talk to them and it doesn’t seem to me that they know the issues. We have so few people who read the paper anymore. They get their news from these sound bites on TV and they seem to be perfectly happy with doing that.”
At the beginning of his presentation, Rassmann said that he had toured the Events Center parking lot looking for Bush/Cheney bumper stickers. He had been hopeful that there would be “Bush fans” present for him to attempt to persuade. As this gentlemanly veteran sees it, we are “all in this boat together and the boat is the United States and it is very important that we come to some decision based on a dialogue, or a debate, or even an argument, if you will. I’d hate to be preaching to the choir.”
The Siuslaw News printed an account of the event September 18. I was very displeased with it. I had expected my long article to be edited but not the way it was. Additions, based (I am assuming) from information provided the newspaper by other people who had attended, were made that I considered unnecessary. The newspaper was careless about its use of quotation marks. Some of the sentences – attempts to paste together statements that I wrote – were clumsy. I especially disliked the newspaper article’s ending. I told Betty Crooks that I was thankful that my name had not been attached (Titus 1-3).
Works cited:
Borger, Julian, “Bush Hails Kerry's 'Admirable' War Record.” The Guardian, August 24, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...
Brook, Stephan, “'Dishonest' Anti-Kerry Ads Cause a Storm.” The Guardian, August 6, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/media/200...
Feldman, Marcus and Grouch-Begley, “Fox News Kicks Off ‘Swift Boat’ Campaign against John Kerry Ahead of Possible Defense Post.” Media Matters, November 14, 2012. Web. https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-frie...
Titus, Harold, “Rassmann Tells Florence Citizens the Facts.” Draft Article Sent to the Siuslaw News, September 2004.
"When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry," a veteran, Larry Thurlow, said in one of the advertisements.
But none of the men in the adverts actually served on the same Swift boat as Senator Kerry, who has invited Vietnam veterans to share his campaign platform several times and told his party that he was "reporting for duty" when he accepted the Democratic nomination for president.
The adverts were funded by a Vietnam veterans group and a Republican property developer from Houston, Bob Perry, who donated $100,000 towards their cost.
Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, attempted to distance the president from the advertisements.
"The Bush-Cheney campaign has never and will never question John Kerry's service during Vietnam," Mr Schmidt said. "The election will not be about the past, it will be about the future."
But Senator McCain said in an interview that the Bush camp had attacked his war record during the Republican primaries in 2000. "It was the same kind of deal that was pulled on me," he told Associated Press.
Later, Senator McCain said the Bush campaign had denied any involvement but then added: "I can't believe the president would pull such a cheap stunt."
The advertisements will run in Ohio, West Virginia and Wisconsin - three so-called swing states, where the electoral outcome is uncertain.
The Kerry camp said the adverts were showing on a very limited basis in cheaper TV markets, a practice known as a "vanity buying" because the real value in the advertisements is the media attention they attract (Brook 1-2).
As polls began to suggest that the charges were beginning to damage Mr Kerry's presidential chances, his campaign headquarters hit back, screening an advertisement accusing the Bush campaign of masterminding the veterans' campaign.
The Kerry camp also organised for other veterans who had served with him to give their accounts. "He deserved every one of his medals," said Del Sandusky, who piloted Mr Kerry's Swift boat (a 50-foot aluminum patrol craft) for nearly three months in the Mekong delta.
Another former navy veteran, Jim Baker, told journalists: "He was the most aggressive officer in charge of Swift boats."
Mr Bush was intensively questioned by reporters on the issue as he emerged from a military strategy meeting at his Texas holiday home in Crawford. "I think Senator Kerry served admirably and he ought to be proud of his record," he said.
"But the question is who is best to lead the country in the war on terror?"
…
The Kerry campaign has taken its claims that the Bush camp is behind the Swift Boat Veterans to the federal election commission, arguing that the Republicans are illegally coordinating the veterans' efforts. It claims that Bush campaign workers were found handing out flyers about the veterans (Borger 2-3).
Factcheck.Org: Swift Boat Claims “Are Contradicted” By Former Crewmen, Navy Records. Factcheck.org reviewed several of the claims made by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and found that they were “contradicted by Kerry's former crewmen, and by Navy records”:
A group funded by the biggest Republican campaign donor in Texas began running an attack ad Aug. 5 in which former Swift Boat veterans claim Kerry lied to get one of his two decorations for bravery and two of his three purple hearts.
But the veterans who accuse Kerry are contradicted by Kerry's former crewmen, and by Navy records.
One of the accusers says he was on another boat “a few yards” away during the incident which won Kerry the Bronze Star, but the former Army lieutenant whom Kerry plucked from the water that day backs Kerry's account. In an Aug. 10 opinion piece in the conservative Wall Street Journal, [Jim] Rassmann (a Republican himself) wrote that the ad was “launched by people without decency” who are “lying” and “should hang their heads in shame.”
Jim Rassmann, a veteran who served with Kerry in Vietnam, defended Kerry's record and affirmed “John Kerry's courage and leadership saved my life.” Rassmann went on to condemn the “Republican-financed Swift Boat Veterans for Bush” who “are suddenly lying about John Kerry's service in Vietnam”:
[Rassmann:] Now, 35 years after the fact, some Republican-financed Swift Boat Veterans for Bush are suddenly lying about John Kerry's service in Vietnam; they are calling him a traitor because he spoke out against the Nixon administration's failed policies in Vietnam. Some of these Republican sponsored veterans are the same ones who spoke out against John at the behest of the Nixon administration in 1971. But this time their attacks are more vicious, their lies cut deep and are directed not just at John Kerry, but at me and each of his crewmates as well. This hate-filled ad asserts that I was not under fire; it questions my words and Navy records. This smear campaign has been launched by people without decency, people who don't understand the bond of those who serve in combat. [The Wall Street Journal, 8/10/04] ((Feldman and Grouch-Begley12).
Early in September 2004 our Florence Area Democratic Club President, Betty Crooks, persuaded Jim Rassmann to speak about his experiences with John Kerry during the Vietnam War and his impressions of the presidential campaigns that Kerry and George Bush were waging. Rassmann was and remains a resident of Dunes City, nine miles south of Florence. Standing in the back of the room, I (Harold Titus, then secretary of the Democratic Club) videotaped his presentation. I noticed while doing so that there appeared to be no press coverage. The next morning I phoned the local newspaper, the Siuslaw News, to ask if they had had a reporter at the event. No, they had not. The person they had assigned to cover the event had been unable to attend. “Then it falls upon us to report what was said,” I answered.
The following is what I submitted to the newspaper.
Rassmann Tells Florence Citizens the Facts
Jim Rassmann, former Special Forces officer whose life John Kerry saved in Vietnam, retired Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy, local resident and international orchid authority, spoke last Friday to interested citizens at the Events Center. His appearance was sponsored by the Florence Area Democratic Club.
Mr. Rassmann became involved in Senator Kerry’s campaign because of his particular concern about the forthcoming election. “I felt for the first time in my life I had to do something [politically].” A registered Republican until this year, Rassmann has always voted for the man he believed was the best presidential candidate. This year George Bush is not that candidate.
Attending orchid conferences throughout the world, Rassmann has witnessed both the apprehension and the disdain that foreigners harbor toward the president. “How have you and the U. S. gotten into this situation? You’ve got a cowboy in the White House. He is incompetent,” Rassmann has been told. In Germany, England, France, Japan, South America, everywhere that he has gone the reaction has been the same. These people are “looking to us for the same sorts of ideals that we’ve put forward ever since World War I. We are a country that stands for justice, … law, … fair play. We are a country that does not torture prisoners.” People are frightened of us. The decision we make Nov. 2 “is going to show the rest of the world what we are all about.” They will “be watching very, very closely.”
Rassmann spoke at length about his Swift Boat experiences.
In March of 1969, in charge of 30 Chinese and Vietnam nationals at the very southernmost tip of South Vietnam, Rassmann conducted military operations for thirty days with Navy Seals and several swift boat commanders, one of whom was John Kerry, with whom he would be associated for two weeks. The boats were operating at the confluence of two large rivers and the many canals running perpendicular to them. The area was largely mangrove swamp. Jungle came right to the edge of the rivers. It was a very dangerous area. “I got ambushed a lot. I got in a lot of fire fights.”
On March 13 Rassmann was on John Kerry’s boat. They discovered amongst a few huts a large cache of rice buried in the ground. He and Kerry blew up much of the cache by dropping into a hole four hand grenades. One of Rassmann’s mercenaries was blown to pieces. “John Kerry among some of his crew policed up all the parts … [He] was not an officer who was afraid to get his hands dirty."
They motored off to an adjacent area and came under fire. The boat to Kerry’s left hit a mine. Five to seven seconds later Kerry’s bow gunner had his M-16 disabled. He yelled for another weapon. Rassmann, carrying a spare, moved toward him along the narrow left side of the boat. A smaller explosion under the boat sent Rassmann sailing into the river and Kerry hurtling across the pilothouse into the bulkhead.
Rassmann went to the bottom of the river to wait for the other swift boats to pass. “As soon as I cleared the surface, I started getting fired at.” He headed under water for one of the banks. “Every time I’d come up for air I’d get shot at … They were AK’s [the enemy’s weapon, not the sailors’ M-16s] … I could hear the AK’s fire [an unmistakable sound]. Five or six breaths later I came up and here are the boats coming back towards me. I distinctly remember two boats. I didn’t see any of the others.”
Critics have claimed that other boats were ten feet to ten yards behind him.
Rassmann swam toward the center of the river. “I didn’t see any other boats other than” the two, Kerry’s boat in the lead. “I grabbed a hold of the boat’s scrabble net on the bow” and started climbing. Because of the shape of the hull, Rassmann was not able to get over the top. Under fire, Kerry ran out of the pilothouse, got down on his hands and knees, reached under the bow and pulled Rassmann aboard. “A lot of things that have been said since then about that incident,” – for instance, that the boat had not been under fire -- have “been shown to be fabrications.”
Rassmann believes that the problem that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and other Kerry critics have has nothing to do with the way Kerry performed his duty in Vietnam. It has to do with “the fact that John … spoke out against [the war and] the Nixon administration’s policies” saying that “American troops had admitted to committing atrocities.”
Certain Vietnam veterans have called Kerry a traitor. Rassmann stated, “Kerry didn’t commit treason. [He] exercised his First Amendment right to criticize our government.” Kerry said that American servicemen were committing war crimes. “He didn’t say that all of them were, like some people would have you believe. He quoted people who had talked to him and told him what they had done themselves. He talked about things he knew about firsthand. He talked about what he had done in regard to free fire zones.”
“We have books [written by] people that have spent years researching all of this and they say to a man that these acts were going on.” Kerry did what needed to be done.
Rassmann spoke about a young MP named Darby who had worked at Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad. Analogous of Kerry’s speech before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Darby had made a copy of the CD containing photographs of prisoner abuse. He slipped it, subsequently, under the door of an investigator charged with uncovering evidence of alleged abuse. Darby’s house and that of his sister have been vandalized. “Terrible things have been said about him in print … Is he a traitor? If you believe he is a traitor, you’re in the wrong country,” Rassmann forthrightly declared.
Last week a group of retired senior officers criticized the investigations about prisoner abuse thus far completed. They said that the findings are essentially “a cover-up.” They say that there is such a thing as command responsibility. About the president’s conduct of the Iraq War, Rassmann stated that “George Bush is directing things for political reasons. And it’s to our detriment. We have 140,000 people over there, and every single one of them is either our son, our daughter, our brother or sister, our father or mother, and we’re responsible for them. The only way we can effect that responsibility is when we vote on Nov. 2.”
Answering questions from individuals in the audience, Rassmann discussed the incident that earned Kerry the Silver Star. An enemy soldier had fired a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) at Kerry’s boat, wounding a crewman. Kerry drove the boat into the bank and chased after, fired at, and killed the retreating soldier. Rassmann explained that an RPG “has to go a certain distance before it becomes armed.” Acting as he did, Kerry had denied the enemy soldier that distance, thereby saving his boat and the lives of his crewmen.
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have lied about that incident, too. They “know that John Kerry lied. [But] none of them were there.”
Former Special Forces friends have told Rassmann that the Republican opposition has targeted him. “People are seeking any possible way … to discredit me.” People looking for discrepancies in what he says have followed him from presentation to presentation. He has been accused of being gay. They have claimed that “Teresa Kerry has paid me a lot of money to do this for John Kerry.” The latest accusation is that thirty-five years ago he and Kerry agreed to “scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” in other words, that he agreed to put in for Kerry’s citation and Kerry to put in for Rassmann’s purple heart.
Rassmann is understandably angry about the lying. He is additionally upset that people are “not working harder to learn about what’s going on. … They don’t seem to care. A lot of them have made up their minds already. You talk to them and it doesn’t seem to me that they know the issues. We have so few people who read the paper anymore. They get their news from these sound bites on TV and they seem to be perfectly happy with doing that.”
At the beginning of his presentation, Rassmann said that he had toured the Events Center parking lot looking for Bush/Cheney bumper stickers. He had been hopeful that there would be “Bush fans” present for him to attempt to persuade. As this gentlemanly veteran sees it, we are “all in this boat together and the boat is the United States and it is very important that we come to some decision based on a dialogue, or a debate, or even an argument, if you will. I’d hate to be preaching to the choir.”
The Siuslaw News printed an account of the event September 18. I was very displeased with it. I had expected my long article to be edited but not the way it was. Additions, based (I am assuming) from information provided the newspaper by other people who had attended, were made that I considered unnecessary. The newspaper was careless about its use of quotation marks. Some of the sentences – attempts to paste together statements that I wrote – were clumsy. I especially disliked the newspaper article’s ending. I told Betty Crooks that I was thankful that my name had not been attached (Titus 1-3).
Works cited:
Borger, Julian, “Bush Hails Kerry's 'Admirable' War Record.” The Guardian, August 24, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...
Brook, Stephan, “'Dishonest' Anti-Kerry Ads Cause a Storm.” The Guardian, August 6, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/media/200...
Feldman, Marcus and Grouch-Begley, “Fox News Kicks Off ‘Swift Boat’ Campaign against John Kerry Ahead of Possible Defense Post.” Media Matters, November 14, 2012. Web. https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-frie...
Titus, Harold, “Rassmann Tells Florence Citizens the Facts.” Draft Article Sent to the Siuslaw News, September 2004.
August 30, 2020
Recent Presidential Elections -- 2004 Election -- Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
In 2004, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth started out on the margins of the presidential race. In an era of Old Media domination, they might have stayed there. When the group's founders held a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington on May 4, there was nothing in the next day's Washington Post, and the episode got scant attention elsewhere. A conservative website, FreeRepublic.com, however, covered the news conference and listed the fax numbers of Establishment news organizations, urging readers to send missives demanding to know why they were "blacking out" the event.
A day later, the Post and New York Times carried short stories inside the paper. The Post report included the Kerry campaign's response that the Swift Boat Veterans was a "politically motivated organization with close ties to the Bush administration."
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was organized by Vietnam veterans who profoundly resented Kerry's role in the antiwar movement. Some of the men personally had served with Kerry in Vietnam. The group was funded and promoted by prominent Republicans, several of whom had ties to both President Bush and Karl Rove, though no evidence of a coordinated effort ever emerged.
As it happened, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth need not have worried about the amount of coverage they would receive, in either the New Media or the Old. And the spasm of publicity would come at the worst possible time for Kerry. On July 28, one day before Kerry formally accepted the Democratic nomination at the party's national convention in Boston, Drudge touted the imminent release of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. On the morning of Drudge's report, the book was ranked at #1,318 on Amazon.com. The next day it had jumped to #2, and within a couple of days it hit #1.
The book, published by the conservative Regnery Publishing, alleged that key elements of Kerry's account of his Vietnam service were false. Most dramatically, it claimed that Kerry's Bronze Star for heroic service, earned on March 13, 1969, was based on fraud. The group also questioned other aspects of Kerry's versions of his tour of duty and his involvement with the antiwar movement.
Beyond the book, the Swift Boaters started with relatively modest purchases of television advertising time. But their sophisticated political advisers knew that cable TV, talk radio, and, eventually, the Old Media would pick up on the ads themselves as controversial content, and give them the equivalent of millions of dollars in free coverage. This, of course, promoted their message and drove up awareness of their cause, traffic to their website, and donations to their coffers. In the end, the group was able to purchase additional millions' worth of television ads. Democratic polling showed widespread awareness of the group's message, even in places where the advertisements never aired. The group's work also lit up the blogosphere and talk radio for weeks, giving the Old Media another hook in covering the coverage of the story.
The Swift Boaters pointed out authentic flaws and contradictions in some of Kerry's assertions about his war service and protest activity. But their most sensational claims were either unsupported by evidence or contradicted by independent journalistic inquiries. This nevertheless did nothing to diminish the group's significance in the 2004 campaign: It inflicted crippling damage on Kerry. Many of his strategists in retrospect regard the Swift Boat Veterans as the single biggest reason he is not president today.
Initially, coverage was limited, and what did appear was sympathetic to Kerry. A Washington Post story from August 6 led with John McCain, a prominent Republican but a longtime Kerry friend, defending his fellow senator. The Post cited McCain's interview with the Associated Press in which he attacked the group's campaign as "dishonest and dishonorable."
Yet within a couple of weeks the Swift Boat Veterans charges were dominating the front pages, and reporting teams were assigned to ascertain the truth of the group's charges.
One reason the controversy moved from the margins to front-and-center was that Bush's reelection team -- which had been watching the story with delight -- helped push it there. While there is no evidence that the Bush campaign orchestrated the group's allegations, surrogates gave the charges respectable validation. The party's 1996 nominee, war veteran Bob Dole, appeared on CNN on August 22 and declared that the Vietnam criticism was fair game.
If nothing else, Dole said, it exposed Kerry as a hypocrite: "I mean, one day he's saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons. The next day he's standing there, 'I want to be president because I'm a Vietnam veteran.' " As for the merits of the accusations, Dole suggested that the Swift Boat Veterans could not all be "Republican liars -- there's got to be some truth to the charges." What about Kerry's war wounds? "I respect his record. But three Purple Hearts, and [he] never bled, that I know of. I mean, they're all superficial wounds. Three Purple Hearts and you're out [of the combat zone]."
A week later, the president's own father weighed in similarly on CNN. From what he could tell, the forty-first president said, the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans were "rather compelling."
The Swift Boat Veterans' offensive presented Kerry with a classic political dilemma. If he responded, it might only elevate the prominence of the allegations. The alternative was to let damaging charges go unrebutted. It was not an easy question at the time but, in retrospect, there plainly was a right and a wrong answer. Kerry chose the wrong one.
He and his team allowed themselves to imagine that, because the Swift Boat Veterans at first were not getting wide coverage in the Old Media, they could not be gaining much traction with the public.
Like many Democrats, Kerry and his team believed that presidential campaigns are fundamentally about which candidate has the best thirty-two-point policy plan and who snags the most endorsements from top-tier newspapers. The reality is that campaigns are also character tests. And, unlike gossip about a possible affair, the Swift Boat controversy went to the heart of Kerry's leadership character.
As August dragged on, a debate grew in Kerry's campaign about whether to get off the sidelines and defend aggressively against the Swift Boat Veterans. The debate was resolved with a bold decision: Let's wait for polling to settle the matter. By the time the numbers came back, it confirmed for Democrats what Republicans already knew. The Swift Boat blitz was raising serious doubts among some swing voters about Kerry's veracity and values.
Kerry's team finally responded, with a demand that Bush apologize for the Swift Boat attacks. That wan parry, which Bush swatted away, was so late and so lame that it hardly projected an image of strength, or solved the problem.
The entire episode, like Kerry's earlier encounters with the Freak Show, revealed the combination of indignation (How dare they attack me!) and insecurity (This is a crisis -- let's take a poll!) that was at the heart of Kerry's campaign. In his defense, it must be said that this combination is characteristic of many Democrats. So, too, was the reaction of his party: pervasive grumbling to Old Media reporters about its candidate's incompetence in standing up to New Media abuse.
…
Bush certainly had his own Freak Show moments. The September 2004 controversy over whether he had evaded his commitments to the Texas Air National Guard was an example. That story, however, promoted by the Old Media warhorse CBS News, promptly was demolished by New Media critics. And though Bush survived it, the episode illustrated that he, too, had a life of competing narratives. According to some, he was a man born to privilege but with a common touch, whose life had been infused with new purpose once he embraced religious faith. This faith was the core of a presidency that had led the nation through the worst attacks on native soil in American history and was keeping the country safe in a dangerous new era.
There was another narrative, too. Bush was a daddy's boy and a lifelong mediocrity who was comically unprepared for the presidency and was elevated to the office by a Republican-weighted Supreme Court. With hawkish surrogates making the decisions, Bush had blundered into a disastrous war and had led the nation to the brink of catastrophe. As in 2000, the country in 2004 divided almost perfectly down the middle over which version of George W. Bush they found more plausible.
…
… Just after the Democratic convention, voters who thought Kerry would keep America strong militarily outnumbered by 19 percentage points voters who said he would not. After Labor Day the margin was 3 percentage points. Over the same time period, Kerry saw comparable declines on "strong leader" (from 18 to 1) and "trust John Kerry to be commander in chief" (16 down to 3).
Because of the Swift Boat attacks, Kerry had to shy away from discussing Vietnam, which the campaign had planned to use as its entrée into presenting Kerry as a regular guy (through his crewmate relationships), illustrating his mettle, displaying his ideas for national security, and positioning him as a wartime president. Within Kerry's campaign, there was a roiling debate about when and how to take the issue on, but there was always more talk than action (Halperin and Harris 24-28).
In his April 22, 1971, testimony [before Congress], Kerry related the personal experiences of other Vietnam veterans who conveyed their personal experiences and focused blame on the leaders at that time -- not the soldiers -- for the atrocities they claimed to have committed or witnessed:
KERRY: I would like to talk, representing all those veterans [VVAW members], and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.
[…]
KERRY: They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. [Media Matters, 10/23/04]
Factcheck.Org: “Since Kerry Testified, Ample Evidence Of Other Atrocities Has Come To Light.” A 2004 Factcheck.org piece found “ample evidence” to support Kerry's 1971 congressional testimony on the atrocities of the Vietnam War:
Some atrocities by US forces have been documented beyond question. Kerry's 1971 testimony came less than one month after Army Lt. William Calley had been convicted in a highly publicized military trial of the murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai hamlet on March 16 1968, when upwards of 300 unarmed men, women and children were killed by the inexperienced soldiers of the America l Division's Charley Company. And since Kerry testified, ample evidence of other atrocities has come to light. [Factcheck.org, 11/8/04] (Feldman and Grouch-Begley14-15).
FACT: Swift Boat Campaign Was Based On Lies, Factual Distortions
Swift Boat Allegations Were Replete With Inconsistencies And Outright Lies. Allegations leveled against Kerry in 2004 by members of the Swift Boat Veterans were replete with inconsistencies and factual discrepancies:
George Elliott: Elliott, Kerry's commanding officer in Vietnam, told conflicting stories in 2004 about Kerry's service. He first said in early 2004 that he had no qualms about Kerry's actions that earned him the Silver Star in Vietnam, affirming that they were “exemplary.” But in the group's Swift Boat ad, Elliott stated: “John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam.” After the first Swift Boat ad aired, Elliott changed his story again, saying that his Kerry attack was “a terrible mistake.” He added: “I'm the one in trouble here. ... I knew it was wrong. ... In a hurry I signed [an affidavit] and faxed it back. That was a mistake.” But in yet another flip-flop, days later, Elliott announced that he stood by claims that Kerry “had not been honest” about Vietnam. [Media Matters, 11/9/07]
Dr. Louis Letson: Letson, who claimed he treated Kerry in Vietnam, disputed Kerry's account of how Kerry received his first Purple Heart, saying, “I know John Kerry is lying about his first Purple Heart, because I treated him for that injury.” Letson later claimed Kerry's wound was too small to justify the medal. In fact, according to Kerry's medical records, Letson was not the doctor who signed off as having treated Kerry the night of the injury. Moreover, Navy guidelines during the Vietnam War for Purple Hearts did not take into account the size of the wound when awarding the honor, which invalidated Letson's wound claim. [Media Matters, 11/9/07]
Cmdr. Adrian Lonsdale: In 2004, retired Cmdr. Adrian Lonsdale claimed that Kerry “lack[ed] the capacity to lead,” which was at odds with what he reportedly said about Kerry during his 1996 Senate race. According to reports from ABC News and Air Force Times, Lonsdale stated: “It was because of the bravery and the courage of the young officers that ran boats ... the swift boats and the Coast Guard cutters, and Senator Kerry was no exception.” In 1996, Lonsdale explained that Vietnam War medals could only be awarded if battle events were corroborated by others -- this explanation contradicted Swift Boat Veterans' 2004 claims that Kerry won his awards only because he was able to write up false reports and fool his commanders. [Media Matters, 11/9/07]
Navy Lt. Larry Thurlow: Thurlow, who commanded a Navy Swift boat alongside Kerry's in Vietnam -- which resulted in Kerry earning a Bronze Star -- affirmed as late as April 2004 that Kerry “was extremely brave, and I wouldn't argue that point.” Four months later, Thurlow publicly disputed Kerry's medal, claiming it was a fraud. Thurlow maintained that Kerry was “not under fire” that day and that the claims that units involved came under “small arms and automatic weapons fire” were “totally fabricated.” In fact, according to The Washington Post, the citation for a Bronze Star Thurlow also received that same day for actions on a swift boat alongside Kerry's, detailed how both his and Kerry's boats sustained “enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire.” [Media Matters, 11/9/07]
Stephen Gardner: Gardner, who served as a gunner under Kerry's command, was repeatedly cited as an eyewitness to key Kerry events in Vietnam. Gardner later admitted however that “he was not on the boat with Kerry during the incidents for which Kerry got his medals.” [The Columbus Dispatch, 8/6/04, via Media Matters]
Alfred J. French: French, a veteran featured in the Swift Boat ads, claimed: “I served with John Kerry. ... He is lying about his record.” French also agreed that Kerry had received his Purple Heart “from negligently self-inflicted wounds in the absence of hostile fire.” But in an interview with The Oregonian, French admitted he had no firsthand knowledge of the events surrounding Kerry's medals and that his information came secondhand from “friends.” [Media Matters, 11/9/07]
Time Magazine: “Swift-Boating's Essence Is A Particular Kind Of Dishonesty.” A Time magazine article described “swift-boating” as “a particular kind of dishonesty”:
There have, of course, been dirty politics and outrageous infamies since the beginning of the Republic. Swift-boating is not about that. Nor is it merely negative campaigning. There's nothing wrong with criticizing your opponent if the criticism is accurate and important. Swift-boating's essence is a particular kind of dishonesty, or rather a particular combination of shadowy dishonesties. It usually involves a complex web of facts, many of which may even be true. It exploits its own complexity and the reluctance of the media to adjudicate factual disputes. No matter how thoroughly a charge may be discredited, enough taint remains to support an argument. The fundamental dishonesty is the suggestion that the issue, whatever it is, really matters. This is how swift-boating differs from its cousin McCarthyism, which deals in totally baseless charges that would be deeply serious if true. Swift-boating is McCarthyism lite. [Time Magazine, 6/12/08]
Kerry’s opponents ... understood that they could strike at the heart of his campaign by questioning his Vietnam service, together with his statements on behalf of VVAW. Under federal campaign finance law, individuals could form so-called “527” organizations to raise and spend unlimited money for political advocacy, as long as they did not coordinate with or endorse particular candidates. Additionally, by 2004, the “new media” of talk radio, blogs, and 24-hour news channels, particularly in the conservative vein of Fox News, was challenging the control of news traditionally exercised by the major networks and newspapers. All of these elements created an environment in which groups like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth could seriously affect the election.
Veterans Who Served With Kerry Documented 10 “Lies Told By People Who Were Not There And Never Bothered To Talk With Us.” In a 12-page letter disputing the Swift Boat campaign against Kerry, a group of 10 veterans identified 10 falsehoods from the campaign that members stated had “tarnished the sacrifices [they] made”:
T]he lies of the SBVT ... tarnished the sacrifices we made, called into question the medals we were awarded and challenged the very authenticity of our service. In countless radio talk shows, television appearances and ads, newspaper and magazine interviews, not to mention political speeches and group appearances, SBVT lied about our skipper's and our service in Vietnam and in so doing, damaged our reputations and attacked the quality of our service to country. We have children and families who were deeply affected by these lies and we believe you and the SBVT whom you supported owe us and the American people an apology for the tactics you bankrolled.
Those of us who served with John Kerry on PCF-94 were personally there, on the boat and with him in the actions for which he was awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and two of his purple hearts. Many of us were decorated for some of these same actions and we are outraged that thirty five years later, for political purposes, people lied so outrageously about what we did, attacking our character and the Navy's integrity--lies told by people who were not there and never bothered to talk with us. How can your group call itself the Swift Boat Veterans “for Truth” when you never interviewed the PCF-94 boat eyewitnesses? [Letter from PCF-94 crew, 6/19/08, via Huffington Post]
John E. O'Neill, founder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, had extensive ties to the Republican Party, including ties to the Nixon administration and contributions of more than $14,000 to GOP campaigns. Member Ken Cordier was also found to have GOP ties, including serving as a member of the Bush-Cheney '04 National Veterans Steering Committee and being named to a Bush administration POW Advisory Committee. [Media Matters, 8/24/04] (Feldman and Grouch-Begley 9-13).
Here is more commentary about the Swift Boat story.
The effects of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s advertisement quickly outstripped its low buy-in cost of $500,000. Immediately, the commercial began appearing all over television and online media. In response, donors sent millions of dollars to the group, adding to the serious money that O’Neill was already receiving from wealthy Texas Republicans, including Bob Perry, T. Boone Pickens, and Harold Simmons.
The advertisement ushered in a period of decline for the Kerry campaign, which, shepherding resources and not expecting the accusations to gain traction, waited two weeks before responding. By August 30, as the Republican National Convention began, Kerry and Bush were polling neck-and-neck again. Most damaging of all, Kerry’s Vietnam service had become controversial, rather than reassuring, and it was largely dropped from the remainder of his campaign.
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and its effective television advertisements (the most memorable of the campaign) became one of the most important elements of the 2004 election. The ads were endlessly parsed within the context of a new media environment and an anxious electorate divided over questions of war and national security. The group capitalized on this context by combining it with decades-old anger over criticism of the Vietnam War and contemporary disapproval of Democrats like Kerry who criticized the war in Iraq. Ultimately, the group’s efforts succeeded so well that the verb “swift-boat” has entered the Oxford and American Heritage Dictionaries. However, as those entries define it, “swift-boating” refers to public campaigns which utilize “personal attacks” and “exaggerated or unsubstantiated allegations.” Thus, while the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth succeeded in helping to defeat John Kerry, they did so in a way that many remember as a low point in modern U.S. politics (Buckaloo 1-2).
Works cited:
Buckaloo, David, “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” Center for Presidential History. Web. http://cphcmp.smu.edu/2004election/sw...
Feldman, Marcus and Grouch-Begley, “Fox News Kicks Off ‘Swift Boat’ Campaign against John Kerry Ahead of Possible Defense Post.” Media Matters, November 14, 2012. Web. https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-frie...
Halperin, Mark and Harris, John F., Excerpts from The Way to Win and the ABC internet article “ Political Pundits on How to Win the White House.” ABC News, October 30, 2006. Web. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Books...
A day later, the Post and New York Times carried short stories inside the paper. The Post report included the Kerry campaign's response that the Swift Boat Veterans was a "politically motivated organization with close ties to the Bush administration."
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was organized by Vietnam veterans who profoundly resented Kerry's role in the antiwar movement. Some of the men personally had served with Kerry in Vietnam. The group was funded and promoted by prominent Republicans, several of whom had ties to both President Bush and Karl Rove, though no evidence of a coordinated effort ever emerged.
As it happened, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth need not have worried about the amount of coverage they would receive, in either the New Media or the Old. And the spasm of publicity would come at the worst possible time for Kerry. On July 28, one day before Kerry formally accepted the Democratic nomination at the party's national convention in Boston, Drudge touted the imminent release of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. On the morning of Drudge's report, the book was ranked at #1,318 on Amazon.com. The next day it had jumped to #2, and within a couple of days it hit #1.
The book, published by the conservative Regnery Publishing, alleged that key elements of Kerry's account of his Vietnam service were false. Most dramatically, it claimed that Kerry's Bronze Star for heroic service, earned on March 13, 1969, was based on fraud. The group also questioned other aspects of Kerry's versions of his tour of duty and his involvement with the antiwar movement.
Beyond the book, the Swift Boaters started with relatively modest purchases of television advertising time. But their sophisticated political advisers knew that cable TV, talk radio, and, eventually, the Old Media would pick up on the ads themselves as controversial content, and give them the equivalent of millions of dollars in free coverage. This, of course, promoted their message and drove up awareness of their cause, traffic to their website, and donations to their coffers. In the end, the group was able to purchase additional millions' worth of television ads. Democratic polling showed widespread awareness of the group's message, even in places where the advertisements never aired. The group's work also lit up the blogosphere and talk radio for weeks, giving the Old Media another hook in covering the coverage of the story.
The Swift Boaters pointed out authentic flaws and contradictions in some of Kerry's assertions about his war service and protest activity. But their most sensational claims were either unsupported by evidence or contradicted by independent journalistic inquiries. This nevertheless did nothing to diminish the group's significance in the 2004 campaign: It inflicted crippling damage on Kerry. Many of his strategists in retrospect regard the Swift Boat Veterans as the single biggest reason he is not president today.
Initially, coverage was limited, and what did appear was sympathetic to Kerry. A Washington Post story from August 6 led with John McCain, a prominent Republican but a longtime Kerry friend, defending his fellow senator. The Post cited McCain's interview with the Associated Press in which he attacked the group's campaign as "dishonest and dishonorable."
Yet within a couple of weeks the Swift Boat Veterans charges were dominating the front pages, and reporting teams were assigned to ascertain the truth of the group's charges.
One reason the controversy moved from the margins to front-and-center was that Bush's reelection team -- which had been watching the story with delight -- helped push it there. While there is no evidence that the Bush campaign orchestrated the group's allegations, surrogates gave the charges respectable validation. The party's 1996 nominee, war veteran Bob Dole, appeared on CNN on August 22 and declared that the Vietnam criticism was fair game.
If nothing else, Dole said, it exposed Kerry as a hypocrite: "I mean, one day he's saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons. The next day he's standing there, 'I want to be president because I'm a Vietnam veteran.' " As for the merits of the accusations, Dole suggested that the Swift Boat Veterans could not all be "Republican liars -- there's got to be some truth to the charges." What about Kerry's war wounds? "I respect his record. But three Purple Hearts, and [he] never bled, that I know of. I mean, they're all superficial wounds. Three Purple Hearts and you're out [of the combat zone]."
A week later, the president's own father weighed in similarly on CNN. From what he could tell, the forty-first president said, the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans were "rather compelling."
The Swift Boat Veterans' offensive presented Kerry with a classic political dilemma. If he responded, it might only elevate the prominence of the allegations. The alternative was to let damaging charges go unrebutted. It was not an easy question at the time but, in retrospect, there plainly was a right and a wrong answer. Kerry chose the wrong one.
He and his team allowed themselves to imagine that, because the Swift Boat Veterans at first were not getting wide coverage in the Old Media, they could not be gaining much traction with the public.
Like many Democrats, Kerry and his team believed that presidential campaigns are fundamentally about which candidate has the best thirty-two-point policy plan and who snags the most endorsements from top-tier newspapers. The reality is that campaigns are also character tests. And, unlike gossip about a possible affair, the Swift Boat controversy went to the heart of Kerry's leadership character.
As August dragged on, a debate grew in Kerry's campaign about whether to get off the sidelines and defend aggressively against the Swift Boat Veterans. The debate was resolved with a bold decision: Let's wait for polling to settle the matter. By the time the numbers came back, it confirmed for Democrats what Republicans already knew. The Swift Boat blitz was raising serious doubts among some swing voters about Kerry's veracity and values.
Kerry's team finally responded, with a demand that Bush apologize for the Swift Boat attacks. That wan parry, which Bush swatted away, was so late and so lame that it hardly projected an image of strength, or solved the problem.
The entire episode, like Kerry's earlier encounters with the Freak Show, revealed the combination of indignation (How dare they attack me!) and insecurity (This is a crisis -- let's take a poll!) that was at the heart of Kerry's campaign. In his defense, it must be said that this combination is characteristic of many Democrats. So, too, was the reaction of his party: pervasive grumbling to Old Media reporters about its candidate's incompetence in standing up to New Media abuse.
…
Bush certainly had his own Freak Show moments. The September 2004 controversy over whether he had evaded his commitments to the Texas Air National Guard was an example. That story, however, promoted by the Old Media warhorse CBS News, promptly was demolished by New Media critics. And though Bush survived it, the episode illustrated that he, too, had a life of competing narratives. According to some, he was a man born to privilege but with a common touch, whose life had been infused with new purpose once he embraced religious faith. This faith was the core of a presidency that had led the nation through the worst attacks on native soil in American history and was keeping the country safe in a dangerous new era.
There was another narrative, too. Bush was a daddy's boy and a lifelong mediocrity who was comically unprepared for the presidency and was elevated to the office by a Republican-weighted Supreme Court. With hawkish surrogates making the decisions, Bush had blundered into a disastrous war and had led the nation to the brink of catastrophe. As in 2000, the country in 2004 divided almost perfectly down the middle over which version of George W. Bush they found more plausible.
…
… Just after the Democratic convention, voters who thought Kerry would keep America strong militarily outnumbered by 19 percentage points voters who said he would not. After Labor Day the margin was 3 percentage points. Over the same time period, Kerry saw comparable declines on "strong leader" (from 18 to 1) and "trust John Kerry to be commander in chief" (16 down to 3).
Because of the Swift Boat attacks, Kerry had to shy away from discussing Vietnam, which the campaign had planned to use as its entrée into presenting Kerry as a regular guy (through his crewmate relationships), illustrating his mettle, displaying his ideas for national security, and positioning him as a wartime president. Within Kerry's campaign, there was a roiling debate about when and how to take the issue on, but there was always more talk than action (Halperin and Harris 24-28).
In his April 22, 1971, testimony [before Congress], Kerry related the personal experiences of other Vietnam veterans who conveyed their personal experiences and focused blame on the leaders at that time -- not the soldiers -- for the atrocities they claimed to have committed or witnessed:
KERRY: I would like to talk, representing all those veterans [VVAW members], and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.
[…]
KERRY: They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. [Media Matters, 10/23/04]
Factcheck.Org: “Since Kerry Testified, Ample Evidence Of Other Atrocities Has Come To Light.” A 2004 Factcheck.org piece found “ample evidence” to support Kerry's 1971 congressional testimony on the atrocities of the Vietnam War:
Some atrocities by US forces have been documented beyond question. Kerry's 1971 testimony came less than one month after Army Lt. William Calley had been convicted in a highly publicized military trial of the murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai hamlet on March 16 1968, when upwards of 300 unarmed men, women and children were killed by the inexperienced soldiers of the America l Division's Charley Company. And since Kerry testified, ample evidence of other atrocities has come to light. [Factcheck.org, 11/8/04] (Feldman and Grouch-Begley14-15).
FACT: Swift Boat Campaign Was Based On Lies, Factual Distortions
Swift Boat Allegations Were Replete With Inconsistencies And Outright Lies. Allegations leveled against Kerry in 2004 by members of the Swift Boat Veterans were replete with inconsistencies and factual discrepancies:
George Elliott: Elliott, Kerry's commanding officer in Vietnam, told conflicting stories in 2004 about Kerry's service. He first said in early 2004 that he had no qualms about Kerry's actions that earned him the Silver Star in Vietnam, affirming that they were “exemplary.” But in the group's Swift Boat ad, Elliott stated: “John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam.” After the first Swift Boat ad aired, Elliott changed his story again, saying that his Kerry attack was “a terrible mistake.” He added: “I'm the one in trouble here. ... I knew it was wrong. ... In a hurry I signed [an affidavit] and faxed it back. That was a mistake.” But in yet another flip-flop, days later, Elliott announced that he stood by claims that Kerry “had not been honest” about Vietnam. [Media Matters, 11/9/07]
Dr. Louis Letson: Letson, who claimed he treated Kerry in Vietnam, disputed Kerry's account of how Kerry received his first Purple Heart, saying, “I know John Kerry is lying about his first Purple Heart, because I treated him for that injury.” Letson later claimed Kerry's wound was too small to justify the medal. In fact, according to Kerry's medical records, Letson was not the doctor who signed off as having treated Kerry the night of the injury. Moreover, Navy guidelines during the Vietnam War for Purple Hearts did not take into account the size of the wound when awarding the honor, which invalidated Letson's wound claim. [Media Matters, 11/9/07]
Cmdr. Adrian Lonsdale: In 2004, retired Cmdr. Adrian Lonsdale claimed that Kerry “lack[ed] the capacity to lead,” which was at odds with what he reportedly said about Kerry during his 1996 Senate race. According to reports from ABC News and Air Force Times, Lonsdale stated: “It was because of the bravery and the courage of the young officers that ran boats ... the swift boats and the Coast Guard cutters, and Senator Kerry was no exception.” In 1996, Lonsdale explained that Vietnam War medals could only be awarded if battle events were corroborated by others -- this explanation contradicted Swift Boat Veterans' 2004 claims that Kerry won his awards only because he was able to write up false reports and fool his commanders. [Media Matters, 11/9/07]
Navy Lt. Larry Thurlow: Thurlow, who commanded a Navy Swift boat alongside Kerry's in Vietnam -- which resulted in Kerry earning a Bronze Star -- affirmed as late as April 2004 that Kerry “was extremely brave, and I wouldn't argue that point.” Four months later, Thurlow publicly disputed Kerry's medal, claiming it was a fraud. Thurlow maintained that Kerry was “not under fire” that day and that the claims that units involved came under “small arms and automatic weapons fire” were “totally fabricated.” In fact, according to The Washington Post, the citation for a Bronze Star Thurlow also received that same day for actions on a swift boat alongside Kerry's, detailed how both his and Kerry's boats sustained “enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire.” [Media Matters, 11/9/07]
Stephen Gardner: Gardner, who served as a gunner under Kerry's command, was repeatedly cited as an eyewitness to key Kerry events in Vietnam. Gardner later admitted however that “he was not on the boat with Kerry during the incidents for which Kerry got his medals.” [The Columbus Dispatch, 8/6/04, via Media Matters]
Alfred J. French: French, a veteran featured in the Swift Boat ads, claimed: “I served with John Kerry. ... He is lying about his record.” French also agreed that Kerry had received his Purple Heart “from negligently self-inflicted wounds in the absence of hostile fire.” But in an interview with The Oregonian, French admitted he had no firsthand knowledge of the events surrounding Kerry's medals and that his information came secondhand from “friends.” [Media Matters, 11/9/07]
Time Magazine: “Swift-Boating's Essence Is A Particular Kind Of Dishonesty.” A Time magazine article described “swift-boating” as “a particular kind of dishonesty”:
There have, of course, been dirty politics and outrageous infamies since the beginning of the Republic. Swift-boating is not about that. Nor is it merely negative campaigning. There's nothing wrong with criticizing your opponent if the criticism is accurate and important. Swift-boating's essence is a particular kind of dishonesty, or rather a particular combination of shadowy dishonesties. It usually involves a complex web of facts, many of which may even be true. It exploits its own complexity and the reluctance of the media to adjudicate factual disputes. No matter how thoroughly a charge may be discredited, enough taint remains to support an argument. The fundamental dishonesty is the suggestion that the issue, whatever it is, really matters. This is how swift-boating differs from its cousin McCarthyism, which deals in totally baseless charges that would be deeply serious if true. Swift-boating is McCarthyism lite. [Time Magazine, 6/12/08]
Kerry’s opponents ... understood that they could strike at the heart of his campaign by questioning his Vietnam service, together with his statements on behalf of VVAW. Under federal campaign finance law, individuals could form so-called “527” organizations to raise and spend unlimited money for political advocacy, as long as they did not coordinate with or endorse particular candidates. Additionally, by 2004, the “new media” of talk radio, blogs, and 24-hour news channels, particularly in the conservative vein of Fox News, was challenging the control of news traditionally exercised by the major networks and newspapers. All of these elements created an environment in which groups like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth could seriously affect the election.
Veterans Who Served With Kerry Documented 10 “Lies Told By People Who Were Not There And Never Bothered To Talk With Us.” In a 12-page letter disputing the Swift Boat campaign against Kerry, a group of 10 veterans identified 10 falsehoods from the campaign that members stated had “tarnished the sacrifices [they] made”:
T]he lies of the SBVT ... tarnished the sacrifices we made, called into question the medals we were awarded and challenged the very authenticity of our service. In countless radio talk shows, television appearances and ads, newspaper and magazine interviews, not to mention political speeches and group appearances, SBVT lied about our skipper's and our service in Vietnam and in so doing, damaged our reputations and attacked the quality of our service to country. We have children and families who were deeply affected by these lies and we believe you and the SBVT whom you supported owe us and the American people an apology for the tactics you bankrolled.
Those of us who served with John Kerry on PCF-94 were personally there, on the boat and with him in the actions for which he was awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and two of his purple hearts. Many of us were decorated for some of these same actions and we are outraged that thirty five years later, for political purposes, people lied so outrageously about what we did, attacking our character and the Navy's integrity--lies told by people who were not there and never bothered to talk with us. How can your group call itself the Swift Boat Veterans “for Truth” when you never interviewed the PCF-94 boat eyewitnesses? [Letter from PCF-94 crew, 6/19/08, via Huffington Post]
John E. O'Neill, founder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, had extensive ties to the Republican Party, including ties to the Nixon administration and contributions of more than $14,000 to GOP campaigns. Member Ken Cordier was also found to have GOP ties, including serving as a member of the Bush-Cheney '04 National Veterans Steering Committee and being named to a Bush administration POW Advisory Committee. [Media Matters, 8/24/04] (Feldman and Grouch-Begley 9-13).
Here is more commentary about the Swift Boat story.
The effects of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s advertisement quickly outstripped its low buy-in cost of $500,000. Immediately, the commercial began appearing all over television and online media. In response, donors sent millions of dollars to the group, adding to the serious money that O’Neill was already receiving from wealthy Texas Republicans, including Bob Perry, T. Boone Pickens, and Harold Simmons.
The advertisement ushered in a period of decline for the Kerry campaign, which, shepherding resources and not expecting the accusations to gain traction, waited two weeks before responding. By August 30, as the Republican National Convention began, Kerry and Bush were polling neck-and-neck again. Most damaging of all, Kerry’s Vietnam service had become controversial, rather than reassuring, and it was largely dropped from the remainder of his campaign.
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and its effective television advertisements (the most memorable of the campaign) became one of the most important elements of the 2004 election. The ads were endlessly parsed within the context of a new media environment and an anxious electorate divided over questions of war and national security. The group capitalized on this context by combining it with decades-old anger over criticism of the Vietnam War and contemporary disapproval of Democrats like Kerry who criticized the war in Iraq. Ultimately, the group’s efforts succeeded so well that the verb “swift-boat” has entered the Oxford and American Heritage Dictionaries. However, as those entries define it, “swift-boating” refers to public campaigns which utilize “personal attacks” and “exaggerated or unsubstantiated allegations.” Thus, while the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth succeeded in helping to defeat John Kerry, they did so in a way that many remember as a low point in modern U.S. politics (Buckaloo 1-2).
Works cited:
Buckaloo, David, “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” Center for Presidential History. Web. http://cphcmp.smu.edu/2004election/sw...
Feldman, Marcus and Grouch-Begley, “Fox News Kicks Off ‘Swift Boat’ Campaign against John Kerry Ahead of Possible Defense Post.” Media Matters, November 14, 2012. Web. https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-frie...
Halperin, Mark and Harris, John F., Excerpts from The Way to Win and the ABC internet article “ Political Pundits on How to Win the White House.” ABC News, October 30, 2006. Web. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Books...
