Accentuate the positive - (a dangerous miscalculation )

[Hoping4Change]

Philip James in The Guardian argues the Kerry has to aggressively fight back against negative ads. Excellent article.


Two cardinal laws govern negative advertisements. One: they work. Two: the way to combat them is to answer fire with fire. The John Kerry campaign seems to be overlooking both at their peril.
When an attack ad from the Republican slime brigade Swiftboat Veterans for Truth - which claimed that Kerry's Vietnam heroism was a fraud - surfaced last week, the initial response of the Kerry campaign team was to ignore it.


snip


So the initial decision not to respond was plain wrong. Now that Kerry has woken up to the potential damage of this smear campaign, his response so far - to use free news media - has been inadequate and, to some extent, self-defeating.


The news media inevitably frames allegations, irrespective of their merit, in the terms of a legitimate debate...So baseless charges get elevated to a level allowing the viewer to make his or her own judgement.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/story/0,14259,1282583,00.html