Opposition Research Politics

The Atlantic - Reframing Candidates and Planting Stories

Kerry was clearly not Bossie's first choice of nominee. In his basement he proudly showed me dozens, perhaps hundreds, of boxes marked "HILLARY: WHITEWATER" or "HILLARY: TRAVELGATE." He called them the "Sierra Madre of Hillary oppo," regretfully adding that what could have been "ready to roll in twenty-four hours" will now have to wait until 2008.

Nevertheless, Bossie is applying the lessons he learned from the campaign-finance scandals of the 1990s to his research on Kerry—specifically, that financial investigations yield a valuable paper trail, hard documents being the gold standard of research.

The official storyline on Kerry has already begun to unfold—though not the one the Bush campaign originally put forward. After Kerry won the Iowa caucuses, the image of him the Republicans hoped to instill was, as one of them told The Washington Post in January, "Liberal, liberal, liberal." But over the next month or so Kerry seemed to float above criticism and to enjoy almost universally good press. The trouble was that the Republicans' original version of the man didn't mesh with the facts: Kerry supported welfare reform, NAFTA, and deficit reduction; his service in Vietnam, his friendship with Senator John McCain, and his fondness for duck hunting were hardly the stuff of liberal caricature. In the 2000 election, Barbara Comstock says, Gore was recast from stiff wonk to serial exaggerator because research showed it was a charge that would stick. "Al Gore kind of gave us the liar thing," she told me. "He had a problem with the truth, and that could be tied to bigger things and bigger issues."

So during the first week in March, President Bush himself instructed campaign officials to stop referring to Kerry as simply a "Massachusetts liberal." The new line is that Kerry is a flip-flopper with a downright reflexive habit of taking the most politically advantageous position. His nineteen-year voting record in the Senate has become fodder for the research files and daily opposition e-mails slipped to reporters.

The new mandate has a proven history. As The Boston Globe recently characterized this campaign, the idea is to portray Kerry as a "waffling Washington insider too aloof to connect with average Americans." If this has a familiar ring, perhaps that's because we've already heard it: the portrait Republican researchers are painting of John Kerry is the one they painted of Al Gore.