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Focusing On Undecided Voters: Not A Very Swift Idea |
Current rating: 0 |
by Arianna Huffington
(No verified email address) |
26 Aug 2004
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By reframing the discussion on his terms and not Karl Rove's, Kerry will not only inoculate himself against the next round of smears, he will also go a long way toward expanding the electorate by convincing unlikely voters - the 100 million eligible voters who didn't vote in 2000 - that this election, and their participation in it, would make a huge difference in their lives and the life of our country. |
I've decided: I've had enough of the undecideds.
Thanks to a tidal wave of polls, focus groups, Powerpoint presentations, slideshows, studies and laboratory dissections, we now know more about undecided voters than we do about almost anyone else involved in the 2004 campaign - including the candidates themselves.
For instance, it turns out these irresolute souls are more likely to be white than black, female than male, married than single, and live in the suburbs rather than large cities. They are less likely to think that politics is relevant to their lives. They are likely to be younger and less educated than the general electorate - but older and more affluent than those who have committed to a candidate. Most will not make their decision until the week before the election.
And, perhaps most important of all, undecided voters love cartoons, talk shows, "CSI: Miami", and reality shows like "Big Brother" and "Fear Factor" (no word yet on whether they prefer Coke or Pepsi, boxers or briefs, Alien or Predator - but I'm sure that info is being tabulated by some highly paid polling company as we speak).
The problem is, this fixation with all things undecided is threatening to turn a campaign that should be about big ideas, big decisions and the very, very big differences between the worldviews of John Kerry and George Bush into a narrow trench war fought over ludicrous charges.
As a group, undecided voters long to be soothed and reassured. And the danger in playing to this fickle crowd is that the message is tailored not to offend rather than to challenge and inspire.
Witness Kerry on Iraq, President Bush's greatest political liability. "Before you go to battle," he said in his powerful and unambiguous convention statement, "you have to be able to look a parent in the eye and truthfully say: 'I tried everything possible to avoid sending your son or daughter into harm's way. But we had no choice. We had to protect the American people, fundamental American values from a threat that was real and imminent.'"
That is the right message on Iraq, and the one he should stick to. And if undecided voters find it too bold and unmodulated, tough luck.
The repugnant non-story of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is an irony-drenched exhibit A in the case against focusing on undecided voters. Consider: After being ardently wooed, courted, pursued and catered to by Team Kerry, a sizeable chunk of this capricious lot has taken the noxious bait being dangled by the anti-Kerry slime machine and swallowed it hook, line and stinker.
According to a new poll by the National Annenberg Election Survey, 46 percent of undecided and persuadable voters say they find the group's vile ads "very or somewhat believable".
Believable?! But then why are we surprised that the folks who are still on the fence nearly four years into one of the most disastrous and polarizing presidencies in American history find foaming-at-the-mouth accusations that John Kerry might have shot himself because it would look good on his resume "believable"?
The 2004 election is nothing less than a referendum on the soul of our country - a political event with unprecedented significance for our lives and the lives of our children. The Kerry campaign cannot allow it to devolve into a debate over whether John Kerry bled enough to warrant a Purple Heart.
And since no one can doubt that more scurrilous attacks are coming Kerry's way, it is imperative that in the future the right answers to all wrong questions be offered immediately. And not for one moment should they cause the Kerry campaign to relinquish its attacks on the president's failures at home and abroad or cloud its alternative moral vision of what America can be with George Bush safely back in Crawford.
This is all the more important since, sadly, the media will continue to make no distinctions in the volume and content of their coverage between true claims and false ones. According to the Annenberg study, nearly six in 10 people saw or heard the smears, despite a small ad buy in only three swing states - thanks to the obsessive, unfair and imbalanced media coverage, which gave greater play to the politically motivated lies of a few than to the official Navy records.
By reframing the discussion on his terms and not Karl Rove's, Kerry will not only inoculate himself against the next round of smears, he will also go a long way toward expanding the electorate by convincing unlikely voters - the 100 million eligible voters who didn't vote in 2000 - that this election, and their participation in it, would make a huge difference in their lives and the life of our country.
And, as an added bonus, he could free himself from the soul-sapping tyranny of trying to please and placate America's vacillating - and terminally unreliable - undecided voters.
Copyright 2004 ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
http://www.ariannaonline.com/ |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Beware the Vulcans: Why this US Vote is so Critical |
by Lawrence Martin
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
26 Aug 2004
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In his book The Rise of the Vulcans, James Mann writes of what he calls one of the most significant foreign policy documents in decades. Written in 1991 by the Pentagon's Zalmay Khalizad, the paper set forth "a new vision for a world dominated by a lone American superpower, actively working to make sure that no rival group or group of rivals would ever emerge."
Formal alliances were to be downgraded, and collective security given short thrift. American muscle would be the arbiter of the new world order.
Mr. Khalizad was part of a pack of Pentagon hard-liners -- or Vulcans, as some of them liked to call themselves -- that included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.
Though it is generally accepted that 9/11 triggered the changes in the world's power dynamic, these men had been plotting since the late 1960s, as the even-tempered Mann book reveals, to bring an end to great power diplomacy and the collective security system.
The Khalizad document became their bible and, when Ralph Nader handed the Republicans the White House in 2000, they began implementing its tenets. If they win the election this fall -- the most high-stakes election in memory -- they will try to finish the job.
The influence of the Vulcans has been pivotal. As the Cold War closed and their manifesto was being written, there were other options open to the United States. As they did after the Second World War, the Americans could have chosen to strengthen multilateral organizations and forge a new concept of collective security. They could have scaled back their overseas power and devoted resources to domestic afflictions. Some in Washington advocated big defense-spending cuts, with the savings going toward making America the real shining city on the hill -- one without the poverty and the glaring inequalities and the health-care shortages. But the cuts would have left the Pentagon with only 10 times the might of its average competitors, as opposed to 20. The Vulcans wanted 20.
George W. Bush took office speaking of the need for alliances and power-sharing. "If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us," he said of the world's other nations. But when he surrounded himself with supporters of the Khalizad document, the die was cast. Unilateralism became a buzzword. The Iraq war -- largely a product of the enthusiasms and exaggerations of Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz -- signaled that the old balance-of-power system was going up in smoke, replaced by the new one-superpower world view.
For the United States, the irony is considerable. It has long held claim to being one of the great democracies. But what, as the critics ask, is democratic about one country running, if not subjugating, a world of more than 200 nations?
The election in November is so critical because it will be seen as either ratification or repudiation of Vulcan unilateralism. On the face of it, the Democratic Party is hardly proposing radical change. John Kerry is fuzzy on Iraq and no dove on military spending. He ludicrously plans on increasing the already-hyperventilating Pentagon budget, making it the biggest in history when the military capacity of the enemy -- pockets of terrorists as opposed to giant armies and arsenals -- is the smallest in history.
But Mr. Kerry is running to the right of how he would govern. His heavily liberal record is that of an internationalist. A victory by him would signal a major attitudinal shift. As he makes ringingly clear, he wants to rebuild alliances, reinvigorate the concept of collective security and make America respected in the world again.
While Mr. Bush must be somewhat chastened by the "weapons of mass destruction" fiasco, by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and by the thousands of deaths his war has engendered, he would see victory as vindication. Other nations would recoil. They would fear more politics of confrontation, more polarization, more war. Hatred for America would escalate.
There would be no search for a new internationalism favored by Canada and other nations because, as The Rise of the Vulcans makes clear, the Vulcans' underlying philosophy is that they need not reach accommodation with anyone.
They are an odd breed, these men. They hate dictatorship, unless they're doing the dictating.
© Copyright 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc
http://www.theglobeandmail.com |
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