Virginia Centrist echoes a Mickey Kaus claim that Democrats should keep themselves totally invisible for the next two years and let the Bush-hating media demolish the GOP for them.
The strategy may be sound, but is the causality? I’m not sure that the media is particularly “Bush-hating.” Sure, it smells blood in the water, but I’m not sure it’s the one that caused the wound. It seems to me that the media is rationally responding to a series of major missteps by the Bush admin: on social security, on Iraq, on Cindy Sheehan (it’s way too late for anybody to resolve that circus with dignity–she has to be the only person whose less extreme as the political football she’s become than she’d be if the media reported her accurately. Though portraying her as less of a loon than she really is might not qualify as being biased against her, it might instead be deference to her understandable grief. But I digress). The press might just be accurately reporting–Bush is screwing up, and folks are beginning to notice.
Similarly, the point that Bush’s best moments have been when Democrats have had a face (John Kerry, Howard Dean, etc) matched directly against him, to me, merely points out that Democrats have an uncanny ability to select bad spokespeople. Given that the CW is that one of the Democratic Party’s biggest obstacles to turning around its electoral misfortune is that it is perceived as not standing for anything, playing the invisible man seems not likely to succeed.
What’s needed is bold Democratic leadership that actually forwards plans. Not just they’re wrong, but also we’re right.