From the Saturday New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/politics/campaign/21assess.html?hp
“… Mr. Kerry decided to respond this week by blaming Mr. Bush for what he described as a scurrilous attack, and by filing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Friday. His actions came after confronting considerable evidence that two weeks of largely unanswered attacks were taking their toll.
A CBS News poll found that support for Mr. Kerry among veterans has declined markedly since the convention, and some Democrats said they believed that the attacks had at the least slowed whatever momentum Mr. Kerry enjoyed after his convention.
The question now is whether his response came in time.
… Still, more than a few Democrats expressed surprise on Friday that a campaign that has made such a point of presenting itself as aggressive and fast-footed had let this story go on unattended for so long.
… “They made a strategic mistake,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said of Mr. Kerry’s campaign. “The ad has been largely effective because it wasn’t rebutted.”
… What they apparently failed to calculate was the extent that advertisements featuring other Vietnam veterans, speaking coolly and directly to the camera, would become the subject of television news shows. That was all the more so because the advertisements and the book were released in August, a slow month when news outlets are hungry for any kind of news.”
I’ve made several statements about this in the past few days. Upthread I said today:
“Kerry’s campaign seems professionally incompetent. Their errors of omission concerning the Cambodian issue are flat out unforgiveable. There is an SOP to follow in such matters. They didn’t.”
Three days ago in this thread I said:
http://www.rogerlsimon.com/mt-archives/2004/08/a_dinosaur_lumb.php#c7459
“I can’t emphasize enough that Kerry’s campaign is very inept. Sure it is stuck with El Dud as a candidate, but it could and should be doing better when disasters like this pop out.
1) They didn’t do “opposition research” on their own guy. The Cambodia story should not have been a surprise.
2) They didn’t hang a lantern on it.
… 5) No spin-doctoring, i.e., they let the only versions of this story be those propagated by their enemies.”
