DOWN 'N DIRTY

[Tigermike 3,044]

DOWN 'N DIRTY

John Podhoretz

October 19, 2004 -- NEGATIVE campaign ing works: People re spond to it, because in most elections your most realistic bet is to vote not for a candidate who represents your every yearning but for the lesser of two evils. But the Kerry-Edwards ticket is taking negative campaigning into uncharted territory.

Come with me on a trip through the last six days. Here's what the Democratic campaign has hammered home:

* Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter, who is (says Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill) "fair game" for discussion.

* President Bush is secretly planning to institute a draft.

* Bush is deliberately going to destroy Social Security in order - why else? - to enrich his fat-cat contributors.

* If you get the flu this winter, it will be George W. Bush's fault.

There's been enough speculation over the purpose of Kerry's gratuitous reference to Mary Cheney. Whatever purpose Kerry and his people thought it would serve, they got it wrong.

But what about the "draft" stuff? Nobody in America thinks a draft is a good or necessary idea. It's expensive and inefficient. The military doesn't want one because it's had glorious success with the all-volunteer force. The politicians don't want one because why would they want what neither the military nor the public want? There will be no draft. Period. And Kerry certainly knows it.

So you can only read this one way: The Kerry campaign is talking up this issue to try to convince college-age voters to turn out on Nov. 2 rather than stay in bed in their dorms, sleeping off their hangovers and zoning out to XBox. And to panic the mythical soccer moms whose supposed Democratic voting pattern helped lead Bill Cinton to victory in 1996.

The Social Security attack is more complex. The president does believe it is necessary to test out new ways to help Social Security funds grow - because if they don't, the system is going to melt down over the next two decades. His proposals are certainly fair game for criticism.

But it's a simple fact that candidates who don't talk about innovative ways to strengthen Social Security are the ones who are being dishonest and misleading. The current system is doomed, and everybody knows that too - including John Kerry.

And as for Bush's supposed responsibility for the production of flu vaccines, that attack (launched by John Edwards) would be comic were it not so slanderous. It is now the contention of the Democratic ticket that the president of the United States should be responsible for ensuring that a private company manufacturing flu vaccine in Liverpool, England, not screw it up.

You get the sense that if George W. Bush said it was sunny, John Kerry would rise in indignation to speak about how a 10 percent possibility of light rain proves that George W. Bush has not been honest with the American people.

Certainly, the Bush campaign has been pounding hard on Kerry as well - it spent $80 million to tag him with the flip-flop label. But there is a distinction to be drawn between the two candidates in their stump speeches and in their debate appearances.

The president spends a lot of time attacking the Kerry record. But he also devotes his attention to the positive accomplishments of his tenure - taking an aggressive approach in the War on Terror, creating the conditions for a historic free election in Afghanistan, using tax cuts to help bring the economy out of the recession into which it had plunged six weeks after he took office, pushing for education and Medicare reform.

Kerry has an agenda of sorts for the future, but he's mostly content to say he has "a plan" to fix things without spending much time or effort explaining what that "plan" is. And he almost never talks about his Senate record. Instead, he concentrates almost exclusively on the negative - hammering the president and his record.

The problem is that this approach gets stale. You can only say the same things over and over again for so long without running out of gas. That's why a successful campaign must balance the negative with the positive - must give people reason to vote for as well as reason to vote against.

John Kerry hasn't given people much reason to vote for him. He's betting his political future that 50.1 percent of the American people will cast a negative vote against George W. Bush.

The polls demonstrate he's not getting there. But he's gone too far accentuating the negative to stop now. Instead, he just keeps doubling his anti-Bush bet.

E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/32163.htm

[MDM4AU 336]

And as for Bush's supposed responsibility for the production of flu vaccines, that attack (launched by John Edwards) would be comic were it not so slanderous. It is now the contention of the Democratic ticket that the president of the United States should be responsible for ensuring that a private company manufacturing flu vaccine in Liverpool, England, not screw it up.

How pathetic!