Full Court Press Releases

By Amanda Griscom Little, Grist.org. Posted August 20, 2004.

Over the past few weeks of Presidential WrestleMania MMIV, the Bush campaign has fired off more than a dozen press releases about John Kerry's policies on energy, nuclear-waste storage, forest and water protections, and other environmental issues – a hodgepodge of smears, exaggerations, and obfuscations intended to besmirch Kerry's pro-environment reputation.

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, says the Bush campaign is responding to polls indicating that voters are taking the environment seriously in key battleground states.

"The polling in Nevada is showing that people are voting on the Yucca Mountain issue. The polling out of Arizona says voters are very concerned about forests and water; Wisconsin polls have shown that the mercury issue could hurt [the GOP]," he said.

Hence the Bush campaign's efforts to neutralize the environment as an election issue: "They know they can't persuade voters that Bush is good on the environment, so they're trying to create enough confusion about Kerry's record that people decide it can't be the issue that decides their vote," said Pope.

Kerry strategists agree. "The Bush campaign has got Kerry written all over it," said Roger Ballentine, a senior environmental strategist for the Kerry campaign. "From Day 1, the goal of the Bush campaign has not been to get voters to like their candidate and respect his record, but to get people to dislike John Kerry even though on this issue Kerry is widely thought to be the greenest candidate America has ever seen. They want people to go into the voter booth, hold their nose, and pick the lesser of two evils."

Bush campaign spokespeople failed to return repeated calls, but a quick glance at the George W. Bush campaign website confirms that Bush's strategy is Kerry-centric. The homepage is a montage of derisive cartoons and photographs of the opponent. Here's Kerry playing the "Flip-Flop Olympics," there's a "Kerry Gas Tax Calculator," which claims to compute how much a 50-cent-per-gallon gas tax would cost individuals (a tax, mind you, that Kerry has repeatedly said he has no intention of imposing). Not a single image of the president himself graces the page.

The Kerry website looks remarkably similar – photos of Kerry abound, only the depictions are more flattering. It has only a low-placed and somewhat defensive nod to Bush, saying, "The Bush-Cheney campaign is running one of the most negative and misleading campaigns ever."

Mud-Slinging Releases

A comparison of the two campaigns' press releases is even more telling. Thus far in the month of August, the Bush campaign has churned out 18 releases dealing with energy and the environment, nearly all of them roasting Kerry, with titles along the lines of "THE RAW DEAL: John Kerry: 'Brought to You by Special Interests.'"

The Kerry campaign, meanwhile, has put out a total of six releases on energy and the environment. While they all slam Bush's rollbacks, at least half of each is devoted to the Democratic candidate and his campaign promises. One representative headline: "Kerry Pledges to Make Decisions Based on Sound Science and Put Public Health and Safety First."

Most of the Bush team's environment-related releases rely on one of two tired claims – that Kerry is a flip-flopper, or that creating jobs and protecting the environment are incompatible goals. An Aug. 6 release charged that Kerry's plan to raise corporate average fuel-economy (CAFE) standards "will eliminate 104,000 jobs." It derided Kerry for supporting the McCain-Lieberman bill on global warming, asserting, "Climate Stewardship Act Is a Job Killer." And it accused the Democratic candidate of having "killed American jobs" because he didn't vote for the Bush energy plan.

These charges have, to put it delicately, little basis in fact. The 104,000 figure, for instance, was plucked from a brief and informal analysis commissioned by General Motors and drafted single-handedly and without peer review by a professor from Pennsylvania State University. Team Bush ignores the fact that higher CAFE standards have won support even from many members of the United Auto Workers union, who agree with more authoritative studies showing that tightening fuel-economy standards would in fact create jobs.

Amanda Griscom writes the Muckraker column for Grist Magazine.

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