Wolf D. Fuhrig

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The Flawed And Costly Campaign Of 2004

Regardless of whether I cast my vote for President Bush or Senator Kerry, I knew that neither candidate needed it. The election was going to be decided in the states where the totals were closest, such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, or Wisconsin. That also was the reason why neither Bush nor Kerry needed to campaign for the 21 electoral votes of the 12 million people of Illinois. It is a distortion of the democratic process when, for example, the Electoral College allows presidential candidates not to present themselves in person to the 65 million Americans in California, New York, and Illinois.

The candidates' tediously repetitious rallies in a dozen battle states did little to clarify their action plans for the next four years. Even before the verdict was in, the British Economist aptly described the campaign as a contest between "the incompetent and the incoherent." Instead of enlightening the electorate with clear explanations of their proposals and their rationales, both Bush and Kerry entertained--and increasingly bored--their audiences with escalating attacks on each other. Rarely has an incumbent president spent so much time attacking and ridiculing his challenger.

Too often most of the media focused upon polls, scandal-mongering, and spin rather than on the issues, certainly not in depth. A survey of pro-Bush voters, conducted by the University of Maryland, found that 72 percent still thought that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Bush supports the treaty banning land mines. 75 percent believed Vice President Chaney's unsubstantiated claim that Iraq was providing substantial support to Al Qaida.

Considering the extent of voter ignorance and gullibility, highly emotional rallies seemed the most promising method for generating support. The President certainly did not expect much political sophistication from his audiences.

With disarming naiveté, he insisted that military force could end the terrorists' threat, and by taking the war against them to Iraq, we would not need to fight them inside the U.S. He assured us that 75 percent of Osama bin Laden's fighters "have been brought to justice." Yet, nobody ever knew their numbers. Nor can anybody tell how many more Muslims might be joining terrorist cells as many more of them, particularly women and children, get killed and maimed.

Voters who expected Senator Kerry to offer more than an echo to the President's foreign adventures had to be badly disappointed. Like Bush, Kerry thought we could destroy the undiminished wave of anti-American terror by military means alone. He, too, failed to see the crying need for American initiatives to end the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and for convincing diplomatic moves to assure the Arabs that we are not threatening their sovereignty and way of life. While vowing to continue the President's hard line in the Middle East, Kerry tried in vain to convince the electorate that he could do it better.

Much of the Democrats' support for Kerry turned out to be a campaign to defeat Bush. "Repeal the President's tax cut for the wealthy," "End the President's unilateralism," and "Stop the President's assault on the environment," these slogans did not tell the voters what course of action Kerry could effectively pursue when faced with a Republican-controlled Congress.

Financially, the big winners of America's presidential election campaigns--the world's lengthiest--are the electronic media. The Bush-versus-Kerry contest yielded the networks $600 million from television advertisements alone. Altogether, the federal elections cost close to $4 billion, 30 percent more than four years ago.

In contrast to independent critics who owe their publishers no political allegiance--as this columnist!--, the networks' so-called "analysts" rarely exposed the spin and the lies by those whose campaign ads their employers ran--including Fox Television's Bill O'Reilly in his "no spin zone."

And so we learned again that presidential election campaigns are too much smoke and mirrors and that most of the media are dedicated first and foremost not to the public but to their owners.