PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS have windows. These are periods of a few days, sometimes several weeks, in which the interest of voters is piqued and they take a serious look at the candidates. The first window of the Bush-Kerry race came after John Kerry locked up the Democratic nomination on Super Tuesday, March2. There will be more windows: during and after the party conventions, around the presidential debates, and at other times when events intervene. Kerry will need these windows. The first window was a downer for him. My explanation: Bush’s negative ads stung, but Kerry’s biggest problem was that swing voters found him stiff and unlikable.
Start with the polls. A Gallup/USA Today/CNN poll had Kerry leading 52 to 44 percent among likely voters just after Super Tuesday. Six weeks later, Bush had jumped ahead 51 to 46 percent. The Gallup numbers are virtually the same with or without Ralph Nader in the race. The ABC News-Washington Post poll showed a similar reversal, from a Kerry lead of 48 to 44 percent to a Bush advantage of 48 to 43 percent.
The head-to-head results weren’t the worst of it for Kerry. “In early March, riding high off his primary victories, Kerry led in public trust to handle eight issues out of eleven,” said ABC polling analyst Gary Langer. Kerry led (outside the margin of error) on the economy, health insurance, education, Social Security, deficit, taxes, jobs, and prescription drugs. “Today Kerry leads only in trust to handle health care, and by just 6 points, compared with a 20-point advantage last month.” In other words, Kerry collapsed across the board. This means, to me anyway, that it’s not an issue or two that’s hurting Kerry. It’s something more fundamental, like the man himself, his style, his manner of speaking, his public presence.
A number of Republicans and a few Democrats I’m not at liberty to name have jumped to the same conclusion. A senior Republican familiar with focus groups that looked at clips of Kerry said these descriptions came up: cold fish, aloof, condescending, liberal, boring, panderer, willing to say anything. Of course those weren’t the only descriptions. Some were favorable: served his country, attractive, tall. Women, more than men, saw favorable traits in Kerry. Republican national chairman Ed Gillespie says this of Kerry’s decline: “He doesn’t wear well. The more John Kerry is out there, the better we are.”
Gillespie’s assessment can be discounted. Given his position, what else would he say? But a Washington financial consultant with ties to both Democrats and Republicans told his clients that private state polls show voters aren’t warming up to Kerry. The more exposure Kerry has on the retail level, the more his poll numbers swing negative, the consultant said. He said Kerry’s problem may not be fatal if he adjusts his campaign style.
The Bush campaign’s TV ads criticizing Kerry have also played a role in his tumble. Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg found in focus groups that “negative perceptions driven by the media dominate the positive ones.” Greenberg’s group, Democracy Corps, conducted focus groups in the suburbs of Orlando, Florida, Columbus, Ohio, Portland, Oregon, and Washington, D.C. “The messages in Bush’s negative ads against Kerry had penetrated voters’ thinking,” Greenberg said. “A dominant attitude was that Kerry changes his position on issues and tells people what they want to hear [and] he will also raise their taxes.”
Susan Page of USA Today discovered in two focus groups in Missouri that with the ads the Bush campaign was “achieving its early goal” of defining Kerry negatively. “Voters who know little else about the Massachusetts senator are echoing Bush’s ads,” Page wrote. The Bush campaign has spent more than $40 million on ads in the 18 states that figure to be the most closely contested. Bush aides argue that Democrats have been attacking Bush just as much, when the cost of TV spots run by independent groups is added to what the Kerry campaign and Democratic National Committee have spent.
What has puzzled the political community about Kerry’s dip is that it’s come during a period of bad news for Bush. Violence and American casualties in Iraq have grown in recent weeks, and members of the 9/11 Commission have suggested the Bush administration could have prevented the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Meanwhile, media accounts of the new book by Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, have stressed parts unfavorable to the president. On balance, however, the book portrays Bush as an effective wartime leader.
The conventional interpretation is that somehow, through a mysterious alchemy of the public’s manner of reaching opinions, Bush was aided by the subject matter under discussion. When the focus is on Iraq or terrorism, Bush is said to gain because he’s seen as having credibility on those issues. You know, he’s tough and strong and relentless. I don’t buy this. The notion that Bush gains from being pilloried on the right topics doesn’t pass the common sense test.
The truth is Bush is more likable than Kerry. And his ads have been soft-hitting but clever and pointed–not heavy-handed as some Bush allies feared they would be. All this doesn’t add up to an assured Bush victory on November 2, however, far from it. The much-touted wrong track number, 57 percent, indicates reelection trouble for Bush. Bush remains highly vulnerable, though not as vulnerable as his father was in 1992 or Jimmy Carter was in 1980. But in those elections, the challengers, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, were political powerhouses who had the added benefit of enormous charm and likability. This is a benefit Kerry will have to get along without, or at least wait for the next window.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
