Democratic campaign strategists are desperately trying to come up with a unified theme they can use to salvage their majority in Congress this November. That would be a nice thing to have, of course. But there’s a better way to reduce the expected electoral damage: Learn the lesson of the 2004 presidential election.
In that campaign Democrats made a disastrous mistake by overlooking an obvious opportunity. They focused on the failures of George W. Bush. And while these failures, both in the domestic and international spheres were great, the man who was fronting them for the Republicans, though not quite Teflon, was something almost as impervious. He was genuinely likable.
Both Bush and Kerry came from very privileged backgrounds but W, somehow, emerged as a guy with a common touch, a guy you could sit around a diner and shoot the breeze with, and even if he didn’t drink beer any longer, a guy who could talk like one of the guys watching a Cowboys-Patriots game. Kerry was stiff and stuffy and came across as too smart for his own good and maybe too smart for your own good as well. An economy that was then getting bad fast and an Iraq War that had clearly become a terrible mistake should have cost Bush the election. It was his easy going manner that saved his political bacon that year.
The lost opportunity in that 2004 election, one that should have been obvious to Democratic strategists, involved other top people in the Bush Administration. Had Democrats used a slogan like “A President is known by the company he keeps” and endlessly trashed the massively unpopular Dick Cheney (one heartbeat from the presidency) and the even less popular Donald Rumsfeld, we might well have had a President Kerry.
So, back to 2010. Is there a high profile Republican leader less well liked, less well respected, less popular than our Democratic President? Of course. John Boehner. This guy is the perfect target to use as an emblem of a Republican victory because a great many people who might vote Republican would find it distasteful if he, personally, were calling the shots.
Republicans used Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as their whipping girl and boy until Obama’s popularity dropped below 50 percent. Then they turned on the President.
Republicans know how to win elections. Wise Democrats should learn from them in this regard. Make John Boehner the face of a Republican November victory, and maybe Democrats won’t lose as big as most pundits now predict.
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