Dems Play Small Ball
Your Hotline OnCall editor writes in this week's National Journal:
Democratic strategists want voters to know that House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio sees regulatory reform as a nuclear weapon aimed at the ant of Wall Street's financial misdeeds. That Rep. Joe Barton of Texas wants to apologize to BP rather than hold the oil company accountable for the widening environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. And that Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele believes that a land war in Afghanistan is the last thing the United States should be involved in. In short, Democrats seem to care an awful lot about the Republicans' minor inside-the-Beltway flare-ups that won't get a lot of attention from swing voters.It's all part of Democrats' effort to make the election about more than their performance. Given President Obama's lousy approval ratings and polls that show a plurality -- if not a majority -- of voters in the mood to kick the bums out, Democrats have to offer voters a choice.
"With history against them and a recession to boot, [Democrats] would be foolish to nationalize the election," party strategist Paul Begala said. "As David Axelrod keeps telling anyone who will listen, this needs to be a choice, not a referendum. Highlighting Boehner's comments about the economy, and Steele's comments about [Afghanistan], and Barton's apology to BP helps make it a choice by showing voters how the GOP would govern -- and whose side they are on."
The trouble is, voters don't much care, especially when the only good news -- that the unemployment rate went down last month -- is followed by the bad news that thousands of Americans gave up looking for work.
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Democrats are playing on a field that favors their rivals and with messages that advantage the GOP. Their only choice is to change the dialogue. They need to make the contest a choice between two competing visions rather than a referendum on their own leadership. And that imperative has them playing the political equivalent of small ball.Democrats have "got to remind people what Republicans were -- the party they rejected last time," said former Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., who led his party's campaign efforts in 2004. "That's good politics if you can make it stick. The problem is, it's only good for a day or two at a time."
Republicans, meanwhile, are no strangers to nitpicking their way through an unfavorable landscape. In recent election cycles, the party has focused on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, seeking to tie every Democratic candidate to the woman they love to deride as the "San Francisco liberal." Last year, Republicans assaulted Democrats for misreporting where stimulus dollars were being spent; they attacked Pelosi for accusing the CIA of misleading Congress; and they questioned whether 11 congressional Democrats stood with Obama in believing that a Cambridge, Mass., police officer "acted stupidly" in arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
None of those attacks will move a vote on their own, just as Democrats shouldn't count on building their majority on the back of Joe Barton. But the Democratic strategy has more to do with building a narrative about who Republicans are. And, in truth, Republicans remain even less popular than Democrats.
"It's going to take a bunch of bloopers. They're going to have to put a lot of hits together to get a rally going," the GOP's Davis said, when asked how Democrats can succeed with their strategy. "The only good news for Democrats is that they're running against Republicans."