CABANA BOY CHRONICLES:

Kerry Life Story Will Be Focus of Big Ad Buy: John Kerry's campaign advertisements will run in 19 states through the end of the month at a cost of $27.5 million. (DAVID M. HALBFINGER and JIM RUTENBERG, 5/04/04, NY Times)

One of the 60-second advertisements also associates Mr. Kerry with Senator John McCain, a Republican popular with independents and swing voters, showing a picture of the two senators side-by-side and noting their cooperation with each other in accounting for Americans lost or taken prisoner in Vietnam.

The new advertising push — its magnitude possible because Mr. Kerry opted out of the public finance system — is in large measure Mr. Kerry's response to a two-month $60 million barrage of advertisements from President Bush, who spent the day traveling southern Michigan by bus.

Most of the Bush spots attacked Mr. Kerry as a political equivocator bent on raising taxes and soft on defense, an image that some Democrats and opinion polls suggested was beginning to take hold in voters' minds.

Mr. Kerry's aides said Monday that his advertisements would establish his leadership credentials, highlighting his decorated combat record in Vietnam. They also said the advertisements would position his campaign as more positive than that of Mr. Bush, who weeks ago shifted to nothing but attack commercials.

Mr. Kerry's aides asserted that the president's strategy was little more than to "destroy John Kerry," and that it had failed because the two men were still running neck and neck in the polls.

"While George Bush has spent $60 million to run negative ads," said Mary Beth Cahill, Mr. Kerry's campaign manager, "John Kerry is up with a stronger message that will define the themes of his presidency: `Together we can build a stronger America.' "

Mr. Bush's aides were dismissive of their opponent's effort to flesh out his biography. "I don't think the problem is that people haven't been introduced to Senator Kerry," said Matthew Dowd, a senior Bush election adviser. "I think the problem is they've been introduced to him in the last 60 to 90 days and they find his record and statements very troubling."

Mr. Dowd is wrong about this one. It's a mark of just how undisciplined the Kerry campaign is that they've wasted these two months when they should have been introducing their candidate, who most people still know little or nothing about. Instead, they seem to have believed that folks were paying attention during the Democratic primaries and/or that people had been following the Senator's career as avidly as he has.

Of course, the campaign is delusional if it thinks the biography helps. The three central facts of his life are that he's a Senator, that he led the opposition to the Vietnam War, and that he married well--none help.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 4, 2004 7:42 AM