The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008

After the denials, the affair story quickly faded, if only because there was no oxygen, in the form of new details, to feed it. The news organizations Drudge claimed were working on the story never published a word about the alleged facts of the accusation, only about Kerry's denials. But at least some damage had been done to Kerry's image, set off by whoever gave the initial tip to Drudge.

By March, with the nomination in hand but many scars to show for it, Kerry felt he had earned a vacation. The candidate and his wife decamped for a skiing holiday in Idaho. Drudge was still hovering: "Spring Break: Kerry Retreats to His Sun Valley Mansion for 5-Day Luxury Unwind." As Republicans delighted in emphasizing, the Kerrys between them owned five properties. Drudge highlighted the fruits of some excellent Republican research on Kerry's Idaho home, including reference to the size, value, and taxes on the "compound," and the detail that the "mansion's 'Great Room' is a 500 year old barn" imported from England and reconstructed on site. Several newspapers began reporting on the other lavish Kerry-Heinz homes as well.

If retreating to Sun Valley was a dubious choice, it was aggravated in the coming days. The athletic candidate was snowboarding when he collided with a Secret Service agent detailed to him and took a spill on the snow. A reporter and cameraman were there for the encounter. "I don't fall down," Kerry snapped defensively, when the reporter asked him what happened, and he called the agent a "son of a bitch."

Kerry had been in the Senate for twenty years and in public life for more than thirty, but he appeared not to appreciate the reality of a presidential candidate's life. While the New York Times put the snowboarding morsel far down in its story about how the weary candidate needed a rest, Drudge trumpeted it on his site, and added, based on his own quasi-reporting, that Kerry and the agent had clashed before. The Boston Globe picked up the baton and noted, "Republican operatives even circulated to reporters and party members news of Kerry's jab at his Secret Service escort," and quoted one GOP strategist as pronouncing the incident "perfect material showing that Kerry will say anything, and can't control what he says." Republican officeholders fanned the falmes. Weeks later, Republican congressman Jack Kingston of Georgia went to the House floor to give a speech about Kerry's five residences, listing the locations and prices of them all. "I will ask you, Mr. Speaker, how many guys do you know over 60 years old who know how to snowboard?" Kingston said. "I guess he bought five ski resorts to learn how. He wanted to flaunt it a little bit. But, to me, if you have a guy that age and he knows how to snowboard, he has not only too much money, but he has too much time on his hands as well."

As Kingston's remarks demonstrated, there were so many cartoon image themes available in the Republican toy chest that sometimes it was difficult for Kerry's opposition to choose which characteristic to mock. In the GOP conception, Kerry alternatively wore sandals (hippie), French loafers (mon dieu!), or flip-flops (enough said). And a negative Kerry theme, once floated, never really evaporated.

Eleven months after the New York Times got the Gallic ball rolling, a new round of the Jacques-ification of Kerry started up. In a March 15, 2004, story with a Paris dateline, the conservative-leaning New York Sun wrote that "the French are going wild for John Kerry." The line Drudge picked up was from the director of the French Center on the United States, Guillaume Parmentier, who described Kerry as having "a certain elegance." A few days later, an Associated Press story quoted Kerry's French cousin, Brice Lalonde, the mayor of St.-Briac-sur-Mer, the town where Kerry spent his boyhood summers, saying helpful things such as "John Kerry is incredibly American. He has absolutely nothing French about him."

Right around the same time, Kerry played into his opponents' hands by boasting of support he claimed to have from unnamed foreign leaders with whom he had met in New York (presumably some French among them). The Republican Party produced a video entitled John Kerry: International Man of Mystery. It was put on the Internet with the goal of earning free television news coverage, which it did, with its irresistible homage to the popular Austin Powers movies. By now, some Americans may have been convinced, Monsieur Lalonde's assessment notwithstanding, that there actually did seem something French about John Kerry.

Republicans also were quick to take advantage of Kerry's more blatant errors, most significantly when he declared at a West Virginia town meeting that he "was for" funding of the Iraq war "before he was against it," and when he decided to go windsurfing within camera view while vacationing on Nantucket, the graceful Massachusetts island where he and his wife owned a sumptuous multimillion-dollar oceanfront cottage. These two episodes, one about a serious matter and the other trivial, were cited by Bush aides as turning points in the election.

Kerry's opponents also leapt on his embrace of some Hollywood liberals who performed distinctly blue sets at a Radio City Music Hall fund-raiser he attended. President Bush and his campaign made Kerry pay over and over again for praising coarse-tongued entertainers as the "heart and soul of America" (a phrase highlighted on Drudge before it hit the newspapers and network TV). The line encroached on coverage of the selection of John Edwards as his running mate, which had occurred three days before.

The big controversies coupled with the petty images (John Kerry ordering a Philly cheesesteak with -- take a deep breath -- Swiss cheese; Teresa Heinz's barking at a conservative reporter to "shove it" on the eve of the Democratic convention; Kerry mispronouncing the name of the Green Bay Packers' fabled Lambeau Field) added up.

The stories about Kerry's vacation habits, his houses, his ties to Europe, his complexion, his hair, and all the rest had been deliberately promoted in order to exploit what Republicans long recognized as the candidate's greatest vulnerability: that he lived a life beyond the experience or even imagination of most of the people he hoped to lead.

The piece de résistance of the Freak Show in the 2004 campaign was taking Kerry's greatest asset, his military record in Vietnam, and transforming it into a liability.