In a blitz of ads and speeches, the Bush campaign claims that John Kerry has flip-flopped on a number of issues. But Democrats are starting to push back with their own examples of Bush flip-flops. Why is the charge such a potent political allegation?
"In the age of sound bites, there's a premium put on consistency," said Paul Waldman, co-author of "The Press Effect," a critique of the 2000 election that faulted the media and voters for not vigorously challenging the fabrications of the Bush and Gore campaigns.
"There's no particular objective reason for this demand for consistency," Waldman said. "Circumstances change, and politicians must respond to these altered conditions -- precisely what you want in a leader." But in the heat of a campaign, the flip-flop charge can be devastating as part of a larger theme: that a candidate is changing positions for political expediency and therefore cannot be trusted.
This is the message Bush has been sending voters for more than a month, beginning with a speech in which he offered a wry critique of the Democratic presidential field.
"They're for tax cuts and against them. They're for NAFTA and against NAFTA. They're for the Patriot Act and against the Patriot Act. They're in favor of liberating Iraq, and opposed to it. And that's just one senator from Massachusetts," Bush said.
To underscore the message, the Bush campaign has run ads portraying Kerry as "unprincipled" and the president as "steady and steadfast." The Republican National Committee has posted a Kerry vs. Kerry boxing match on its Web site, a cartoon narrated by legendary promoter Don King.
The strategy seems to be working. In a recent Gallup poll, 49 percent of the voters who were surveyed said Kerry is likely to change his positions on issue for political reasons, while only 37 percent said Bush is.
Kerry and the Democrats have countered in a manner that underscores the so-called "credibility gap" that has dragged Bush down in some public opinion polls.
"On issue after issue, George W. Bush keeps saying one thing to the people and then doing another big favor for the special interests," Kerry said in a recent speech, calling the Bush White House "the biggest say-one-thing-do-another administration" ever.
The steadiness Bush touts in his ads is, to Kerry, "stubborn leadership (that) has led America steadily in the wrong direction."
Meanwhile, numerous Democratic Web sites have begun compiling lists of Bush flip-flops, often using the president's own words against him.
"I think credibility is important," Bush is quoted as saying in the introduction of the "Flip-Flopper In Chief" on the Web site of the Center for American Progress.
The flip-flop charge is not always politically potent, however, said Frank Greer, a veteran Democratic consultant who was a longtime media adviser to former President Clinton. "Sometimes, if you end up on the right, or popular, side of an issue, they don't mind if you flip-flop," he said.
Greer's view helps explain why Bush, despite some truly impressive political acrobatics, is not seen by voters as a waffler to the extent that Kerry is.
For example, Bush's latest flip-flop -- allowing national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to give public sworn testimony to the 9/11 Commission after weeks of refusing the commission's request -- moved him from a politically unpopular position to one with broad support from the public.
Similarly, Bush long opposed a post-9/11 Democratic proposal to create a Department of Homeland Security, only to unveil his own proposal as the idea was gaining support on Capitol Hill.
"People are never going to believe that Bush is a flip-flopper," Bush campaign senior strategist Matthew Dowd boasted to Time magazine last week.
Kerry, on the other hand, has performed his most notable political cartwheels on the war in Iraq, an issue that deeply divides American voters.
Kerry voted for the resolution to go to war, then voted against the president's plan to spend $87 billion reconstructing Iraq, then tried to explain how, in the often twisted parliamentary ways of the Senate, he had "voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
Kerry, in fact, voted for an Iraq reconstruction bill that would have rolled back some of Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy to cover the cost of the $87 billion, but voted against the bill that ultimately passed the Senate, which did not include the tax cut rollbacks.
"Most of Bush's flip-flopping attacks on Kerry are bogus, but Kerry himself opened the door by saying he voted against the $87 billion Iraq spending bill before voting against it," said Craig Crawford, a political analyst for CNBC, CBS and Congressional Quarterly magazine. "With that one statement, Kerry not only branded himself a flip-flopper, he bragged about it."
Flip-flop charges are very effective, especially in the circumstances Kerry finds himself in. The senator from Massachusetts, who is largely unknown to the national electorate, is being defined as much by the barrage of Bush ads as by Kerry himself.
Defending a steady flow of such charges can force an opponent "off message." And such ads are also easy to produce, especially for a longtime senator like Kerry with a long record and thousands of roll-call votes from which to draw seemingly contradictory actions.
"You're always going to be able to find things that you can twist and make them look like contradictions," Waldman said. "And that, of course, plays into the negative feelings we already have about politicians in general -- that they are fake, that they're just going to tell you what you want to hear and that next month, if it's convenient, they'll tell you something else."
"The whole concept of 'character' is an important one to American voters," said John Zogby, an independent pollster. "They want to know that their president is principled, grounded and has leadership skills."
He added: "It is one thing for a candidate to have grown or changed his or her mind earlier in a career. That could be growth, maturity, bonding with the people or colleagues. But for a candidate to change on issues in the heat of a campaign denotes the opposite: weakness, a lack of principle, a willingness to rely on the polls."
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