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	About-faces Republicans who voted for Bush in 2000 tell why they changed their minds JENNIFER LEON, RELIGIOUS-STUDIES STUDENT It’s almost like a bully. A bully in school, they beat you up, they don’t tell you why. They don’t need to tell you why, because they’re a bully! You don’t just hope they’ll go away. You have to stand up to them. Our president just feels like he’s unstoppable. He feels like he can do anything he wants. There’s a lot of people in this country who don’t know what they can do to stop this. A lot of people have given up on the voting system. But you can’t. You just can’t give up. WILLIAM HARROP, AMBASSADOR TO ISRAEL UNDER GEORGE H.W. BUSH I thought that voting for Bush would do the country better, but I turned out to be wrong. We have problems with weapons of mass destruction. We have problems with terrorism. We have environmental issues. They can only be addressed through countries working together and through the United States providing that leadership. This administration is not very good at listening. It’s the first administration in history that conducts foreign policy without diplomacy. It’s not working, and it’s not going to work. DEBORAH WOOD, LIFELONG REPUBLICAN Why did I vote for George Bush? Because that’s the way that I was raised. You’re raised a Republican, you vote Republican. Don’t question. You’re going to vote for your party because that’s your team. You just do it. The last four years have been an awakening for me. It’s not a game. I really and truly believe that our country and that our lives are at stake because of what George Bush has done. LEE BUTTRILL, SERGEANT, USMC, AND IRAQ-WAR VETERAN We will serve with the best interest of this country. We will go to war if we need to. We will do whatever it takes to protect this country because we love it so much. But with that comes the obligation to the government of, just don’t abuse it. Don’t make what we do a waste. Or don’t put our lives in jeopardy if there’s not a really good reason. That wasn’t a proper use of American troops. It wasn’t a proper use of my life and of my friends’ lives or the Marines who I’ve seen die around me. It’s not a proper use. WILLIE RIOS, LIFELONG REPUBLICAN By losing me, they lost a guy who knocks on doors. By losing me, they lost a guy who makes the phone calls. By losing me, they also lost a guy who puts a sign in front of his house. Because of their arrogance they lost my trust, and if you’re arrogant and you lose somebody’s trust, that’s something you can never get back. The Republican Party has lost the trust of a lot of their soldiers. That’s why me, a lifelong Republican, is going to vote for John Kerry.

Q: Also, if the Kerry campaign had run an ad like the one you suggested, you can argue that they would have at least been able to engage his opposition to the war on their own terms. They would have had control of how that message was delivered.

A: That is correct. I was involved in this unexpected irony, because as I continued work on The Fog of War, its relevance to what was going on in the world today became more and more apparent — if you like, the metaphorical connections between Vietnam and Iraq. It seems to me, if Kerry had come out and said, "I fought against the war and I fought for the war. This is not flip-flopping. This is a person coming to understand more fully what is at stake here, and a refusal to waste American lives for a mistaken policy" — Kerry can be as forceful as he likes about the war on terrorism. [Voice rises] But he also has to be forceful about telling people that the war on terrorism is not being fought! It’s not being fought the right way, and it may not be being fought at all. Someone dropped the ball here, and it’s the president of the United States. And that Kerry is a person willing to fight, and he’s a person willing to fight against fighting for the wrong things. I believe that the American people would buy it. Instead, I feel this vacuum. I feel that what made this guy a hero has been lost! He is a hero! [Laughs] And it’s not because of the three Purple Hearts or the Silver Star. That’s fine. It’s because of other things.

The other thing that distresses me is selling Vietnam as World War II. Vietnam, excuse me, is not World War II. It’s not just a "band of brothers." It’s a war that for almost all of the people involved — and for all of the Americans who lived through that period of time — is this moral cloud. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the right or the left or the center; people who lived through it all have misgivings about it. You have some people who feel that the war shouldn’t have been prosecuted at all, and other people feel that the war should have been prosecuted more vigorously, but almost everyone feels that it was a problematic war. And to pretend otherwise — I think a number of things happen. Kerry’s real strength is ignored, and no real coherent picture of the candidate emerges. Sure, he voted for the [2003 Iraq] war — he voted for the war because he felt that it was his responsibility to give the president a free hand to put as much pressure as he possibly could on Iraq. I think that the problem is, at the center of the campaign, this refusal to present Kerry as who he is, as if somehow that risk cannot be taken. But in fact not taking that risk has been a far greater risk, in my view.

I had asked [close Kerry adviser Bob] Shrum repeatedly to interview Kerry. The original idea was, let’s do Americans, and then let me shoot Kerry the same way, so by that very fact alone he becomes a man of the people. Also, getting Kerry to speak extemporaneously and cutting it in a way that is not just this rehearsed speech would do him an enormous amount of good. If the perception is that he is this robotic presence on screen — that’s part of what I do. I make people look natural, real, believable, spontaneous, et cetera.

Q: When did you first propose this to Shrum?

A: My producer Julie Ahlberg and I started in March. We started first talking to people at the Media Fund, and then we went from the Media Fund to the Democratic National Committee, and we went from the DNC to the Kerry campaign itself. This was in the period preceding the convention, and no one was willing to pull the trigger and to give us money to shoot any of this material. There was talk about my shooting Kerry. No one ever said no, by the way, but no one ever said yes. There would be these conference calls, endless discussion. The feeling I had was of this bureaucracy that could just simply not make decisions.

Also, I was in favor of creating nontraditional political ads. I think that a lot of the ads are so pro forma — they’re so expected that they are not terribly effective. You have to come up with new approaches. Everybody talks about the "Daisy" ad in the 1964 presidential campaign [a Lyndon Johnson spot that graphically depicted a nuclear attack]. Everybody knows what perfunctory advertising is, and people know what innovative and cutting-edge advertising is, and there’s no reason why advertising in a political campaign has to be the way it is.

Q: Where would you file the windsurfing ad the GOP did?

A: The GOP is very good at a certain kind of food-throwing ad. They go for innuendo. But they’re ads! To me, you want to create ads that make people think — that don’t necessarily just say the expected in the expected way. There was an essay by Schopenhauer that I’m very fond of, called "The Art of Controversy," in which he talks about how to win an argument. He says [that] there’s two ways to win an argument: there’s logic and dialectic. Now, anybody knows you can’t win an argument through logic, so let’s pass on quickly to dialectic. And then he proceeds to give you some 30-plus ways to win an argument any way you can. For example, after someone has completely discredited your argument and shown you to be a fool, you look directly into their eyes and say, "You know, I’m really glad you’ve come around to my way of thinking." [Laughs] The idea is that in any kind of persuasion, logic is not necessarily the strongest tool in your arsenal.

Q: And President Bush is a mass persuader who doesn’t really traffic in logic or convincing facts.

A: Yes. And to me, you’re trying to create ideas in the strongest possible way you can. What’s strong about these real-people ads is not necessarily the logical arguments that they’re providing, although in some instances they are logical arguments. What’s interesting to me is that they are real Americans, and they’re actually thinking about stuff. For people who want to say that we have an electorate that doesn’t think, this is an answer to that. This is an electorate that does think, and is concerned. And it’s valuable to hear these people express themselves. Not because they’re involved in some meaningless theatrics or performance — they actually feel this stuff.

I made it very clear [to the Kerry campaign] that I was willing to work for free. As it turns out, you can’t work for free under election-law guidelines, but it was never an issue of money. It was an issue of really trying to contribute something. I still want to interview Kerry. I kept saying, "Give me Kerry. I don’t need Kerry for all that long. Give me Kerry for two or three hours. I’ll go wherever you need me to go." I have a joke — the joke was, if I can humanize Robert McNamara, I can humanize anybody. It’s what I do. If you know somebody who can get me in there this week —

Q: If I did, I’d tell you.

A: I’m ready to go. I’m your guy.

Adam Reilly can be reached at areilly[a]phx.com