Claire Conger

I knew immediately why Hillary put out her campaign ad Who Do you Want to Answer the Phone? when I watched the documentary So Goes the Nation, A True Story of how Elections Are Won . . . and Lost.

Ultimately it comes down to selling an image in a single repeating message. Hillary is copying Shrubby’s 2004 image, if not his repetition tactic.

So Goes the Nation covers Ohio’s part in the 2004 presidential election between Senator Kerry and incumbent George W (Shrubby) Bush.

It offers convincing reasons for Shrubby’s win:

1) Shrub skirted the issues and sold the image “You’re safe with me.” (Shrubby was smart enough to know that he could beat Gore in 2000 because Gore “doesn’t know who he is.” Image is everything.)

2) Shrub attacked Kerry.

3) Shrub played the religious morality card.

4) Shrub’s his workers surprised the Democrats by getting out the rural vote.

It offers convincing reasons for Kerry’s loss:

1) Kerry spoke to the issues, which are troublesome. But issues don’t provide image, and people tend to vote how they feel not what they think. Kerry lost despite the fact that most Americans agree with him.

2) Kerry didn’t fight back when he was attacked. He bought into the myth that mid-westerns vote against acrimonious candidates.

3) Kerry portrayed himself as young and hip with photo-opps snowboarding and riding a $5,000 bike. This just exacerbated his image as an East Coast elitist, an image that doesn’t sell in middle America.

4 ) Kerry’s people got out the urban black vote, but it wasn’t enough to counter the rural and religious.

The documentary covers fairness issues concerning Ohio’s then Secretary of State, J Kenneth Blackwell (who is black), specifically his handling of challenging voters at the polls (a traditional way to invalidate the black vote) and his decisions regarding provisional ballots (voting when you’re not on the pre-printed voter list—new, mostly black and student, registrants would be not on the list).

The film makers did not conclude that the outcome was changed by those decisions, but hints that it might have been by the differential supplying of voter precincts, also under the control of Ohio’s Secretary of State. Precincts in white areas are shown with no wait to vote. Precincts in black areas are shown with discouraging lines.

Not shown is Blackwell’s choice for tabulating the ballots: “the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the servers for the Republican National Committee, and the Bush White House, were also located.”*

Now that gives a voter reason to pause.

* according to Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman co-authors of How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008; read the full story from which I took this quote at fraudbusterbob.com