September 4, 2020

By Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille

In the 2004 presidential campaign of George W. Bush and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was a major contributor to Kerry’s loss. The group, orchestrated  by longtime Republican Party operative Chris LaCivita, blanketed the airwaves with advertisements that called Kerry’s Vietnam War service into question, maintaining that Kerry had exaggerated his war record, and had unmercifully criticized and undermined the troops when they returned from Vietnam. Now, a new Super PAC, called Preserve America, is launching a major media assault on Joe Biden.

According to Politico’s Alex Isenstadt, Preserve America “is poised to begin a $30 million advertising blitz, an amount that's likely to escalate in the weeks to come, two people familiar with the effort … . The super PAC is expected to draw the support of a range of GOP megadonors, including Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus.”

Both Adelson and Marcus have been strong backers of the Republican Party. In fact, over the past twenty years, Adelson has been biggest political donor in the United States.

Using ‘law and order’ to Swift Boat Joe Biden

The new effort is being again spearheaded by Chris LaCivita. His goal is to amplify Donald Trump’s claims that Biden is a radical left-winger leading a mob of thugs and criminals bent on destroying cities across the country, and to link Biden to the defund the police movement.

The Trump campaign is clearly trying to distract Americans from focusing on Trump’s miserable record and lack of coherent leadership in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic that has resulted in more than 185,000 deaths and a cratering economy.

 “The radical left-wing mob is trying to destroy our country from within and Joe Biden is too weak to stop them,” LaCivita wrote in a statement to ABC News. "It's a concern shared by a growing number of Americans and we intend to spread their message far and wide over the coming months."

LaCivita’s website describes him as “a former Marine who was wounded in combat … a fierce competitor with a proven track record of winning difficult campaigns at every level of the ballot”.

In August 2004, reporting for the Guardian, Julian Borger wrote: “John Kerry’s Vietnam war record has been trashed in a series of advertisements and a book by a group … who claim that Kerry inflicted injuries on himself and falsified his field reports to win his medals and ultimately get out of Vietnam after four months of combat.” He added: “It is a potentially devastating multi-media assault on a presidential candidate. It also turns out to be largely untrue.”

The term “Swift Boating” became part of the American political lexicon. In 2008, The New York Times’ Kate Zernike wrote that “’Swift boat’ has become the synonym for the nastiest of campaign smears, a shadow that hangs over the presidential race as pundits wait to proclaim that the Swiftboating has begun and candidates declare that they will not be Swiftboated.”

In the 2008 presidential campaign, the GOP and its surrogates launched a campaign against then Senator Barack Obama that was less Swift Boat-like, and more like death by a thousand cuts, which ultimately failed to derail his candidacy.

Preserve America’s multi-million dollar advertising strategy

Preserve America is expected to drop $25 million in television ads in a number of swing states, including Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Iowa and Georgia. $5 million is expected to be directed towards digital platforms.

The focus will be to reinforce Trump’s law and order platform. According to Politico, “One commercial features a direct-to-camera testimonial from an Arizona woman named Alyssa Cordova whose husband, a police officer, was killed in the line of duty.”

With an American flag and photograph of her husband behind her, Cordova says: “I haven’t heard Joe Biden stand up for law enforcement, which says a lot. You’re part of the problem because you’re condoning it. What kind of a leader are you?”

Political describes “Another ad [that] spotlights John Gillis, a retired Los Angeles police lieutenant who talks about how a gang member murdered his daughter. ‘Joe Biden is not going to take a stand,’ says Gillis, who is Black. ‘He can’t do the tough things, he’s too worried about popular opinion. That’s his character.’”

Both ads make powerful emotional claims that Biden won’t support law enforcement – and by extension, that he condones or is silent about unlawful acts and civil unrest. At the end of each ad there is a quote attributed to the May 31st edition of The Washington Post that seems intended to give additional weight to claims of Biden’s weakness: “Joe Biden has stayed relatively quiet.” (Note: a search of Post content did not turn up that statement on May 31st.) Ironically, on that same day, a Philip Rucker Washington Post column was headlined, “As cities burned, Trump stayed silent — other than tweeting fuel on the fire.”

It remains to be seen whether LaCivita’s Preserve America will able to effectively link a “soft on crime” Joe Biden to “rampaging mobs in the cities” and turn that fear into votes for Trump. Joe Biden is not making this an easy case. Just this week he has made several speeches that forcefully distinguish between rioting and peaceful protest, between defunding the police and holding police accountable. Excerpts of these speeches are being translated into a $45 million ad campaign that is blanketing swing states.