THE VETS ATTACK

The attack of the Swift Boat vets did not catch the Kerry campaign by surprise, not entirely at least. Kerry's operatives had worried from the beginning that some right-wing group would try to use his old Vietnam antiwar speeches against him. In the summer of 2003 the Kerry campaign had quietly made some inquiries with C-Span, asking the cable network not to release old videotapes of Kerry as an angry young vet fulminating about war crimes and atrocities. Portions of his sometimes overwrought testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971 could be twisted into an attack ad, the Kerryites feared. They were told not to worry: the rules prohibited the use of the tapes for political advertising. (When the Swift Boat vets made ads attacking Kerry with images from his 1971 testimony, they used a voice-over, an actor reading Kerry's words.)

In August, when the Swift Boat vets scheduled a press conference at the National Press Club, the Kerry campaign dispatched Gen. Wesley Clark to hold a counter-press conference. At the last minute the Swifties canceled. A cheer went up at Kerry-Edwards headquarters on 15th Street in Washington.

The cheers were premature. The Swift Boat ads--a first round charging that Kerry had lied to win his medals, then a second batch accusing him of betraying his mates by calling them war criminals--were misleading, but they were very effective. The Kerry high command failed to see the potential for damage until it was too late.

To respond to the ads would be to dignify them, argued both Bob Shrum and Mary Beth Cahill. Mostly the ads were stirring up the Republican true believers, not winning over the "persuadables," the undecided voters. At least that's what most of Kerry's advisers wanted to believe. It would be a mistake for him to hit back; the persuadables don't like negative campaigning. Better to float above it all.

But Kerry's chief pollster, Mark Mellman, wasn't so sure. He could see that the Swift Boat ads were having an impact--not much at the very beginning, but soon a measurable dent in Kerry's support. The old-fashioned mainstream press was ignoring the claims of the Swifties, but on Fox News, the "fair and balanced" cable network whose viewership was rough 80 percent pro-Bush, the Swifties were getting plenty of air time. And not just on Fox. Other cable networks, possibly trying to catch up with their flag-waving (and higher-rated) competitor, had jumped into the fray. The Swifties had bought only a few hundred thousand dollars' worth of ads, but each played over and over--free--on the cable channels, CNN and MSNBC as well as Fox. The Swift Boat charges were the source of constant debate in the blogosphere, the new online world of bloggers, the modern-day Internet pamphleteers whose screeds were widely read--especially by the young bookers and producers who set the agenda on cable TV.

With all this churning in the new media, the story was bound to spill out into the undecided electorate. Mellman could see it in the numbers. So, too, could Kerry's old campaign manager, Jim Jordan. As an adviser to America Coming Together, he saw lots of polling. He could see that in West Virginia, a key battleground state, 65 percent of voters told one survey that they had seen the group's first ad, which was impossible--but they had clearly heard about it. A fairly small slice--16 percent--said the ad made them feel less favorable to Kerry. Jordan knew that the real number was higher. People don't like to admit that they're influenced by propaganda.