1.         Tactical Dimension: A Public Narrative—Kerry Lied, Bush Smears

In the short term, Kerry has been hurt by the SBVT ads.  The lies of Rove & Co. have struck a glancing blow against his leadership credentials.  The Bush team has succeeded in moving the focus of the news off Bush and onto Kerry for the first time in many months.  Polling conducted before the Kerry counter-attack showed Bush eating into Kerry’s lead.  Bush has finally succeeded in moving the needle in his direction.

Bush also sought to pull out the old bully’s trick of provoking a response and then trying to act cool when the inevitable response comes.  Although the Kerry camp did play into Rove’s hands by complaining to the FEC, (“Mom! he’s over on my side of the car seat!”), and by staging the Max Cleland visit to Crawford, there is little worry the electorate will see the generally stolid Kerry as unbalanced.

But Kerry’s response also showed the Democrat’s determination to bring forth a new meme: Bush is a smear artiste.  This will have the longest-lasting effect of any aspect of the SBVT ads.

An added dimension was the “bitch slap” meme brought out by Josh Marshall.  The Kerry camp used the SBVT episode as a springboard to establish the democratic nominee’s cojones credentials. View Josh's Post here

Adding up the score indicates that Kerry lost 2 points to Bush’s one.  Kerry’s war credentials took a slight hit that may or may not have lasting impact in the minds of Americans, but SBVT’s ads have been clearly linked to the Bush campaign in the minds of a plurality of voters.  View the poll here (Warning Adobe requried).  This is the most important aspect of the Kerry attempt to turn the tables on the SBVT attacks.

2.         The Strategic Dimension: The Law of Diminishing Returns

But two steps forward, one step back is not enough for Bush.  With the right track/wrong track numbers showing the majority of the country believing that the country is on the wrong track, View Current Right/Track Wrong-Track Polling, the Bush Team must succeed in moving the needle much farther in his favor and fast.  These numbers are critical for an incumbent president and without serious movement, they spell doom in big letters for the President.  The Bush team must create a series of SBVT’s to bring Kerry down to where Bush is now. 

But the Kerry Camp’s response to SBVT made it highly unlikely that the Republicans will be able to unleash a series of more attack ads like this one.  Linking Bush to “smear” attacks makes new attacks much less likely. 

In short, Kerry’s team has sent Bush a strong message:  Your attacks will come at a price.  As the press has finally decided that its job is to report facts and not to allow lies to pose as opinions worthy of airing, the SBVT allegations have fallen apart.  The electorate and the press are unlikely to give another round of sleaze a second glance.  Bush will be forced to fight the election on grounds he would rather not: the actual state of the country.

These are hard times for the Fourth Estate.  It is an entity that currently seems bereft of any real mission save a corrosive song and dance cynicism that neither enlightens nor informs.  Frankly I’m not going to sugarcoat the past, but do you really think the Founding Fathers were hoping that the nation’s citizenry should not have the tools to decide their own fate or that of the nation as a whole?  I’ve watched with despair a long series of events in which the one entity we should count on to inform us seems wholly unprepared to handle even its most basic responsibilities, and even more disappointingly makes excuses for that lack of performance by often blaming the victims of its callous disregard.  Certainly we can say that there are some incredible reporters and columnists out there doing solid work but the exceptions don’t make the rule.  While watching what amounts to libel passed along as merely one man’s opinion by those who at least should know better, I thought I’d offer a series of suggestions to our much ballyhooed media elite… especially those stuck within the Beltway.

1.  Judge them by what they do, not by who they say they are:  We are often bombarded with personality pieces masquerading as actual analysis of the news of the day, and quite often reality seems to take a back seat to some sort of weird rote psychoanalysis put forth by journalists who are frankly not qualified to comment.  Depending on the subject, this kind of coverage rewards not only outright character assassination but also a very creepy cult of personality worship we used to associate with Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China, not American Democracy.  If you turn on the news and suddenly see George W. Bush spending his birthday swimming across the Rio Grande with his security entourage, don’t say that I didn’t warn you!  But then again, how different would that be from the most recent round of “Ask President Bush” campaign events or even that aircraft carrier stunt last year? 

Any journalist should know that public figures throughout time have always resorted to some form of carefully crafted image or façade to give them credibility or standing, on the other hand, your job is to neither blindly perpetuate that façade, nor is your job to applaud its cleverness when it is continually contradicted by the facts!  In fact, when a public figure’s actions contradict their image then they are fair game for criticism and they should not only be held to account, but under particularly egregious circumstances they should be held up to ridicule, if not contempt… and I’m not just talking about Britney Spears!

Hint:  A president who has a well crafted image as a heroic, tough guy straight-shooter but who has held fewer press conferences than any president since it became a conventional part of a president’s duty either 1.) has something to hide, 2.) cannot handle criticism, or 3.) is woefully unprepared to handle even the basic duties and expectations of the Presidency.  Better yet, if that same tough-guy president refuses to come before an investigative committee without his vice-president present, you have to question whether his reputation is well deserved or merely convenient.

 Another rule of thumb along the same lines:  If a public figure or organization does something that is so out of character that its too good to be true, don’t be afraid to be suspicious of their motives.  Recently Matthew Yglesias ridiculed the coverage of the Labor Department’s new overtime rules or more specifically the unchallenged motives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in supporting the measure.  Anyone knows that the Chamber of Commerce doesn’t go out of its way to praise regulations that hurt its members, in fact quite the opposite, so imagine my surprise when journalists couldn’t figure out which side had more credibility on the subject.

Hint:  If the #1 pro-business lobbying organization in the country says that the new rules will cost our members a bundle of money and we support it wholeheartedly, you really have to wonder if those rules are a going to benefit most workers at all.  Feel free to mention that instead of splitting the difference and suggesting that criticism from the AFL-CIO is merely shrill and in keeping with a rigid outdated organization…after all, didn’t they see that the Chamber of Commerce is making some sacrifices, too?

Our system of government rests on the principle that public officials need to be held to account for what they do, not who they are, and if you don’t understand the difference you might want to move on to a career in advertising because journalism should not be about touting the latest defective name-brand product to come along.

More later….

Welcome to The Iron Mouth. The Iron Mouth will be speaking daily. Topics you will hear the Mouth speak of may include politics, culture, religion, outsourcing, bail bondsmen, turncoats, anti-antidisestablishmentarianism, under use of punctuation, and others.

The Mouth starts as five friends, but the door is kept slightly ajar: three within the deep savage heart of the D.C Beltway, one perched aloft the glassy, reflective towers of nearby Baltimore, the last in Middle America. Of course, these friends don't always share the same point of view, though as friends they certainly try to get along.

The Iron Mouth is named after La Bouche de Fer, a journal published by the Cercle Social, a club founded by Abbe Claude Fauchet (1744-1793). Fauchet, a revolutionary priest, was a leader of the attack on the Bastille and styled himself the "Attorney General of the Truth" in the French Revolution. Viva.