Our political Quote of the Day comes from Republican David Frum who, in a commentary on the CNN website that needs to be read in full, argues that just saying “no” won’t win it in 2010 for the GOP.
Frum starts by looking at the content of the campaign ads of the Democratic and Republican candidates running in the highly watched 12th district of Pennsylvania, where many observers felt the GOP had an excellent chance to pick up the seat of the late Jack Murtha. He analyzes the ads of GOP Tim Burns and then of Mark Critz, the Democrat who not only won but won handily. (It’s notable that the Republican commentators who were predicting a GOP pickup and saying how vital it was as a kind of hype in advance for what they believed would happen downplayed the Democratic win the next day or tried to move onto things — a further sign of how partisan-based and partisan-biased commentary before elections needs to be taken with a huge chunk of salt).
Frum then says this:
Critz got away with it in large part because angry memories of George W. Bush and the congressional Republicans remain fresh. That represents a big difference between 2010 and 1994.
Little as they like Obama and the Democrats, the voters in PA-12 have not yet forgiven the Bush Republicans.
Only 28 percent of voters in the district told pollsters that Bush and the Republicans did a good job running the country in the 2000s; 63 percent said they did not.
As unpopular as Barack Obama is in PA-12, he did better than that: 35 percent said he was doing a good job. Only 22 percent said the congressional Republicans were doing a good job.
What this suggests is that a positive agenda may be more necessary than usual this year, if only as a way to inoculate Republicans against Democratic attacks on an anti-Medicare, anti-Social Security secret agenda.
Here may be the inner weakness of the Tea Party faction’s contribution to the GOP: It has enticed many Republicans into endorsing ultra-libertarian ideas not heard from a national party since the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964.
Leave aside Rand Paul as an outlier.
How many Republicans from Karl Rove on down have praised Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget as an example of forward-looking Republican thinking? And that budget is built on radical cuts in Medicare benefits for everyone younger than 55. Americans do not know that today.
But they will by November – unless Republicans act early and decisively to give them something else to talk about: an agenda to vote for, not just against; some “yes” to go with all that “no.”
This is one of the problems that is emerging in the 21st century’s dual echo chambers. Conservatives and Republicans begin to believe all of true believer perceptions see that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck as reflecting real sentiment out there. Reading like minded weblogs that agree in advance with your perceptions don’t help expand perceptions beyond what’s formed by the echo chamber. Similarly, on the left, if you listen to progressive talk and read many progressive sites you get the the impression that voters in 2008 REALLY voted to enact a progressive agenda and sweep away conservatism. In reality, 2008 was about firing the team that ran all branches of government for many years and trying something else — another way of saying voters opted for a blank slate concept called “change” which became more ticklish when it had to be defined in specifics after the election. They decided to try the Democratic alternative product.
Frum’s point is that now just being against Obama is not going to be enough. There has to be an affirmative reason to vote FOR the Republicans and AGAINST the Democrats.
The big, fat problem for the Republicans is that even though the elephant may want to forget, many voters do not forget what it was like under the final years of the Bush administration or GOP control of Congress.
Voters will need more than references linking Barack Obama to Nazi Germany or word “socialism” (which does not alarm younger voters the way it does more old fogy-ish voters of my Baby Boomer or the WWII generations) or even talk about how the economy is still a mess.
Voters will need affirmative specifics on what the GOP can and will do better— because if there is voters’ remorse over Obama many voters were resoundingly unhappy with results of the product they bought from the GOP under George W Bush, so in 2008 they held their noses and tried a different brand. Would those voters go back and buy the same old GOP brand in 2010? Or do they need to see that its offering them something different?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.