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Interview von PRJ-Redakteur Wolfgang Reineke, Heidelberg und PRJ- Korrespondent Bernd Bühler, Paris mit Cameron Kerry, Massachusetts/USA Mr. Kerry is a member of the international law firm Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Glovsky & Popeo, P.C. He practices at the intersection of litigation and regulation, where he has been called on to solve legal problems in the regulation of cable television and communications. In addition, Mr. Kerry has been an Adjunct Professor of Telecommunications Law at Suffolk Law School and has published and lectured articles on communications law and litigation. During 2003 and 2004, Mr. Kerry reduced his practice to take on several roles as a senior advisor and surrogate for the Democratic Presidential campaign. He remains active in civic and political affairs. He received his B.A. from Harvard College, and his J.D. from Boston College Law School. 1. What fascinates you about election campaigns? Most of all, the passion of ideas in action. I love debate about ideas; it is part of why I became a lawyer. And I love that passion as people bring it to politics. It brings together an extraordinary range of people who share a common values and beliefs and go through an intense experience together. Most of my enduring friendships in life are people I have been through a campaign with. And working in campaigns has exposed me to people and communities I never would have known otherwise. In 2004, I was in 29 states and got to see America in ways few people ever do. 2. You have advised your brother in all his political campaigns. Is family the better advisor? In some ways, yes. You need professionals in campaigns, but you also need people who know the candidate intimately, understand the candidate deeply, and whose loyalty is entirely to the candidate. Sometimes a professional operative can do that. Karl Rove is an example. But too many professionals are hired guns who are more interested in promoting themselves or other interests and for whom the candidate is simply a commodity. 3. What is the most important lesson you took away from advising your brother's presidential campaign in 2004? Having a clear, simple, forceful, emotional message. It is something conservatives are better at not just in the United States but elsewhere. I had the opportunity to observe the presidential election in France this past spring, and it was evident that Nicholas Sarkozy had a much clearer, more direct message than did Ségolène Royal. The left tends to think much more in programs and complexity, and values like gentleness and tolerance tend to soften message. The Bush campaign succeeded in appealing to people’s fears and getting key voters to believe the Republicans would do a better job of keeping them safe. Political opinion research is operates far too much at the verbal and intellectual levels and fails to get at emotions. The result is communications about programs and a lot of words. I think product marketers understand a lot more about the non-verbal, visceral things that motivate buying decisions than political marketers understand about what moves people to vote. 4. What is more useful: the positioning through topics or the negative personalisation of the competitor? I believe issue positioning is important because I believe that politics and governing are about important substantive issues. Negative campaigning is not the opposite of issue positioning. After all, a competitor’s policy positions can be the basis of negative campaigning both unfair and fair. But emotions like fear and hope cut across perceptions of candidates’ personal character, and these cannot be shaped by policy alone. “Negative personalisation” succeeds because it operates on this nonverbal level. The Swift Boat Veterans attacks on my brother succeeded because they became an attack on his character -- not simply on his heroism or service, but on his ability to defend himself and, by implication, his ability to defend others. 5. How can one battle negative campaigning as your brother had to against the Swift Boat Veterans? The basic rule of rapid response is to respond in the same medium in the same news cycle. The Kerry campaign did that, except that it did so through surrogates -- crew members on my brother’s Swift Boat and others -- instead of John Kerry in person, and it did not do so through television advertising. The mistake was not to recognize this as a attack on the critical front, an attack John Kerry’s character and strength, and thus not to answer in person sooner, and not to answer at all to the significant number of swing voters who get their political information from television advertising and entertainment and not even from television news. 6. Does fairness give positive results? In the long run, yes. George Bush and the Republicans in Congress are paying a price now for playing fast and loose. But it got them through the elections of 2002 and 2004, if barely. It goes back to what Abraham Lincoln famously said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” 7. What will the future of election campaigning look like? It’s back to the future. I am struck by how little the fundamentals change. To go back to Abraham Lincoln, not long ago I read the book Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, about Lincoln as a politician. One of my favourite parts is a quote from a Whig Party campaign manual that Lincoln wrote instructing county captains “to procure from the poll-books a separate list for each Precinct” of voters and then divide the list “into Sections of ten who reside most convenient to each other,” with each section captain assigned to “see each man of His Section face to face, and procure his pledge … [to] vote as early on the day as possible.” Campaigns are still about the same things: identifying the voters, communicating with voters and to identify your supporters and get additional supporters, and getting supporters to the polls. And raising the funds to enable these things. The techniques change but the fundamentals are the same. 8. What role will the internet play in the future? It has a profound impact on politics. Much of the attention has been on the amount of money raised on-line and on blogs, but the organizational impact has been at least as great. It allows distributive campaigning in identifying and contacting voters, and the organizational efficiency it permits enlarges the battlefield in both geography as well as scope. It puts citizens back in the middle and diminishes hierarchies both because it allows more level organizational structures and equalizes access to information. The informational aspect is equally important. Inside information is no longer the exclusive province of Washington insiders. Anyone can be insider by clicking on the Drudge Report, or DailyKos, or the ABC Political Note, or RealClearPolitics.com no matter where you are located. This kind of instant information not only changes access to information, it also accelerates the news cycle to warp speed and diffuses distribution through networks of networks. We have gone from one or two news cycles a day with newspapers and three monolithic national television networks, to hourly cycles with cable news, to instantaneous news with internet diffusing through networks of 9. Is online community building indispensable? It depends what you mean by community building. A lot of the on-line community building we have seen in the political world has consisted of supporters talking to themselves. We saw a lot of that in the Howard Dean campaign and I noticed it in the Ségolène Royal campaign. That serves little purpose. But community building also enabled Howard Dean and Barack Obama to build up national lists almost instantaneously. There’s no more vital tool than a supporters list, and that’s something that used to take years. Used effectively to channel feedback, the two-way communication can be a useful tool. 10. How effective are blogs for mobilization? It’s about much more than the blogs. They are the most visible aspect of a political phenomenon -- the netroots, the network of online activists who get political information via the internet and use the internet as a means of political expression. The blogs are one important source of that information and a crossroads or exchange where online activists can express themselves via comments and posts, and by joining in collective activity. For example, in the 2006 election, various blogs joined together to enlist netroots activists behind particular candidates and help launch the candidacies of successful candidate who weren’t given much a chance by conventional Washington wisdom. The blogs themselves are important in the same way traditional news media are important, and individual bloggers are as important as most columnists or reporters. DailyKos has more readers than most daily newspapers. They can be more influential because many of them have the liberty to be openly partisan. Much marketing is an effort to reach and enlist “influentials,” people who influence the purchasing or voting behaviour of others. Research by the Pew Center in 2004 indicated that over 70 percent of online activists are influentials. Blog are one important way or reaching them. On-line advertising is another. 11. Get out the vote: What is important in the last 100 hours? It’s not the last 100 hours that are important; it’s the first 100 hours. The Republicans won Ohio in 2004 -- and with it the Presidency -- because they started prepare their vaunted 72- hour program right after the 2000 election.

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