The War Of The Flip Flops

(3 of 3)

"What hurts him are his own statements and the way he does this," says Bush campaign senior strategist Matthew Dowd. Whatever preconception voters may have about Kerry, he says, "is made much worse by what [Kerry does] than by anything we do about it." Dowd savors a comparison between Kerry and the Democratic nominee who preceded him. "What hurt Gore was this idea that he was political and he would weigh things and do them for political reasons," Dowd says. However politically motivated Bush's own U-turns may have been, his advisers are confident that the President is inoculated. "People are never going to believe that Bush is a flip-flopper," says Dowd. "Some may not agree with his policies, but they think he says what he means and does it."

Some Democrats disagree and have been threatening a counterattack. There are plenty of websites allied with the Democrats that lay out Bush's wandering record and rhetoric on matters small and very large. "The entire Bush record is one big flip-flop," says Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and an occasional adviser to the Kerry campaign. "He hasn't changed the tone in Washington; he's made it worse. He's been an ardent conservative, not a compassionate one. He hasn't been a reformer and hasn't delivered results." One soft spot exploited by Bush critics is that the President who promised fiscal discipline has added more than $1 trillion to the national debt.

Kerry's response to Bush is not so much that Bush shifts as that he lies, though Kerry won't say it quite that way. He calls this "the biggest say-one-thing-do-another Administration" ever, and points to the fine print of Bush's budgets to make his case. One ad, now being previewed on Kerry's website but likely to hit airwaves soon, is called "Keep Our Word" and contrasts video of Bush's pledges with details about his actions during his Administration. It features Bush vowing that "my economic-security plan can be summed up in one word jobs," and the screen flashes the words "2.9 million jobs lost." Bush is shown promising to "make health care affordable and available," and the screen flashes, "3.8 million more Americans lost health insurance." "On issue after issue," Kerry said in a speech in Nevada, "George W. Bush keeps saying one thing to the people, and then doing another big favor for the special interests."

The new Kerry ad aims to use Bush's claim to be a straight talker against him. But because a majority of voters still say they believe Bush is basically honest, Kerry's other play on the consistency front is to make his own faults a virtue, and Bush's virtues a fault. Kerry's allies talk about the sophistication of his thinking, all but drawing the contrast to a President they believe fixes on an idea and will not move off it even when the world around him transforms. "He stubbornly insists on tax cuts as he steadily loses jobs in this country," Kerry says on the stump. "He stubbornly refuses to allow the importation of drugs from Canada, while steadily the prices are going up. I think his stubborn leadership has led America steadily in the wrong direction," he says, winding up. "And that's why we're going to vote for change in November."

But, as the slippage of the past few weeks has shown, Kerry faces the added burden of defining himself for voters even as he tries to adjust their view of a President they have had three years to get to know. That's why we can expect to see a return of the ads that show Kerry in camouflage, that use his Vietnam experience to signal that he's a guy with the guts to make life-and-death decisions under fire. Beyond biography, the Kerry campaign hopes to use some high-fiber policy speeches one a week from now through May to tell voters about his values as much as his positions. That was the idea behind his recent speeches on energy and corporate taxes. If Kerry can seize the voters' imagination in this way, says a strategist, everything the Republicans want to make of his various statements on the campaign trail and the hiccups in his voting record won't matter. "People will know where he's coming from," says an adviser, "and those charges won't stick."

As the war of the flip-flops drags on, voters can run a consistency check of their own. Kerry's team will blast Bush for reversing himself on steel tariffs and then charge that he is too stubborn to change. The Bush machine will paint Kerry as an unreconstructed Massachusetts liberal, and then if he claims to be a centrist by citing his past statements challenging affirmative action and teacher tenure and promoting free trade, he'll be back in the Waffle House. But maybe voters won't care much. The only perfectly consistent man, Aldous Huxley mordantly noted, is a dead one, and we've yet to elect one of those.