ABC News' The Note: First Source for Political News

ByABC News
July 22, 2004, 8:10 AM

W A S H I N G T O N, July 21, 2004&#151;<br> -- NOTED NOW

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5 days until the Democratic convention40 days until the Republican convention104 days until election day

NEWS SUMMARY:

Don't get distracted by Sandy Berger's troubles (or his pants, or even his socks) there are some big things going on out there that will actually determine who wins the election.

Tonight, post-network news, President Bush is expected to deliver a version of some sort of semi-"new" stump speech and the setting couldn't be more symbolically resonant.

In a city he rails against (Washington), to an audience who already fervently supports him (loyal Republican donors), for an event that represents the area of both his greatest political success and a diminished advantage (a big GOP fundraiser), Mr. Bush will become Pre-butter in Chief of the upcoming Democratic convention.

BC04 Spokesgal Nicolle Devenish tells ABC News that tonight, ""President Bush begins to discuss his vision for a second term as part of a process that begins in earnest in early August. Tonight's speech begins to touch on some broad themes."

The president road-tested the speech New Haven-style yesterday.

(On the other big Bush campaign news the presidential offspring's protruding tongue, apparently aimed at the media on the campaign trail yesterday), Devenish says of Jenna Bush," She's a spirited campaigner who was having fun on the campaign trail.")

Yesterday, the president self-consciously suggested to one audience that he wasn't going to be just about running down John Kerry, but that remains a big part of the BC04 campaign strategy.

Several big newspapers this morning eat Dan Balz's dust in pointing out that reporters, Democrats, and even some Republicans have increasingly demanded to know what a re-elected George W. Bush would actually do with the office.

Forget Labor Day that will turn out to be the third or fourth unofficial campaign kick-off of 2004.

The day after the Democratic convention ends, both campaigns will be out there full throttle on the road, fighting for every advantage.

So it's never too early to size up the two sides on the Big Ms money, message, machine, momentum, and Men.

Money

For most of the Bush years, Democrats have been at a practical and psychological disadvantage on money, even with all the union spending. And Republicans have rightly pointed out that the President's hard-dollar donations were a sign of fervent grassroots energy.

Who knows which side will eventually end up having more global resources, but John Kerry and Democrat/liberal 2004 fundraising raised more by anti-Bush ire than love of Kerry is one of the biggest political stories of the last 25 years.

Advantage: tie.

Message

We'll see what the President comes up with to add to the security, tax, and family values messages that are pretty effective. But from where we stand right now, with the Kerry campaign message still hard to discern, it is quite possible that the incumbent actually holds the weaker hand.

Advantage: Kerry.

Machine

Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove have built the most organized, well-funded, and technically proficient presidential campaign machine ever, including coordination with state parties and major down-ballot candidates. The Kerry campaign is trying to catch up, but it never will.

Advantage: Bush.

Momentum

Since both sides agree that July "belongs" to Kerry and August to Bush, it is quite understandable that Sen. Kerry seems a bit more on the upswing now. But whatever bad news there is out of Iraq continues to stay off the front pages and out of the TV leads. And that is a necessary condition for the Bush comeback.

Advantage: tie.

Men

If George Bush loses this race, the poetry of his underestimating his opponent just might be part of the explanation.

Is John Kerry as good a politician as Bill Clinton? No.

But he is a heck of a lot better at all this stuff than the last Democratic nominee for president. If Kerry gives a boffo acceptance speech as part of an overall successful convention, he will be on track to put himself in a position to win this.

But the president is an incredibly competitive man, and a great politician and he knows what it takes to win.

Advantage: tbd.

And let us take a moment to Note the success of the so-called Third Man one Terence Richard McAuliffe.

The Democratic National Committee Chairman has at times been derided, but his successes as chair are manifest.

Although we aren't the first ones to point this out, and although we do it on the merits, it never hurts to tell the world what a great job the head of the party about to hold its convention is doing.

What with credential, party, and informational needs abounding for ABC News in Boston.

Consider what McAuliffe has accomplished to aid and abet John Kerry:

1. a front-loaded nomination process that produced the desired early nominee, allowing Kerry months and months to raise money and stop taking intra-party shrapnel

2. the inclusion of states from the Southwest in the front-loading, including as nomination debate sites, stoking Democratic activity and Kerry visibility in those general election battlegrounds

3. a re-making of the computerized voter file (and, yes, Terry, we used to laugh at that part of the speech)

4. a constant and thorough whipping up of the anti-Bush sentiment through all means of message delivery, a key component of Kerry's fundraising and grassroots support

5. rebuilding the DNC fundraising operation in a post-Shays-Meehan-McCain-Feingold world

6. the new DNC headquarters building, which puts the office set of "thirtysomething" to shame and still maintains Tortilla Coast proximity!!!

Today's must-reads:

--Adam Nagourney and Dick Stevenson's preview of August and all it means to the Bush campaign and what the KE04 folks will have to dodge. LINK

--The campaign fundraising analysis brought to you by the Washington Post's Jim VandeHei and Tom Edsall, who we've no doubt pored over many a campaign disclosure form in their time. LINK

And as always, we remind you that you can follow all of the breaking political news of the day on ABCNEWS.com with our very own Noted Now: LINK (Those paying close attention will Note the new link!!!)

President Bush signs the BioTerror Act this morning at 9:40 am, right around the same time his campaign and the RNC will be arguing the Democratic platform is "an extreme makeover" of Sens. Kerry's and Edward's voting records. At 10:10 am ET Bush participates in a photo-op with survivors and their families of the Apollo missions, and tonight at 7:15 pm ET speaks at that Washington dinner held in his honor by the NRCC and the NRSC.

Jenna and Barbara Bush spend their first full day campaigning on their own, beginning with a volunteers appreciation coffee in St. Louis followed by a "Students for Bush" and other volunteers event in Columbus, Ohio.

Sen. Kerry travels from Nantucket to Boston to Detroit today but has no public events as of this writing. He will appear on both the NBC Nightly News in an interview with Tom Brokaw and CBS' Evening News in an interview with Dan Rather tonight.

Sen. Edwards travels from Washington to New York today to raise money at the cool Maritime Hotel and the uber-cool Crobar with his daughter Cate Edwards and Sen. Kerry's stepson Chris Heinz. He and Mrs. Edwards appear tonight on CNN's "Larry King Live."

The House continues to debate whether to extend certain tax cuts today while the Senate debates the Morocco Free Trade bill.

The politics of Sandy Berger:

Is it us or are the DOJ/FBI handing out details like candy?

We are less interested in the timing of the disclosure than in the ease with which reporters seem to be getting information about the investigation.

As we have said before, we are all for leaks to the press, but criminal probes are supposed to be secret, and this sentence from USA Today is typical: "Three government officials who have been briefed on the investigation said Berger was seen placing some of the material in his clothing

The well-sourced Wall Street Journal's editorial board raises some interesting questions:

"There's only one way to clear away the political smoke: Release all the drafts of the review Mr. Berger took from the room."

"If it's all as innocent as Mr. Berger's friends are saying, there's no reason not to make them public. But there are good reasons for questioning Mr. Berger's dog-ate-my-homework explanation. To begin with, he was not simply preparing for his testimony before the 9/11 Commission. He was the point man for the Clinton Administration, reviewing and selecting the documents to be turned over to the Commission."

"Written by Richard Clarke for the NSC, the key document was called the Millennium After-Action Review because it dealt with al Qaeda attacks timed for the eve of the Millennium celebrations. In his own 9/11 testimony, Mr. Berger described these al Qaeda plans as 'the most serious threat spike of our time in government.' He went on to say that they provoked 'sustained attention and rigorous actions' from the administration that ended up saving lives.'"

"Sources tell us that Archives staff noticed documents missing after one of Mr. Berger's visits. After gently raising the issue with him, they were shocked to have him return other documents they hadn't even noticed missing. The result was that the next time Mr. Berger went to the Archives, the documents he was given were all marked."

"Mr. Berger attributes the disappearance of this classified information to the kind of 'sloppiness" that comes from reviewing 'thousands of pages of documents.' But it strikes us as amazing that mere sloppiness could account for how Mr. Berger seized on the same memo during two different visits."

"We're not interested in rehashing what the Clinton Administration or even Mr. Berger did or didn't do vis-a-vis the al Qaeda threat pre-9/11. Nor are we much interested about Mr. Berger's troubles with the law. What does interest us is what this memo might tell us about how America should respond to terror."

This story is still a moving target substantively.

What tick-tock facts emerge in the coming days, and whether Berger is indicted, are obviously huge elements in determining where this goes.

You'll notice that the Bush campaign has said next to nothing on the record about all this, and the Kerry campaign is standing pat with the short paper statement from the candidate.

The general Republican view can be summed up thusly: isn't this suspicious; what did Berger do exactly?; what did Kerry know and when did he know it?; and how can Democrats try to get away with this and will the press let them?

Now, do more forthcoming GOPers actually think that there is some automatically big political story here? Maybe not. But they are going to try to make it one.

The general Democratic view can be summed up this way: Berger did a really stupid thing; how could he not have told the Kerry campaign he was being investigated?; the timing of the leak is absurd; and Republicans have completely ruined their chances to make political hay over this by having the Hill and talk radio make this a shrill, partisan fight about someone who no longer works for the Kerry campaign and about whom the public knows next to nothing.

The Democrats are pushing back from some classic boogeymen tactics that we won't even repeat here.

So, our questions:

1. Are there Archive employees whose tales will be told who will put out at least a Rashomon version of what Berger did?

2. Is taking Notes out of the Archive as Berger admits he did a crime or simply a violation of Archive rules? In either case, what are the penalties?

3. Since several news organizations reported that Berger put documents in his socks, and attributed it to government sources, and Berger's spokespeople denied it what are we to make of that?

4. How many Lannys does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

5. Who wrote the anti-Berger, anti-Kerry talking points that seemed to be being uniformly used by Hill Republicans, Rush, Sean, and unnamed Republicans close to the Bush campaign?

6. Why Gordon Smith?

Berger attorney Lanny Breuer made the morning show rounds today, telling ABC's Charlie Gibson that it is "absolutely false" that Berger put documents in his socks, and added "scurrilous" to the charge when talking with NBC's Katie Couric. ABC's George Stephanopoulos Noted on "Good Morning America" that "without those socks, this thing would not have taken off like it did yesterday."

The Washington Post's Susan Schmidt reports on Berger's withdrawal from advising the Kerry campaign, and includes this detail: "A government official with knowledge of the probe said Berger removed from archives files all five or six drafts of a critique of the government's response to the millennium terrorism threat, which he said was classified 'codeword,' the government's highest level of document security." LINK

"A Kerry adviser said the expanding controversy convinced the campaign that Berger's departure was essential because of the serious distraction it posed for Kerry in the week before the Democratic Party nominates him for president," Schmidt reports.

USA Today's Mimi Hall and Jill Lawrence Note at the very end of their story, "Some Republicans, including White House spokesman Scott McClellan and Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz. and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., were more restrained than their party colleagues. McCain called Berger 'a fine and honorable man who we should presume innocent until proven guilty.'" LINK