This is really good stuff. From the Kerry-Edwards Blog:
Posted by Mike at July 23, 2004 06:03 PM | TrackBack
George Bush has been saying he's adopting a gentler approach to campaigning--he's not "gonna spend most of my time attacking my opponent – I’ve got too much good to talk about.” In response, the Democratic National Committee Chair Terry McAuliffe has sent the following letter to his Republican counterpart, Ed Gillespie, the Chair of the Republican National Committee.Dear Ed,
After hearing your Presidential nominee say yesterday that he will not engage nor apparently condone any negative attacks on John Kerry, I wanted to extend my congratulations to you and the Republican National Committee. It certainly is never easy to make a 180 degree strategy change in the middle of a campaign. And I have to admit it takes a lot of guts to publicly admit that waging the most negative campaign in history and spending $80 million dollars to vilify John Kerry with unfounded attacks was the wrong strategy to adopt.
Since we sort of keep track of the negative tactics the RNC and the Bush Cheney campaign have engaged in (hard to catch them all, but those nasty ones tend to make an impression) I thought I would submit a gentle reminder of some remains of your old, abandoned strategy that you will want to clean up so as not to distract from all the “good” things you have to talk about.• Get new talking points to all your surrogates so they know there is “too much good” to talk about now, and no more time should be wasted on attacking John Kerry and John Edwards. Better get Research on the hunt to find some “good” stuff.
• Stop throwing money down the negative ad drain on spots that focus completely on attacking John Kerry and offer no Bush vision or agenda.
• Go ahead and close your “war room” office in Boston, and abandon your plans to lob attacks at Democrats and John Kerry during our Convention.
• Dismantle large chunks of your website and take down the so-called “games” that in reality just take cheap shots at John Kerry.
We at the DNC are very excited to see where this new strategy takes you guys. We can’t wait for that one ad you manage to string together with positive material, and of course we are expecting much shorter stump speeches, and maybe even some speechless talking heads! Cheers to your new strategy, and good luck in this brave new endeavor.
Sincerely,
Terry R. McAuliffe
Chairman
Democratic National Committee