Change of Strategy
Reported by Eleanor - August 26, 2004 -
Studio B with Shepard Smith (Aug. 26, 3:00 p.m.) spent seven minutes on the smear vet story. The focus of the coverage with Jim Angle and Carl Cameron was that both sides benefit from 527's, and democrats benefit 10 times more. McCain joined the president in filing a lawsuit to stop the ads.
Cameron said that both sides are working with the 527's in terms of letting the campaigns know what's going on, but not coordinating. That's not illegal. There are smart partisan operatives on both sides. Shep said that we have problems like war and health care, and they're talking about things that happened when he was four years old. Cameron said the voters are asking why this is drowning out other issues.
Cameron continued by saying that Kerry is painting the president negatively, as misleading and deceptive. Angle came back with Kerry gave Viet Nam a "book length" treatment. The president did not embrace the swift boat story, and now he's taking action to curtail all but soft money. This will reign in or curtail those 527's.
Cameron ended this conversation by saying that Kerry made his biography Viet Nam, and the democrats are associating Iraq with Viet Nam. This is a war time election, and the Viet Nam story may be an indicator of what kind of commander-in-chief Kerry might be.
Comment: That last statement is true and very much to the point, but this month-long story does not address the difference between telling lies and telling the truth. Bush's current record, with the royal screw-up in Iraq, is one example from his record as a commander-in-chief. The other is his apparent absence when he was supposed to be on active duty in the National Guard in Alabama. The major shift in the focus of this story today, and the tremendous downsizing of its importance, in terms of the time devoted to it, point to a need for a change in democratic tactics as well. What is the documented record of both candidates during war time? Where is the AWOL story that shouldn't go away without written proof of Bush's whereabouts? The democrats cannot let this story die while the mud is still sticking to Kerry. Oh, I forgot. The "liberal media" tells just one side.
