MORE LIKE A SOCCER TEAM? OUCH!:

Q & A: Coaching Team Kerry: This week in the magazine, Ken Auletta writes about Robert Shrum, John Kerry’s senior adviser, and whether he’s up to the job of taking on Bush. Here, with The New Yorker’s Matt Dellinger, Auletta discusses Kerry, his team, and the role of the media in the Presidential race. (The New Yorker, 2004-09-13)

MATT DELLINGER: How has the Kerry campaign performed, in your opinion, and what has Bob Shrum’s role been?

KEN AULETTA: Shrum’s brilliant strategy in the primary season a year ago was that, in the post-9/11 world, the public would tire of negative campaigning, and that Kerry was the only candidate who had the potential to unite all these Democratic parties, and the only candidate, or one of the only candidates, with a war record that would potentially immunize him against charges that he was soft on defense or too liberal. He fought back those people in the Kerry campaign who wanted to attack Howard Dean, who wanted to go after him more aggressively, saying that if they did that they’d diminish Kerry’s stature, and they would polarize the Party and make it tougher for Kerry to emerge as the winner. He was proved right in that strategic choice. But where he’s probably wrong, I think, is that he’s done what generals often do: he’s repeated the same strategy for one war without realizing there’s a different war. When the Swift-boat attacks came, in early August, the Kerry campaign waited before fully responding to them. Shrum’s philosophy was that, post-9/11, people didn’t have the kind of tolerance for negative personal attacks. That has been proved false, because Kerry’s poll numbers, as they related to that topic, dropped. I think the Kerry camp misunderstood the nature of the modern campaign, where you have the Internet dovetailing with twenty-four-hour cable news, creating this kind of echo chamber.

You wrote a piece earlier this year about how the Bush White House is famously tight-lipped, more so than any Administration in recent memory. Is that kind of discipline true of Bush’s campaign, too?

Well, it’s interesting. The discipline that I saw while I was working on the piece I wrote in January, which was called “Fortress Bush,” was that they stay on message, they don’t leak, and they don’t believe they have to talk to the press. That actually is changing some. All the discipline and talking from the same message points or choir book is still there. But actually, by contrast, the Bush campaign was, in some ways, more open to me in answering questions than the Kerry campaign was. For instance, I asked the Kerry campaign how many employees they had. They refused to answer, like it was a state secret, and the Bush campaign was totally open about it. It was quite stunning. I think that the Bush people are very shrewd politically. I’m not saying that a lot of the Kerry people are not, but the Bush people understood that if they continued with Fortress Bush going into a Presidential campaign, if they were not more accessible to the press—whom they need now, but didn’t in the first three years of Bush’s Presidency—they would be hurt by it, and people would be talking about the secretive Bush White House. So they tried to change that story line; if you ask the Bush people now how many real volunteers they have, they answer exactly. It’s like pulling teeth to get that out of the Kerry campaign.

Your article raised a question about the structure of these campaigns. In the Bush campaign, it seems as though Karl Rove is the general. In the Kerry campaign, you have a campaign manager, media consultants, different spokespeople, the communications director, senior advisers, speechwriters. Is Kerry’s campaign more like a soccer team than like a football team? Is there no hierarchy?

The Kerry campaign has a lot of talented people, including Bob Shrum. But the difference that pops out at you when you look at both campaigns is that the Bush campaign has a final authority, and that’s Karl Rove. Now, there are other important advisers around Bush—political advisers; Mark McKinnon, who handles the media; Karen Hughes, who travels with Bush; Matthew Dowd, who is called chief strategist. Karl Rove is the boss, and he has a meeting every weekend at his home with these people. He signs off on everything. But in the Kerry campaign it’s much more of a committee. Shrum is probably the preëminent political adviser to him—that’s the case in this current piece—but he’s got a lot of other people now: John Sasso and Joe Lockhart, and Shrum’s partners, and Mary Beth Cahill, the campaign manager, and a lot of other people. There is no one person who has to sign off on everything. You could argue that Mary Beth Cahill does, but her forte is much more in operations than in strategy. She’s pretty much the campaign manager, and she did a brilliant job after they turned that campaign around last fall. But they don’t have the kind of hierarchy that the Bush campaign does, and every time they make a decision it is by committee.

Can you say that Kerry has taken the high road and acted more Presidential?

Well, that was the argument for doing it. The argument was that the public would not have patience for that kind of negative personal campaigning. That was Shrum’s argument, and the polls suggest that he was wrong. So far.

The failure of Democrats to challenge each other at all during their primaries--to "go negative"--left them with a candidate who, though they thought he looked good on paper, was completely untested and who crumbled quickly when he was. Whatever else conservatives may think of John McCain, he made George W. Bush a much better campaigner than he would otherwise have been. Meanwhile, there's pretty little indication that the Deaniacs back Mr. Kerry with any enthusiasm, so what did Democrats really gain by having a coronation rather than a fight for their nomination?

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 13, 2004 11:47 AM