Campaign '04: BLUE TRUTH, RED TRUTH

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That failure is strange because the Democrats have seen the changes coming from a long way off. It was Clinton, after all, who played the sax on Arsenio and talked about his underwear on MTV. The Democrats invented the war room, having learned from the evisceration of Dukakis that every attack must be answered. In some ways, Kerry's team has adapted to the new world. When rumors of an affair with an intern swirled last February, Kerry followed the cardinal rule: Don't elevate rumors into a story in the mainstream press. He went on Don Imus' radio show to deny them, and they faded away.

But the events of August suggested that Kerry's team was not yet quick or smart enough. Unlike in February, when Kerry was less well known, by August the Bush team had constructed a cartoon narrative of Kerry as a phony, unprincipled opportunist. When the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth launched its ads claiming that Kerry had embellished his war record, the accusations fell on fertile soil. Quite apart from Red America, in the purple enclaves of Missouri and Ohio, there were plenty of voters who would hear the charges on cable or online and believe there was something to them. Only 29% of voters in last week's New York Times/CBS poll think Kerry is telling the entire truth about his Vietnam service, and 49% think he's mostly truthful but hiding something.

But back in the Blue World the Kerry team inhabited, the "larger truth" was that it was outrageous for a President and a Vice President who supported the Vietnam War but didn't fight in it to stand by while their surrogates questioned Kerry's service. Even if the charges were coming from an independent group of veterans, the Kerry camp thought it could rely on the mainstream media to police the situation and inform voters that they were false. Kerry adviser Bob Shrum, says a Democratic strategist, "kept telling Kerry over and over, 'We don't need to respond. It's only a $170,000 ad buy. Nobody will hear it.'"

But Shrum was assuming that the old order was still in place, not realizing that old media and their insurgent competitors are locked in an asymmetrical conflict, with one set of outlets following the traditional conventions of neutrality and balanced coverage and the other not. So when the talk shows began covering the charges, they adhered to those conventions and gave equal time to those leveling the attacks and the Kerry representatives disputing them. "Every credible news organization knocked down their allegations," moans a Democratic strategist--as if that mattered. "They didn't understand what was going on," Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi says of the Kerry team. "It was almost like, 'That's not true, so we don't need to respond.' That's the trap they fell into. They just got the big wake-up call that it doesn't work that way anymore."