Wednesday, March 02, 2005
By Brad Bannon
In the same way that high school football players can learn a lot about the game by watching the pros play in the Super Bowl, local political activists should be able to learn a lot about campaigns by watching the players in the presidential race.
By the same token, the people who work in presidential races can easily forget the basic rules of politics they learned when they started out as local political activists. In fact if you examine closely the inside workings of the Kerry campaign, as the editors of Newsweek did in the new book, ‘Election 2004’, it is clear that the people who called the shots for the Democratic presidential candidate made several basic mistakes they could have avoided if they had remembered what they learned in Campaign 101 back in the day.
John Kerry had the opportunity to beat George W. Bush. During the presidential campaign, a majority of American voters felt that the country was heading in the wrong direction and faulted the President for his handling of the economy and Iraq. Voters were searching for an alternative to re-electing the President but the Democratic candidate did not run a good enough campaign to take advantage of the political vacuum.
These are some of things that the Kerry campaign commanders should have learned in basic training. Don’t forget these rules when you run your own campaign:
1. Communicate a clear and consistent message
2. Persuade, don’t educate
3. Respond quickly to attacks
4. Run a tight ship with a clear chain of command
LEARN MORE AFTER THE JUMP…
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