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| Avery's
Campaign Journal Here’s a question for sweaty Republicans: Did the Bush campaign smear job/strategy to present John Kerry as a flip flopping, left-winging, wanking liberal work too well? Three campaign debates later, Yawn F. Kerry's presidential candidacy is no longer in the dumpster and The Bush campaign's ferocious advertising to depict him as a vacillating opportunist who has the magnetism of Elmer Fudd may have worked too well, say pollsters and strategists. By turning Kerry into a cartoon, the Bush campaign created such low expectations for the senator that he easily exceeded them in the debates. “I think voters were surprised when they saw a real man, not a cartoon,” said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster and male model, “His eyeballs didn’t shoot out, his head didn’t spin, his tongue didn’t roll out and drop to the floor, and his pants didn’t explode. No one was expecting this.” Instead, viewers saw a Kerry who, if not dazzling and able to shoot smoke out of his ears, was generally coherent and at times even forceful. And voters were surprised. “Id heard he was a cartoon, I was expecting a rabbit or a duck. But he looked like a real person to me,” said one amazed viewer. In the Washington Post poll, the number of respondents viewing Kerry favorably jumped 12 percentage points between early September and this week; in fact, many voters now view Kerry as a real human being. The number of people who think Kerry has taken a "clear stand" on separating himself from his cartoon image is up 10 percentage points in less than three weeks; although American all agree they would still prefer someone like Daffy Duck or even Sponge Bob Square Pants to run the country. “People thought he was a candidate who couldn't put one foot in front of the other and who was always shoving sticks of TNT into dog’s and cat’s mouths,” said pollster Andrew Kohut, who directs the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Kohut also said that Kerry benefited from low expectations of him set by Bush’s campaign. "Low expectations are a President’s wet dream,’ he added. According to pollster and male model, Fabrizio, Bush's mistake was switching in recent days away from portraying Kerry as a flip-flopper and toward describing him as a devoted liberal. "If you're going to take the wood to the guy, take the wood to the guy," Fabrizio said while making sexually explicit humping motions. Kerry strategist Tad Devine agrees that Bush, by turning Kerry into a cartoon, inadvertently helped him defy perceptions. "The relentlessly negative advertising created a caricature that was not true," Devine said. "When John Kerry showed up and wasn’t bouncing on a pogo stick or carry an Acme Exploding Kit, it completely undercut $100 million of Republican advertising.” That seems true for now, although Bush still has time to rebuild voters' doubts about Kerry. Asked about whether Kerry helped his chances in the debates, the president deflected the question and counseled patience. "The voters will decide that," he said. "Now please, be vewy, vewy qwiet. I’m hunting Democwats. Haw, haw, haw.”
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