Campaign '04: BLUE TRUTH, RED TRUTH

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Thus do the most important issues unfold, not just across the gray pages of the serious papers but in a foaming free-for-all in which every charge, however fair or false, gets BlackBerried and instant messaged in a Darwinian democracy of ideas. At a rally in Huntington, W.Va., last week, 3-year-old Sophia Parlock dissolved into tears after having her Bush-Cheney sign torn up by Kerry-Edwards supporters. The picture was mailed out by the Republican National Committee after conservative Matt Drudge spotted a wire photo. The Democrats meanwhile sent around the story of a Gold Star mother, whose son was killed in Iraq, being arrested at a Laura Bush speech in Hamilton, N.J., when she tried to interrupt the First Lady. As for that little girl with the sign, the Democratic Underground posted a story claiming that her father is a Bush campaign operative who used his child to create a partisan photo op, having done the same with a different kid four years ago against Al Gore. No incident is too small to produce its own parallel truths. And the party e-mail lists make sure that these truths make their way into every Red or Blue mailbox.

In the past few weeks, as Bush moved into the lead for the first time in months, his home-field advantage became clear. Conservatives say that, of necessity, they learned long ago how to transmit their message below the radar of the mainstream media, academia and Hollywood. They became the masters of direct mail, which helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, and their next wave of messagemakers was much quicker to understand the power of talk radio, cable and blogs. Until the week of the Republican Convention, it had been three years since Bush had talked to the Washington Post or the New York Times. In his 31/2 years in office, he has given 15 press conferences, the fewest of any President in 50 years. But he has talked to Rush Limbaugh, and he's scheduled to appear on the O'Reilly Factor this week.

While leery of the old media, this White House is expert at narrowcasting to the new. From the Amish to snowmobile users to stockcar-racing fans, the Bush coalitions are sliced like Bible leaves and addressed according to their specific priorities. Aiming to strengthen his socially conservative base, Bush in May sat down with a handful of journalists from religious media to discuss his opposition to abortion and gay marriage. The transcript of that long interview, even the fact that it was happening at all, was not released to the mainstream White House press corps. In May the campaign released a Web ad featuring Laura Bush talking about education, which ran on 60 sites, including cookinglight.com

The campaign also keeps a close eye on the blogs, using them, just as it uses Limbaugh, to mainline information to the G.O.P. faithful. "Blogs are what talk radio was a few years ago," says Bush campaign communications director Nicole Devenish. Her staff members regularly write, along with the message for the talk-radio circuit, the one that will go out to blogs and websites that link to the Bush campaign site. Bush staff members rely on technorati.com and truthlaidbear.com which track political blogs and websites to see what items in local papers, on websites and in blogs are getting the most hits. "If a story moves up through the rankings and linking, we can know," says one of the Bush staff members assigned to alert the rest of the team about which stories are moving through the blogosphere. "We can get indicators about stories before they break elsewhere. It's like an early-warning system."

That attention has proved fruitful, since blogs are where some of the most powerful if picayune attacks on Kerry have taken hold. When Kerry put Swiss cheese rather than the traditional Cheez Whiz on his Philly Cheese Steak last year in Philadelphia and last month in Green Bay, Wis., called the famous Packer stadium "Lambert Field" instead of Lambeau Field, the bloggers lampooned him for being out of touch. Does this matter? The Washington Post wrote off Kerry's chances in the key swing state of Wisconsin because his slip was "akin to calling the Yankees the Yankers or the Chicago Bulls the Bells."

While Republicans have relied on the Internet to spread a message, Democrats have focused more on the Net's power to raise money. One of the great anomalies of American politics was that Republicans could always count on many small donors, while Democrats depended on a few big sponsors. Back in the days of Barry Goldwater, his movement had more than 650,000 individual donors, compared with 22,000 for John F. Kennedy in 1960. Campaign-finance reform, however, meant that Democrats would need to broaden their donor base fast. The party claims to have quadrupled its small-donor base since the last election. MoveOn's 527 committee has been able to spend more than $17 million this cycle--not bad for a group that didn't exist seven years ago.

But some Kerry advisers think he has missed an opportunity to rally voters to his cause using the Net. "I don't think this campaign really understands the new technology," says one. "Yes, they raised money with it, but they don't see it as an organizational tool." The reason, he says, is that the team still steers by the stars of the New York Times and the TV networks. Senior adviser Mike McCurry reads the Daily Kos and a few other blogs, but most Kerry aides don't and instead rely on one staff member to provide an overnight summary. The Internet is not their medium. "It's not where they live. It's not how they talk to each other," says the adviser. "The Kerry camp hasn't moved. It's where campaigns were 20 years ago. They are going to do it the way they did it in '88 for Michael Dukakis. They are going to do it on TV, but broadcast television is damned near irrelevant for the rest of the cycle. Things move too fast now."