The Kerry Campaign and the Dinosaur Elite Media do not understand the compression of the news cycle that the Blogosphere and the New Media represent
I think the Kerry campaign is puzzled by what is happening to it. They remind me of a 60+ year old former CEO I was talking to last year. He didn’t know how to use email, and he had no intention of doing so. He quoted Ted Turner: “I get my email from my female.” He was a decade out-of-touch.
It seem to me that precisely the same disorientation is going on at the Kerry campaign. It was not that long ago that the SwiftBoatVets story would have gone nowhere. The Washington Post and the New York Times sat on it for two weeks, after all, hoping it would go away. As Jonah Goldberg reports: Alison Mitchell, the New York Times deputy national editor, admitted in Editor and Publisher, “I’m not sure that in an era of no-cable television we would even have looked into” the SwiftBoatVets story.
Even Alison Mitchell doesn’t get it. The Swifties’ story, like l’affaire Lott, is a blogosphere story, not primarily a cable story. So if the NYT is one or two technology generations behind in understanding the story, how on earth are Bob Shrum and Mary Beth Cahill supposed to understand what’s going on?
And understand it they do not. This from CNN:
NEW YORK (CNN) — Democratic leaders, increasingly concerned that John Kerry’s presidential campaign is adrift, are urging the presidential nominee to make changes in his staff before Labor Day, according to some party sources. If not, said one party strategist, “it could be too late.” Sources say major changes could come at the campaign’s highest level.
The concern, according to these sources, is that Kerry has failed to effectively respond to attacks from Republicans and criticism of his military service in Vietnam, particular ads from a group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth….
“We don’t have a Carville or a Begala,” said a senior Kerry official, referring to Democratic strategists James Carville and Paul Begala, who masterminded Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign. “We can’t mimic what happened in 1992.”
Earth to Kerry campaign: wake up, it’s not 1992. Your problem is not a communications strategy problem, it’s a veracity problem. You can’t make the story go away by sending out spinmeisters, and by making soothing noises to elite newspaper editors. As I wrote yesterday, Instapundit alone in a week has the circulation of the daily New York Times and the Washington Post. Drudge gets 52 million hits a week, while the nightly news has 30 million TV’s on. Rush and Hannity between them have 30 million listeners, and there is a phalanx of dozens behind them. Finally, the Powerline/Star Tribune war illustrates precisely that it is now impossible to keep stories like the SwiftBoatVets v. Kerry out of the MSM.
All the campaign staff shake-ups, communications strategy revisions, and extra advisors in the world do no good, when the media agenda is no longer the sole property of the media wing of the Gang of 500, as ABC’s The Note (which also said that this was Kerry’s race to lose on August 11) calls them.
John Kerry missed his big chance today to put this whole thing behind him at the American Legion. He didn’t do so, and in part that is because his campaign does not yet comprehend the nature of the problem.