Bush Campaign Cranks Up Attack Ads on Kerry

President Bush began his television advertising campaign this year as an heir to Ronald Reagan, with images of flag-raising patriotism that harked back to the 40th president’s “Morning in America” commercials of 20 years ago.

But Bush quickly shifted tactics in response to political challenges Reagan never faced. He reduced his positive TV spots to nearly a whisper and cranked up the volume on a series of slashing attacks on his Democratic challenger.

In essence, he labeled Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts an anti-Reagan, accusing him of a vision that amounted to “Twilight in America.”

New data on the TV ad wars, compiled for The Times and covering the three months of advertising by Bush, Kerry and a coalition of liberal groups, illustrate the unusual intensity of the president’s assault. The information also shows the extent of Kerry’s effort to neutralize those attacks with a massive barrage of his own, mostly upbeat TV messages.

The Bush and Kerry TV ads are continuing most of this week even as other campaign activities stop while the nation memorializes Reagan after his death Saturday. Both sides plan to suspend their advertising on Friday, a national day of mourning for Reagan.

The former president’s legacy remains a matter of intense dispute between liberals and conservatives. But retrospectives are reminding many voters of his masterly use of television to project an infectious optimism.

To varying degrees, both Bush and Kerry are vying this year to position themselves as messengers of hope in a world shaken by terrorism. But analysts say Bush’s TV messages have been, to some extent, hemmed in by events: the ongoing bloodshed in Iraq, a somewhat bumpy economic record, Kerry’s easy dominance in the usually fractious Democratic primaries.

Even Bush’s early positive ads, while echoing some of the themes of Reagan’s, also showed footage of firefighters with a fallen comrade at ground zero in Manhattan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes. In short, 2004 is not 1984.

“It’s hard to see how Bush would re-create Reagan in ’84 because he doesn’t have in place most of the conditions to do that kind of campaign,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Instead, Jamieson compares Bush’s TV spots to those run by his father’s presidential campaigns -- hard-hitting, controversial and, in some cases, misleading.

Strategists for the Bush and Kerry campaigns agree that the race so far has largely been about defining the Democrat. In part, that is because the nation is closely split and opinions about Bush are firm among most voters -- pro and con. Kerry is less well-known.

“Our ability to affect [Bush’s] image is limited,” said Matthew Dowd, the reelection campaign’s top strategist. “Most incumbents, especially this one, are fairly well-defined.... What you want to do is have your communications have an effect on wherever the largest number of ‘soft’ voters are. In this case, that was Kerry, and it continues to be Kerry.”

From early March through Saturday, the Bush campaign produced 17 commercials that together have run an estimated 70,000 times on local broadcasts in the campaign’s most closely contested states and on national cable TV, according to TNSMI/Campaign Media Analysis Group, a nonpartisan company based in Virginia. About 70% of the spots were critical of Kerry.

The latest Bush attack on Kerry, a 30-second spot that premiered Monday, is titled “Pessimism” and chides the senator’s frequent citations of the Great Depression when describing the nation’s economy. “Pessimism never created a job,” a narrator remarks over a full-screen picture of a dour-looking Kerry shrouded by a computer-generated white fog. Bush, in the ad, declares himself an optimist.

By contrast, Kerry’s current ads show him smiling against various backdrops of American flags and make no mention of Bush. “We’re the can-do people,” Kerry declares in one spot, titled “Optimists.”

Among the Bush attacks on Kerry were assertions that the senator supported higher taxes 350 times, planned “at least $900 billion” in tax increases in his first 100 days as president and opposed various weapon systems the administration deems vital to the war on terror. Each of those claims has been denied by Kerry and questioned by independent fact checkers. They all echo lines of attack that President George H.W. Bush made in TV ads against Democrats Michael S. Dukakis in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 1992.

Kerry, in the last three months, aired 10 spots that cumulatively appeared about 56,000 times, according to the media analysis group. Roughly 75% of the spots delivered messages focused on Kerry or his agenda; just one-quarter mentioned Bush.

One of Kerry’s ads stated Bush had said exporting U.S. jobs overseas “makes sense” -- an assertion denied by the Bush campaign and criticized as misleading by independent analysts.

Kerry attacked Bush in several other ads during the primary season. And in recent months he has benefited from millions of dollars worth of anti-Bush commercials run by groups that operate separately from the Democrat’s campaign and the national party.

It remains unclear how the ads are affecting the electorate.

The National Annenberg Election Survey, affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, reported last week that 47% of voters surveyed recently in 20 battleground states viewed the president favorably and 41% unfavorably, with 12% neutral. For Kerry, the results were 40% favorable and 33% unfavorable, and 22% neutral. Those results were nearly identical to what the survey found in the beginning of March when the general election TV ads began.

So far, Bush, Kerry and other groups have spent close to $150 million in privately raised funds on TV ads. That matches the budgets both candidates will have for all aspects of their campaigns after their party conventions: about $75 million each in public funding.

“There’s no historical playbook [for this year’s ad campaign]; they’re writing it right now,” said Evan Tracey, chief operating officer of the media analysis group.