Menendez Promises Review Of Dem Campaigns

In the wake of losing a Dem-held seat in one of the most heavily Dem states in the nation, DSCC chair Bob Menendez on Wednesday promised "concrete steps" to right the listing ship.

"We're going to conduct a forensic examination of each of our campaigns and our candidates," Menendez told Hotline OnCall in an interview. "That doesn't mean a shift to the right or the left or the center, it just means making sure that they're calibrated to the volatility of this electorate."

After issuing an unusually frank statement in the wake of Dems' loss last night, Menendez acknowledged that his party has a problem at the moment with independent voters.

"Democrats have to do a better job of engaging and delivering with independnet voters, and that means being focused on the issues they care about most, which is jobs, the economy and spending. There's a lot of economic angst and anxiety out there. There's a lot of impatience out there. And I think the electorate, particularly with independents, needs to be seeing Democrats, even though we did do important things this last year like the stimulus and the omnibus for the purposes of this, bottom line is they have to see us focused like a laser beam on these issues," he said. "If we do that, I think we can be very successful in November."

To do so, Menendez said Dem candidates need to position themselves as agents of change, something MA AG Martha Coakley (D) failed to do in her losing race against Sen.-elect Scott Brown (R). Even though Brown has served for years in the state legislature, he was able to effectively cast himself as an outsider.

Coakley, meanwhile, ran a largely passive race after the election and didn't even run TV ads until the final 2 weeks. That, Menendez said, should serve as a warning to every Dem seeking a Senate seat this year.

"They have to be aggressive, and that to me means, as I've been saying to both our incumbents and our open seat candidates before this election, that this election has to be about a contrast," Menendez said. "You have to clearly define yourself before your opponent defines you. You have to frame the election in the appropriate way, and, lastly, you have to define your opponent, so that the choice is crystal clear."

Choice elections are the right way for Dems to go. Dem sources have pointed to polls that show Obama policies beating those of Pres. Bush by wide margins. Still, saying an election is a choice is one thing; Coakley, ex-NJ Gov. Jon Corzine (D) and VA state Sen. Creigh Deeds (D) all tried that. Actually making voters believe it is another thing; all 3 Dems lost, as did dozens of GOPers who ran for office in '06 and '08.

But Menendez pointed out that all 3 Dems started making those contrasts very late in the campaign, and he said doing so earlier would
pay dividends.

"If you frame the race earlier, if you defined their candidate and their positions earlier, then you have a real opporutnity to succeed in this election. I think that contrast works. The contrast doesn't work if you try to define it in the waning stages of the campaign," he said.

The DSCC chair also said the party believes it has found an effective issue with which to attack GOPers and label them out of touch. In the race's final week, Dems attacked Brown for opposing a proposed tax on banks that took bailout money. Casting the election as Wall Street vs. Main Street, the ultimate insider against outsider contest, could give Dems a leg up.

"We know the Wall Street argument is a potent one, we just got it too late in Massachusetts," he said. "If you look how the race was framed in the last week, we knew we had a winning argument. You know, Republicans were standing up for Wall Street versus Democrats standing up for taxpayers. But there's no question that our campaigns have to start using that frame earlier."

Some Dems have said they don't believe the party should continue pursuing health care legislation, given the political toll it has already taken on the party. Add to that the fact that the process will be much more difficult with Brown having promised to provide the 41st vote against the current proposal and some Dems want to scrap the bill now and instead focus on jobs legislation.

But Menendez said the political benefits of passing a health care bill outweigh the drawbacks, and that it could still help Dems make an economic argument to voters.

"I think that we should continue to move forward, because health care is an economic equation," he said. "It was number 2 on everybody's list in terms of issues. If you look at the Coakley race, for whatever intensity it brought to Brown's campaign, it also brought intensity to Coakley's campaign. If you look at some of the post-election analysis, it shows that in both candidates, the majority of voters who were driven to vote for that candidate were driven by health care."

Menendez said Dems should continue the process of "passing health care, achieving the immediate benefits that are provided and explaining it out as one of the economic issues that makes a difference to families."

Menendez will soothe worried Dems at a weekly party caucus meeting later today, but he said he hasn't had to deal with too many nervous senators. "We'll be having a caucus meeting later today, and I'm sure we'll talk it out there," he said.