Josh Marshall has a must read post with advice for Kerry. To me this is the key part:
". . . Don't complain; fight. The press is too lazy and insensible to be a watchdog for this sort of business.
. . .
Kerry is a fighter. I saw it first hand during his 1996 senate race against Bill Weld. But Kerry will never successfully parry these hits by getting tangled and stuck in the molasses of the president's lies and distortions. Getting sidetracked into a discussion of legislative maneuvering isn't the answer to the president's attacks; it's precisely what they're trying to elicit.
The answer is simply to say they're lies (while having surrogates and staffers explain why) and then to go on the attack. "
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
I totally agree .
For instance, the Kerry campaign should never have let Bush get the upper hand on the issue of combat pay, health care, and getting things like body-armor to front line troops. One need only be a casual reader of the military press to know that the president is extremely vulnerable on these issues.
The Bush campaign against Kerry is already crystal clear: Kerry has no center, no core. That makes him a waffler and weak -- too weak to defend the country in perilous times. That's the whole campaign, the whole message.
The winning campaign against the president is equally clear. He doesn't tell the truth. Almost nothing he has told the American people has turned out to be true (from budgets to jobs, from wmds to his personal past). In many cases, that's because he's lied to them In others, it's because he's promised things he had no reason to believe were true. In some instances, he just failed to deliver.
As you'll note from the Clift column, Republicans themselves know this is his central vulnerability.
Just as the president only tauntingly alludes to the attacks being mounted by his campaign surrogates, Kerry can't go around calling the president a liar. But the president's credibility and his ability to deliver on his promises should be the centerpiece of his campaign.
Indeed, the president's loss of credibility should be central to Kerry's attack on his stewardship of the country's security.
We are accustomed to thinking about a president's and the country's 'credibility' abroad as a factor of his willingness to use force. Credibility is key because it is central to a president's ability to protect the country and advance its interests.
But what we are seeing right now is that the president has lost his credibility with the world. Whether foreign leaders want Bush to be reelected is, from a domestic political perspective, irrelevant. Indeed, it can easily backfire on a candidate who seeks to mobilize it against him.
The key is simply that the president has no credibility. He has lost the trust of the country's allies in part because he has repeatedly deceived them -- dealt with them falsely or simply lied to them. But to a critical degree neither do they fear him. This is what we're seeing as our few remaining allies in Iraq ramp back their deployments in the country (Spain, South Korea, possibly Poland) and abandon our foolishly shortsighted effort to advance our interests by dividing Europe.
Right-wingers in this country are casting this pattern as a cosmic moral drama of appeasement, with the faint of heart cowering before the grand struggle. In fact, the president is reduced to a In fact, the president is reduced to a mix of taunt and begging, pleading with other countries not to abandon him. What is a leader without followers? Not a leader.
The president's campaign ads have heavily pressed the point that when confronted with a threat, he takes action -- but with conspicuous inattention to what action he takes, or whether it makes any sense or diminishes the threat.
The message of these ads amounts to ...
Vote Bush: When Dangers Threaten, You Know He'll Go Beserk!
But again, the president has damaged the country's hard credibility by lying to our allies and isolating us from them. For half a century the United States has been the guardian of a prosperous and increasingly democratic world order. If our allies are really abandoning us and making 'separate peaces' with gangs of murderous religious fanatics what does that tell you about this president's leadership? His credibility abroad or even his ability to use hard power to advance the country's interests?
The president made the mess and he lacks the credibility, thus the strength, to clean it up.
Credibility is the thread that ties this whole election together."
Very powerful.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/