E-Mail This Article to a Friend The elephant watch: video distribution BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

WEDNESDAY, July 28, 2004 -- Yesterday it was the photo. Today it is the video that adjoined the podium at the 10 a.m. Republican National Committee daily rebuttal press conference. The RNC released an 11-minute "documentary" this morning, in which John Kerry’s alleged-flip-flopping on the Iraq War is catalogued through clips of the Senator, which pop up from date boxes on a calendar. The video documentary is being distributed today through emails to eight million people in the RNC’s database.

The RNC has been showing the video to Republican bigwigs behind closed doors for at least a week, according to their press people. Why didn’t they release it sooner? "That’s what Wednesday was for," says RNC spokesperson Scott Hogenson.

This would seem to validate my thesis described here yesterday, that these RNC press conferences are not about rebuttal, and are not intended for the mainstream media. They are to provide the day’s fodder for right-wing talk hosts. Tuesday was for the NASA photo -- incidentally, when a reporter asked at today’s press conference about allegations that the photo was leaked, the response from Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss did not include a denial, just an expression of horror that somebody would speak ill of NASA.

Senator Norm Coleman, who was shown the video in "the war room" Tuesday morning, according to his press secretary, let the cat out of the bag at Tuesday morning’s RNC press conference, when he digressed into the following:

"I had a chance to look at a video before I came in. It’s an eleven-minute video, which lays out things that Senator Kerry -- it’s not commentators talking about Senator Kerry, it’s not Norm Coleman talking about Senator Kerry, it’s Senator Kerry -- his comments about the war.... He starts out: ‘We’ve got to get rid of Saddam Hussein, he represents a threat, we gotta act decisively." And then there’s a progression there, at about the time that Howard Dean starts to rise in the Democratic primary. All of a sudden he now starts to become from a pro-war candidate, an anti-war candidate.... It’s a great video.... So whatever you [Gillespie] can do to get that out, John Kerry’s words, let’s have his words out there, and then I think people should make a choice."

Gillespie, laughing, said "I will do my darnedest."

Sure enough, 24 hours later I was in the same room watching said video. To emphasize the flip-flop message, Senators Chambliss and Mitch McConnell followed with comments about "[Kerry’s] continual flip-flop in the Senate" and "the stunning inconsistency in [Kerry’s] voting record," respectively.

The documentary was produced by Laura Crawford, of Crawford Creative in Texas. Crawford has produced advertising for Bush since his 1998 gubernatorial campaign. (She was with Maverick Media when her coworker Juanita Yvette Lozano surreptitiously mailed a Bush debate tape and strategy materials to an Al Gore advisor during the 2000 campaign, a charge to which Lozano ultimately pled guilty.) Back then, Crawford claimed to have a distaste for the sort of thing she just created. "The other bad experience for me was when we contemplated running negative ads. I didn’t like the idea because we weren’t a negative campaign," Crawford is quoted in a December 2000 Southwestern University alumni profile article.

Again, please let me know if the talkers are all about the video today (dbernstein[a]phx.com), and I promise to go back tomorrow to find out what Thursday is for.