Considering how bad of a speaker and campaigner he was how the hell did Dubya win any of his elections??????
George W. Bush was a poor speaker but he was a GREAT retail politician. Bush's team would carve out three or four policies and Bush was laser-focused on message discipline. He might say some goofy things or throw some malapropisms in there along the way, but he stayed on message, got his points across and he connected with the people who supported him. He wasn't as qualified as his father (or pretty much any other President since World War II besides Trump), but he wasn't as aloof as his father or brother. In fact, he was even somewhat likable and had a charm to him, especially in small groups. Just ask Michelle Obama! Because of his name he was always going to raise tons of money from the big business types who always supported Republicans, but he also raised a ton of money through small fundraisers in 1999/2000 because he went everywhere in New Hampshire and Iowa and South Carolina and people genuinely liked him. People also tend to forget that Bush pretty clearly won two of the three debates against Al Gore in 2000. And there were such low expectations for him in the 2004 debates against John Kerry that holding his own against Kerry was equivalent to a victory.
The problem people had with running against George W. Bush is that people always underestimated him (or, in Bush's words, "misunderestimated" him). Bush was smarter than people thought he was and he worked harder than people expected him to, and most people didn't realize that until he'd served two terms and started two wars. I remember Bill Clinton making those points. Clinton said, "Bush really connects. It's a mistake to underestimate him," and told Al Gore's campaign managers in 2000 to be careful because "compassionate conservatism" was a "genius slogan." Clinton had one of the most brilliant political minds in American history and he said, "I always thought Bush was a good politician. I never thought he was dumb. There's a difference between not knowing certain things and being dumb. But I never bought that. Not ever, not for a minute. I never believed it."
Spooky Stories at Camp Quarantine: The Tale of the Swift Boat
Campfire story (n): a ritual where we all sit under the vast darkness of a midnight sky and tell ourselves a story about the big, scary monster that isn’t lurking just out of sight. You know. Probably.
2004 was a dark and stormy year.
The world pulsed with the still-raw trauma of the September 11 attacks. It was an anxious year of denial and bargaining, a desperate search for the loophole after Sirius Black fell through the veil. The twentieth century was dying and the third millennium was struggling to be born. It was the time of the Swift Boat.
The Usurper Bush the Lesser was in a tough place. If you were paying attention, you could see the signs that his stolen presidency was going to end in disaster and disgrace. And it was an election year, so people were about to start paying attention. So he took a lesson from his dear old Dad: he would unleash the hired help to unload a relentless fusillade of lies against his opponent.
Lying was an important part of the strategy because he was up against a strong challenger. John Kerry of Massachusetts was one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate; he was also a tall, fit, well-educated, impeccably diplomatic, Irish Catholic patrician who didn’t challenge anyone’s idea of what a president looked like. He talked like Barack Obama and looked like Mitt Romney. He was allowed to get pneumonia without anyone losing their goddamn minds, that’s how white and manly he was.
Most critically, though, he seemed to have almost unique standing to campaign against the Bush administration’s spectacular failure in Iraq. At the time, Republicans had – cynically, but effectively – made themselves synonymous with The Troops. Anyone who questioned their lies or challenged their reckless foreign policy was axiomatically discredited as “hating the troops.” Kerry, however, was A Troop, with a track record of telling the hard truth about an unjustified war. He had earned five medals in Vietnam and then used that moral authority to call for an end to the bloodshed. His service gave him a way to connect to a massive group of voters for whom the war had been a generational trauma – and it was a strong contrast to Bush, who had used his wealth and family connections to dodge the draft.
Enter the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. This was a group of Vietnam veterans who, in mid-2004, collectively realized that Kerry had lied about his heroism, hoodwinked the military into giving him an award, not once but five times, and successfully covered up his perfidy for thirty-odd years, despite having been scrutinized by Massachusetts voters and press in half a dozen statewide elections. This fantastical tale was largely spun by Jerome Corsi, now known for spreading birtherism (the racist conspiracy theory that former President Obama was not an American citizen), narrowly escaping prosecution by special prosecutor Robert Mueller, and, most recently, hawking Trump’s favorite quack coronavirus cure. They were, naturally, bankrolled by obscenely wealthy Bush supporters.
Maybe these Swift boat veterans were purposefully lying; maybe they were sad old men whose trauma was manipulated by right-wing propagandists. But they did what they were supposed to do. Kerry’s campaign lost its footing and never quite got it back. Instead of being able to challenge Bush’s lies about about the war in Iraq that was happening at the time, he was stuck on the defensive against Bush’s lies about the Vietnam war, which had ended decades before. In one retrospectively critical moment of priming the conservative base for Donald “I like the people who weren’t captured” Trump, delegates at the Republican convention wore silly purple heart bandaids to mock the wounds Kerry received in combat.
We know how that ended. Bush won the popular vote by around 2%, which back in the day actually used to be enough to win the election. Thus, ISIS rose and New Orleans drowned.
The thing is, the bad guys don’t actually forget the past as easily as they hope you do. When a play works, they run it again. When a play almost works, they run it again but better. When a play doesn’t immediately work, it still rallies the right-wing base and softens up the general public for their authoritarian politics of lies and abuse, so they keep it in their back pocket. So we should probably try to understand the specific elements that made the Swift boat propaganda campaign particularly effective.
Imagine you’re an amoral Republican candidate and I’m your mercenary sociopath of a campaign manager. I’ve just said, “look, you’re getting your ass kicked, we’re going to have to swiftboat your opponent” and you’re like “what’s a swiftboat? Write me a memo!” So, here it is. (You may be thinking “but you don’t know anything about me, and I’d never be a Republican candidate for anything!” Lesson the first: it doesn’t matter, because your swiftboat attack has nothing to do with you.)
A swiftboat attack is bullshit. We like to think the truth is the most effective political weapon, but what if there really aren’t any disqualifying skeletons in your opponent’s closet? If you’re going to sabotage them anyway, that’s kind of liberating. After all, true stories depend on facts, which can be too boring to stick with people, and don’t have made-to-spec story arcs that conveniently fit with your campaign’s themes. Plus, if you’re relying on some actual truth that exists in the universe, you’re running the risk that there’s some mitigating factor out there, some witness who can give different context or a wronged party who can say they’ve buried the hatchet. Worse, your opponent already knows about stuff they actually did. Campaigns do a ton of background research into their own candidates, specifically so that they’re prepared for a predictable attack. They can’t prepare themselves for literally anything your army of political strategists can imagine, so you will always have the element of surprise.
Swiftboating isn’t an attack on your opponent’s policy. It’s an accusation that they’ve violated some taboo. There’s some sticky detail that people won’t quite be able to forget, even if they are exposed to the eventual debunking. The story, whatever it is, should be most upsetting to a large, important block of voters who are inclined to support your opponent.
The allegations don’t come from you, your campaign, or even a sympathetic journalist. They’re laundered through apparent private citizens who are part of a group of people that the general public tends to find sympathetic. This makes your story seem more credible to at first glance, wrong-foots anyone who wants to defend your opponent against the allegations, and lets you get credit for insincerely denouncing the attack while continuing to benefit from it.
This is a dick-swinging exercise, so be shameless. You’re not just putting your opponent in their place by showing you can get away with lying about them, and maddeningly rejecting responsibility for your lies. You’re showing off an authoritarian contempt for truth itself.
You need a relentless multimedia assault, impossible for people to miss. You might have to bully legitimate media into teaching the controversy, but they’re wimps. You’re not trying to convince most people that this specific story is true, you’re just trying to plant some seeds of doubt, and to sap time and enthusiasm from your opponent and their supporters. Make the election as miserable as possible and voters will reward you for it.
The most important thing is that you want your swiftboat attack to be on some area where you have a real liability and your opponent has a real strength. You want them to have to defend themselves on something they should get to use as a selling point. Even better, you neutralize a totally fair criticism of yourself – no matter how accurate they are or how ridiculous you sound, the press will dismiss it as “both sides point fingers.”
Kerry’s campaign gets used as some kind of object lesson about the futility of primary voters trying to pick a candidate they think will win: “Kerry was supposed to be electable and Kerry lost, so there.” (You’ve probably heard the even stupider cover version, “if Hillary was so electable, why’d she let herself get targeted by all those criminal conspiracies, HMMMM?”) This is 20/20 hindsight spiked with the just world fallacy. John Kerry seemed like a good candidate because he was, in fact, a good candidate, which is why he did significantly better expected, and he came pretty close to beating the odds. If there’s a lesson here, maybe it’s that swiftboating can keep a clearly electable candidate from being elected.
That’s a real buzzkill because it means we can’t treat the primaries like a round of playoffs where we root for the most exciting player and then kick back to watch the finals. But what it lacks in self-gratification, it makes up for with agency. If a swiftboat attack is supposed to affect how people respond to a candidate, then people get to choose whether or not we play along.
Trump, a textbook narcissist who instinctively projects his infinite failings onto others, is almost a swiftboating savant. His campaign is being handled by the professional Republican operatives behind the original Swift Boat campaign. (Literally, some of the same guys.) So as we move into the general election, know that this is in their bag of tricks. If you start to hear alarming stories about presumptive Democratic nominee former Vice President Biden or any other prominent Democrats on the ballot …. give it the smell test, is all I’m saying.
it’s been brought to my attention that not everyone has seen the JibJab from the 2004 election cycle and i feel like that needs to be corrected bc it’s an important piece of political history
You answered a question recently about the presidents who actually saw combat while serving in the military and I'm just curious when was the last time that one of the presidential nominees was a bona fide war hero? George Bush Sr?
George H.W. Bush was definitely a decorated hero of World War II, but there have actually been three major party Presidential since Bush 41 who I think could/should be classified as war heroes -- and they all lost their Presidential campaigns.
The most recent was 2008 Republican Presidential nominee John McCain, who flew nearly two dozen bombing missions during the Vietnam War before being shot down and taken prisoner. McCain was a POW for nearly six years and faced such brutal torture during that time that he was permanently disabled to the point of being unable to raise his arms above shoulder-level for the rest of his life. And when the North Vietnamese learned that McCain's father was a powerful four-star Admiral who commanded American forces in the Pacific during the war, they offered to release McCain for propaganda purposes, but he refused to accept freedom while other Americans were still held as POWs. McCain's not only the most recent war hero to be nominated for the Presidency, but he's the most recent major party Presidential nominee to have any type of military service.
Despite the despicable lies of the "Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth", 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry was also a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War. Kerry was wounded in combat and awarded three Purple Hearts along with the Silver Star and the Bronze Star. Shortly after returning from Vietnam Kerry became an outspoken opponent of the war, which helped launch his political career.
Last but not least, the other major party Presidential nominee since George H.W. Bush who was a war hero was 1996 Republican nominee Bob Dole, who was so severely wounded during World War II that it took him YEARS to recover. As I once wrote:
Dole barely survived both World War II and the grueling attempts at rehabilitating his injuries afterward. And even then, Dole lost nearly all ability to use his right arm for the remainder of his long life (he died in 2021 at the age of 98) -- which is why he was almost always seen with a pen or a rolled up piece of paper in his right hand. Dole even has a pen in his hand in the official portrait commissioned to honor his service as U.S. Senate Majority Leader. Politicians spend a lot of time shaking hands, so Dole kept an item in his right hand at all times because he was physically unable to use it for anything else and it was a creative way to get people to shake his left hand instead.
