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Donkey watch
The Dems put the ZZZZ… in zinger
BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN
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MONDAY, AUGUST 30, 2004, NEW YORK -- The Democratic National Committee has a better space for its war room response effort than the Republicans had in Boston -- and why wouldn’t they? This is their town. They took offices and hung an enormous banner at an office building south of Madison Square Garden, in the fashion district -- an office already housing a plethora of lefty offices, including the Immigrant Coalition, the Welfare Law Center, the Free Expression Policy Project, and several unions. The Dems are also treating their press better; the briefing room is considerably bigger (although warm and overcrowded); they put out coffee, bagels and grapes; and they didn’t make us wear attack ads as press credentials. Unfortunately, they are also not nearly as entertaining as Ed Gillespie and the RNC circus. They came to Boston ready to give short, punchy presentations with jokes and gibes at the expense of John Kerry. DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe doesn’t have the same flair, by a long shot. First of all, he loaded the dais with 13 people, five of whom had speaking parts, and they droned on for nearly an hour. Their theme is pretty good, riffing on the infamous "Mission Accomplished" phrase and Bush’s recent acknowledgement that he had "miscalculated" on Iraq. Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack intoned that Bush has miscalculated on health care coverage, jobs and the economy, Iraq, energy independence, and so forth, all of which are "mission not accomplished." Former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak expounded on the same theme on foreign policy. International Association of Fire Fighters president Harold Schaitburger criticized Bush’s homeland security record with the same language. They showed three brief new TV ads using the phrases as well. That’s worth an A for staying on message, but boooooring. They spoke in soft monotone, reading scripts (the GOP for the most part spoke extemporaneously in Boston), and if they took a stab at humor it was not recognizable as such. I caught a group of four people dressed, for reasons not apparent to me, as a pageant queen, the Incredible Hulk, a cowboy, and something I couldn’t identify. They came out of a door marked "volunteer and non-war room staff this way," and scurried in great humor to the elevators. I’m not sure what they had to say about George Bush or John Kerry, but I was more inclined to listen to them than to the 13 people through the door marked "media this way."
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