Media Watchers Expect Anti-Bush Smear Leading Up to Election

by Bill Fancher and Jody Brown
September 10, 2004

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(AgapePress) - A media watchdog says while President Bush is currently doing well in the polls, it would be unwise to underestimate the ability of the mainstream liberal media to pull out all the stops in the waning weeks of the campaign. And one conservative political pundit is predicting the nation may well be entering what he describes as "the ugliest period in American politics in recent memory."

Recent polls have shown George W. Bush surging ahead of the Democratic challenger, John Kerry, since the Republican National Convention in New York City last week. According to the Washington Post - ABC News poll published today, the Republican incumbent has a solid nine-point lead (52 to 43 percent) over Kerry. And according to a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll earlier this week, Bush has similar leads in the key battleground states of Missouri and Ohio. Bush had trailed his Democratic rival in the Buckeye State before the GOP convention.

Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the Media Research Center in Virginia, attributes Bush's rise in the polls to a successful Republican convention and the continued inability of the Kerry campaign to effectively respond to the ads produced by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. But Graham says people should not forget what the liberal-leaning media did four years ago when it released a copy of a DUI citation (driving under the influence) given to George W. Bush 25 years earlier.

Tim Graham

"You cannot look at the 2000 election without realizing what the left-wing media can do at the last minute," Graham says. "The [media's handling of the] driving-under-the-influence scandal over the last weekend of the 2000 election is really the thing that threw [that] election into a tie."

How did the media handle the report about the two-decade-old citation? "The media ran around," Graham recalls. "And they not only played it up dramatically, they also tried to present it as utterly unpartisan, which of course it clearly, transparently was not." Graham points out that those who released the records in Maine about Bush's 1975 DUI citation had been holding onto them in safekeeping until the right moment.

The MRC spokesman is convinced that without the media reports, Bush would otherwise have won easily over Al Gore. "I think it's clear that Bush probably would have won the race without that thing in the last 72 hours," he says.

In retrospect, Graham issues this warning: "I don't think you go into any election campaign thinking the liberal media can't throw some pretty heavy artillery at you an any point."

The Opening Salvo
Gary Bauer of the Campaign for Working Families thinks he has a pretty good idea what sort of ammunition will be flying across campaign waters in the next several days. In fact, he says charges will be leveled at President Bush that "may make your knees buckle." But he says it merely reflects desperate moves by the Kerry camp in light of their candidate's descending poll numbers. The Democrats, he says, are "going negative."

Gary Bauer

"It is all part of a strategy by the Kerry camp and the radical left to destroy the president by undermining his support, particularly among men and women of faith," Bauer says, explaining that the "opening salvo" is a new book released by gossip columnist Kitty Kelly -- a book he points out that both Time and Newsweek magazines refused to serialize because of doubts raised about its sources and accuracy.

According to Bauer, Kelly alleges past drug use by both the president and First Lady Laura Bush -- "and those charges are just the beginning of what you may hear in the next few days," Bauer adds. "This is the politics of personal destruction at its worst."

Bauer notes that those personal attacks are being committed against the nation's Commander-in-Chief while America is at war -- and he wonders if any of those "character assassins" who he claims are "out to get the president" ever stop to consider the effect of their actions on the United States.