Inside Politics

Kerry’s strategy

John Kerry’s presidential campaign believes it is playing “rope-a-dope” with President Bush, Ryan Lizza writes in the New Republic.

While the Bush campaign has been unleashing a series of negative ads against Mr. Kerry, hoping to define him early in the race, the Democrat has spent much of his time raising money, Mr. Lizza observed.

“But instead of spending this money as it came in, the Kerry campaign made a decision to absorb Bush’s blows and to rely on the effects of the [independent groups known as] 527s and the negative news from Richard Clarke, Iraq, and the 9/11 commission,” Mr. Lizza said.

“This decision may be remembered as the most brilliant move of the campaign or the one that cost Kerry the presidency. It is a large-scale version of rope-a-dope — allow your opponent to unload his most powerful punches as you hunker down and bide your time, waiting to unload in the next round, once the other guy has spent himself. If it works, it will partly be because Bush was hit with a blizzard of bad news that overlapped precisely with his anti-Kerry advertising schedule.”

The union label

“A basic fact of Democratic Party politics is that you look for the union label before buying any service or good. So it should come as no surprise that unions representing airline workers are miffed that John Kerry’s campaign is using a nonunion campaign jet,” Paul Bedard writes in the Washington Whispers column of U.S. News & World Report.

“But labor insiders tell us that it’s not the senator’s fault. Commercial carriers, it seems, can’t supply what he needs, largely because of costs. Paul Hallisay, political director of the Air Line Pilots Association, says he has even contacted airline CEOs to help, but no luck yet.

“’The Kerry campaign has done everything they can do to secure a union airline,’ he says. Hallisay, whose union is likely to endorse Kerry next month, concedes that no union label is a problem, especially for the AFL-CIO. ’We would like to see him flying a union carrier, but we’re workers and we’re not management and we cannot dictate procurement policy to the airlines,’ he says.

“Then there’s the problem with the charter broker Kerry uses. It’s Air Charter Team, which brags that ’our most notable client was U.S. President George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign.’”

They’re not laughing

Democrats in Colorado are furious about a joke made by a spokeswoman for Republican Senate hopeful Pete Coors.

The dispute started when the New York Times inadvertently published a photo of Mr. Coors above a story about a KKK member who murdered a black sharecropper. The Times published a correction Saturday.

Cinamon Watson, spokeswoman for Mr. Coors, said the error was “so outrageous it’s kind of funny.”

“It could have been worse,” she said. “Pete could have been identified as John Kerry.”

Chris Gates, chairman of the Colorado Democratic Party, demanded an apology. He said Democrats are “out there campaigning positively on the issues, and the Republicans can’t help but resort to the lowest level of insult and name-calling.”

Mr. Coors, head of the Coors brewing empire, is seeking the Republican nomination to fill the seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who is retiring.

Finding a message

“They say that John Kerry has the entire Democratic establishment, and even some outliers, in his corner,” Sarah Wildman writes in the American Prospect, a liberal journal of politics.

“’I personally have never seen the Democratic Party more united,’ says one party strategist. ’As in ever.’ Swearing that the intraparty squabbling of the last decade is over, allegiance to the candidate has come from all corners,” the writer said.

“But ’party unity’ doesn’t equal ’defined candidate.’ And at the beginning of April, as this issue went to press, Kerry’s message had yet to be firmly articulated. ’It’s up to the campaign to make choices — clear choices — so that the campaign is not a themeless pudding,’ says another top Democratic strategist. ’No one wants to rerun the Gore campaign.’

“Kerry has his work cut out for him. His party is most deeply divided on the very questions that will dominate the 2004 election: foreign and economic policy. He’ll need to try to satisfy both wings enough to keep them engaged in his campaign while at the same time coming up with a unified message that reaches crucial independents.

“So far he’s kept a tenuous hold on the party, but his message is still patchy, generally promoting a multilateralist foreign policy and a hard line on deficit reduction. In both arenas, he’s got to find a coherent ideology, and present it with force, if his bid to trump George W. Bush is to succeed.”

History lesson

“The Democratic candidate’s spouse refuses to disclose tax returns. Republicans seize the issue, asking what the spouse is hiding. The New York Times calls for full disclosure. Distracted by the controversy, the candidate is on the defensive. The spouse eventually relents and agrees to release five years’ worth of tax returns, but only after the candidate’s campaign has been damaged,” Matthew Continetti writes in the Weekly Standard.

“Sound familiar? Yes, John Kerry’s wife has refused to make her tax returns public, and her decision has caused some controversy. But she’s not the spouse in the example above. That would be John A. Zaccaro, husband of then-New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1984. And if the Kerry campaign doesn’t learn from the historical record, it risks its own John Zaccaro problem,” Mr. Continetti said.

Strafing Specter

An organization of airline pilots is targeting Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican, for having opposed a law that allows the arming of pilots against terrorists.

Mr. Specter, who is battling Rep. Patrick J. Toomey for the Senate nomination in tomorrow’s Republican primary, was one of the few senators who opposed the Federal Flight Deck Officer Program, which was approved 87-6 and signed into law as part of the Homeland Security Bill in 2002.

The Airline Pilots Security Alliance said its 40,000 members have been alerted to Mr. Specter’s stance toward the program.

“This common sense security measure was supported by liberal Democrats like Sen. Barbara Boxer, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. John Kerry, but we couldn’t count on the support of Arlen Specter,” said Bob Lambert, former APSA president and Pennsylvania resident.

“You would expect that those officials representing Pennsylvania, the site of one of the devastating September 11th attacks, would be more responsive to the security needs of the American people,” he said.

APSA was formed by pilots from every major American airline in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.

• Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/636-3285 or gpierce@washingtontimes.com.