US and the World

Courage and the Fear Driving this Election

The Ad That Beats Bush

This caption for a photo of OBL captures the thrust of the piece: "Osama: If Kerry can pin bin Laden on Bush in his upcoming ads, he will finally connect with the fear that is driving this election."

The ad starts with Bush and his September 14, 2001, bullhorn. This time, though, it's a Kerry commercial that reminds swing-state Americans of Bush's blood vow—precisely three years ago—that "the people who knocked down these buildings" would "hear all of us soon." The cowboy soundbites that we would "smoke 'em out" track across the screen with any network's footage of the "wanted dead or alive" culprits: Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Mullah Omar.

Then the camera moves on to anchors reporting that bin Laden was cornered at Tora Bora, picked up on cell-phone intercepts commanding the surrounded 2,000 Al Qaeda troops, but that U.S. commanders were allowing mercenary Pashtuns to lead the fighting and Pakistanis to seal the backside border. Next, news headlines blare that Special Forces and key CIA operatives were prematurely pulled out of Afghanistan to prepare for the war on Iraq. The last visual is of Bush momentarily forced at a March 2002 press conference to discuss bin Laden: "I just don't spend that much time on him, to be honest with ya."

. . .

With all its metered focus groups, the Kerry campaign remains blind to the core weakness of the Bush campaign. It is not Iraq, still a 50-50 proposition with American voters. The economy is backdrop when life-and-death fear grips us. It is the abject failure of the Bush team to make America safer—either by corralling the killers or raising the defenses.

. . .

Does anyone doubt that if Al Gore was in the White House and had the same record on bin Laden, he would be the drumbeat of the perpetually riveted, on-message, Republican campaign?

The central portion of the argument invokes the 9/11 Commission Report as an itemization of the Bush administration's failures and urges that it be made part of a big stick with which to club Bush and his minions.

The final paragraph begins . . .

The only one who can insinuate the real threat, and our lack of response to it, at the core of the American presidential debate is the man who has the most to gain by doing so. No fear of an October surprise should stop John Kerry - if it happens, he loses anyway. [Emphasis added]

Kerry has shown that when the going gets tough he can get going. When threatened in the primaries this year he found the voice and the ability to connect with Democrats. He is similarly threatened in this national election and the question is whether he can connect with the voters nationwide. If there really is 10% of the electorate undecided that suggests that two weeks after the Repub convention and six weeks after the Dem convention, neither Bush nor Kerry has connected with the "undecideds," particularly Kerry in making the election a referendum on the Bush 43 administration. Bottom line: Kerry has nothing to lose in going full-bore at the Bush record at this juncture. He has not pulled the undecideds in with a campaign of not offending anyone. It's getting close to crunch-time and nailing the Bush failures to the media door may yet make this referendum on BushCo a "Reformation" of national direction.