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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: August 2008

Karl Rove’s Strategy for Attacking Obama — How Democrats Can Respond

[Editor’s Note: this is the second item in a two-part series on Democratic communications strategy by James Vega. It was originally published on August 8, 2008]
Print Version
With the recent appointment of Steven Schmidt and several other staffers to the highest levels of the McCain campaign, the political protégés of Karl Rove have now taken almost complete control. As a result Rove’s basic political strategy has been elevated to the core approach of the campaign.
At its heart, Karl Rove’s approach for the last 20 years has been an essentially class-based attack on Democrats – one that portrays them as representing an out-of-touch, educated elite who have little in common with average Americans. In this strategy, individual Democrats are not simply wrong about specific issues; their errors all arise from deep, pathological defects in their basic values and character.
This general strategy can be traced back to the campaigns of Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968 and 1972. But one of Rove’s distinct additions was to recognize that attacks on a candidates’ character must be psychologically plausible – they must be fine-tuned to exploit weaknesses the opposing candidate actually appears to reflect in his behavior.
In this regard, Rove has always had an exceptionally sinister aptitude (one that is reminiscent of Hannibal Lector’s perverse but penetrating form of psychological insight) for being able to recognize subtle human weaknesses and frailties. For example, although Al Gore and John Kerry were both products of relatively advantaged, prep school environments and were clearly not working class “ordinary guys”, they were nonetheless quite distinct. On the one hand Gore was vulnerable to being portrayed as somewhat pompous, self-important and egotistic. Kerry, in contrast, invited the caricature of being a long-winded, detached, emotionally remote New England Yankee. The overall class-based frame worked for both men, but the political hit-man’s art lay in recognizing and exploiting the subtle variations between them.
Obama presents an even more complex challenge. Although meditative, professorial, articulate and elegant, he nonetheless does not fit the image of a typical left-wing college professor (or, for that matter, of a Black militant, a well-to-do New York limousine liberal or corrupt Chicago pol).
The solution the Rove team developed, only days after taking control of the McCain campaign, was to portray Obama as a resident of the rarified world of the “Hollywood movie star liberals” – a pampered universe of exclusive health and exercise clubs, expensive hotel suites and fancy bottled water. The implication was that, like other Hollywood stars, Obama must be “self-infatuated and effete” or “vain and out of touch” or “effete, elite and equivocal” – in short, a weak and vain man without real character; a male fashion model living a movie stars’ life and not the real life of ordinary Americans.


How to Attack John McCain–What Would Rove Do?

[Editor’s note: This is the first item of a two-part series on Democratic communications strategy by James Vega. It was originally published on August 6, 2008]
Print Version
As the McCain campaign has rolled out its new, “Karl Rove style” personal attack on Barack Obama, Democrats have begun to feel a very familiar sense of frustration.
On the one hand, for many Democrats the “high road” taken by the Barack Obama campaign in replying to the attacks until several days ago did not seem adequately aggressive. At the same time, the DNC and other third party Democratic attacks on McCain’s close financial ties to oil companies and other lobbyists and his subservience to the policies of the Bush administration seem somehow to be glancing blows that do less damage to his personal image than do his attacks on Obama.
There is a reason for this. One fundamental element of the Karl Rove approach is to focus the most visceral and aggressive attacks on the opposing candidate’s character and personality rather than his policies. The recent Democratic attacks on McCain criticize, sometimes very bitterly, his positions and actions, but the Republican attacks on Obama are directly aimed at impugning his character.
In the past, Democrats often felt that focusing one’s attacks on an opposing candidates’ character was inappropriate – that politics should be about issues and policies, not personalities. But repeated muggings by the Rove Republicans have made many, if not most, Democrats now quite willing to respond to personal attacks in whatever way seems required.
The more difficult problem is that McCain is not, at first glance, an easy target for attacks on his character. His youthful military experience as a pilot and POW and his well-cultivated media reputation as an occasional “maverick” in the 80’s and 90’s present no obvious vulnerabilities. Current characterizations of him as old, ill-tempered, easily flustered and prone to blundering, while certainly true, are also essentially trivial. Comparing McCain to “The Simpsons’” Mr. Burns or to a clichéd grouchy grandpa simply has no meaningful political effect.
But, in fact, McCain is actually profoundly vulnerable to a powerful, aggressive and damaging attack on his character. McCain’s actions in recent weeks have provided compelling evidence for three genuinely disturbing propositions about his character, core values and integrity.

1. That John McCain has become desperate to win this election and is willing to sacrifice his deepest principles and his personal honor in order to do it
2. That the John McCain we see today is only a pale, diminished shadow of the man he once was in his early years.
3. That John McCain is allowing men he once despised and held in complete contempt to manipulate him and tell him what to do – to literally put words in his mouth and tell him what to say.

At first glance these statements are so strong that they sound almost defamatory. But each is supported by McCain’s recent actions (as described below) and they fit together into a single coherent narrative of ambition overcoming integrity and moral character.
Here is how this narrative can be presented in the format of a typical 45-60 second TV spot


McCain’s Vulnerabilities

In his new perch at ThinkProgress, Matt Yglesias is back to his prodigious blogging, and today offers a good reminder (in the contest of a new AFL-CIO direct mail piece) that Social Security could be a big problem for John McCain in the stretch-drive of the campaign.
I can’t recall a competitive major-party presidential candidate who was as dependent on the votes of older voters as John McCain is today. His past and prospective support for Social Security privatization (in the context of an overall fiscal plan that guarantees perpetual raids on Social Security revenues), and his recent attacks on the basic pay-go structure of the program as “disgraceful,” expose him to some very real problems with seniors.
But the time bombs ticking away in the substructure of McCain’s campaign go far beyond Social Security, and extend to issues that currently may be working in his favor. Sure, the present Russia-Georgia conflict may be giving him a good opportunity to talk tough. But it also will increasingly draw attention to his overall foreign policy posture of wanting to fight in Iraq until “victory,” while increasing troop levels in Afghanistan and rattling sabers against Iran, and now Russia. The unsettling reality about John McCain is that his foreign policy thinking combines the pre-9/11 conservative obsession with a new cold war against superpower rivals (then China, now Russia and China) with the post-9/11 neocon obsession to fight a new world war against “Islamofascism.” How many wars, cold or hot, regional or global, are Americans really ready to undertake?
Similarly, McCain is getting some traction from his flip-flop favoring offshore oil drilling. But that’s about all he has to say about the economy, other than the same cut-taxes-and-deregulate-and-promote-free-trade message Republicans have offered for eons. At some point, the fact that his health care plan is even worse than the status quo will get noticed, along with regressive and pro-corporation tax policies that blow up his credibility as a fiscal hawk, and an unconditional pro-trade-liberalization commitment that should represent a deep political problem for him in battleground states like Ohio and Michigan.
And for those of you who may believe policy really doesn’t matter to voters because it’s all about “character” and “trust” and “likeability” and so forth, McCain’s vulnerabilities go beyond wonky subjects like the fate of the country domestically and internationally. His much-vaunted “maverick” persona continues to be threatened by a vast track record of solidarity with George W. Bush and the GOP, and his reputation for a positive, transpartisan approach to politics may not survive his campaign’s steady descent into negative attacks on Barack Obama. And if his past behavior is any indication, there’s also a good chance that McCain will do or say something on the campaign trail, or in the debates, that makes him a lot less “likable.”
It’s always possible that McCain will successfully navigate all these potentially lethal problems, or that Obama and Democrats will fail to fully exploit his many vulnerabilities. But he’s got a tougher path to victory than a lot of nervous Democrats seem to realize.


Why Swift-Boating Obama Won’t Work

With the publication (and quick rise to the top of the bestseller lists) of The Obama Nation, a nasty anti-Obama screed penned by Jerome R. Corsi, the same bird who co-authored the 2004 anti-Kerry book, Unfit to Command, Democrats are quite naturally worried that the “swift-boating” of John Kerry is about to be replicated. Kerry himself seems to share this concern; his PAC has just launched an anti-smear website devoted to defending Obama and other Democrats from “swift-boating,” citing his own experience as a cautionary tale.
This is all perfectly understandable, and obviously, no one should have any illusions about the willingness and ability of GOP-allied operatives to pull off Big Smears. Corsi’s 2004 book was indeed the immediate precursor to the Swift Boat ads, and featured some of the same Kerry-hating personalities. And both phenomena fed directly into the frenzy of attacks on Kerry’s credibility and defense views at the Republican National Convention.
But there are reasons to think that the past won’t be repeated.
As Byron York of National Review pointed out today, Corsi’s 2004 book got attention in no small part because his co-author, John O’Neill, and most of the people “speaking” in the book via interviews, had actually served on Swift Boats in Vietnam. Corsi’s anti-Obama book has none of that ostensible credibility or news value; it’s just a collection of attacks on Obama by a thuggish right-wing hack, no different from what you’d hear on a right-wing talk show.
Secondly, and more importantly, the Swift Boat smears were perfectly aimed at the soft strategic underbelly of the Kerry campaign. They occurred immediately after a Democratic Convention that placed enormous emphasis on Kerry’s Vietnam War record as his preeminent credential for the presidency, without, unfortunately, presenting his record of Vietnam War protest (a big part of the Swift Boat attacks) in the right context as the other side of the same patriotic coin that led him to volunteer to fight in the war in the first place. The “revelations” in the Swift Boat assault were effective not just because Kerry didn’t challenge them aggressively enough, but because his campaign didn’t prepare for them in advance in how the candidate was presented to the public.
For all the talk about Obama’s “charisma” and “story,” he actually may be less vulnerable than Kerry was to attacks on his “personal narrative.” As a new Pew survey today illustrates, Obama’s credibility as a candidate is heavily based on the popularity of his policy positions. McCain is the candidate who is dangerously dependent on “character” and “biography” as a credential.
Finally, of course, there is zero chance that anti-Obama smears will go unchallenged. The Obama campaign decided a long time ago to abandon the once-prevelant belief that responding to smears gives them too much attention. And the fact that most attacks on Obama’s “story” inevitably go over the line into thinly disguised racism is a problem for the smear artists as well, as is evidenced by all the disengenuous whining from the McCain camp about Obama’s willingness to play “the race card.” Racist appeals are far more effective when they are subtle and implicit, not over-the-top. The fact that the whole political world is aware that race is a factor in this election means it won’t be as easy to deploy racial weapons under the radar screen.
So: I just don’t think this sort of crap is going to work for Republicans this time around. It doesn’t mean they won’t try it, but Democrats should skillfully fight back instead of panicking.


McCain’s Veep Games Show Ambivalence About Choice

In his column at WaPo‘s ‘The Fix,’ Chris Cillizza discusses Senator McCain’s latest veepstake trial ballon. Cillizza quotes McCain:

I think that the pro-life position is one of the important aspects or fundamentals of the Republican Party…And I also feel that — and I’m not trying to equivocate here — that Americans want us to work together. You know, [former Pennsylvania Governor] Tom Ridge is one of the great leaders and he happens to be pro-choice. And I don’t think that that would necessarily rule Tom Ridge out…I think it’s a fundamental tenet of our party to be pro-life but that does not mean we exclude people from our party that are pro-choice. We just have a — albeit strong — but just it’s a disagreement. And I think Ridge is a great example of that.

Cillizza sees it as a genuine veepstakers trial baloon. My guess is that what McCain is really up to here is trying to cool out pro-choice GOP women and PA Republicans, since he still harbors hope that he can be competitive in that state. Ridge will almost certainly get a big cabinet job if McCain wins. But putting a pro-choice veep on the ticket could open up a big can of ugly at the GOP convention, with angry ‘pro-lifers’ giving bitter interviews to anyone who will listen.
Also, Seema Mehta and Maeve Reston caught a revealing comment by McCain in their L.A. Times post, “Sounds like Tom Ridge is out of the VP picture” :

…Conservatives scoffed at the notion that McCain, already viewed with suspicion in some conservative circles, would choose a running mate who supports abortion rights. And McCain hinted Monday, perhaps unintentionally, that Ridge might not be on his short list.
During a visit to a General Electric plant in Erie, Pa., with Ridge in earshot, McCain was asked what he would do in his first 90 days in office. He replied, “Call Tom Ridge to Washington from whatever vacation he’s taking and get him to work.”

McCain is clearly worried about losing the votes of pro-choice women in the general election, even though he has cast his lot with a strong anti-choice position. He doesn’t want to discuss his position regarding criminalizing abortion in any detail because it could be a huge loser, with the rapidly-growing single women demographic and what polls show about their views on abortion-related issues.
Dems have much to gain by making sure the public, especially women swing voters, understand that he favors a constitutional amendment banning abortion, overturning Roe v. Wade and more Supreme Court justices who support criminalizing abortion. At some point during the campaign, he should be asked straight out “Do you favor criminal penalties for women who have abortions?” Letting him get to November 4 without answering this question on camera would be the real crime.


DCorps Survey: Economic Change Key to Winning Youth Vote

Democracy Corps and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner have just released the results of their fourth “Youth for the Win” survey of young voters, and the conclusion is good news for Senator Obama and Democrats — with a couple of caveats. Among the findings in the analysis:

The last six weeks saw the inauguration of a serious, McCain-sponsored offensive against Barack Obama, as well as an effort in the Obama campaign to “moderate” their candidate. And, at least among youth, the impact of these events has been notably modest. While we see some movement in Obama’s support among young people of color growing even stronger and softening a bit among white youth, overall this has been a period of remarkable political stability. Obama consolidated some of the gains we saw in the June survey and still posts a convincing 27-point margin (60 – 33 percent) over McCain…Historically, this lead exceeds Kerry’s margin among youth (54 – 45 percent) and reflects the Democratic Congressional margin in 2006.

However, the analysis also notes,

John McCain recovers somewhat from his post-primary nadir among youth, arguably highlighting a political price for the progressive failure so far to really define this candidate, but in their enthusiasm for Obama and their commitment to vote, young people have not changed. Most indicators still suggest both a record turn out and margin in November.

But it’s critical that Dems understand the economic struggles young people are facing:

As a more economically vulnerable demographic group—often competing for entry-level jobs with limited benefits, most surviving on a single income—young people then represented a “canary in a coal mine” of sorts for the rest of the electorate, previewing a broader concern over the economy….Nearly half are a missed pay-check away from having to borrow money. Three-quarters owe some manner of debt, including a third who owe student loans. And one in five has had a utility cut off for failure to pay a bill.

And, one of the key challenges for Dems:

Gas prices are, of course, a major concern among young people. In a recent survey of youth that GQR conducted for Qvisory, young people identified gas prices as their leading financial concern. This is also an issue where McCain and Republicans have, at least, an argument. Young people in this survey divide evenly on whether drilling for coastal oil is a good idea (44 percent say this drilling will hurt the environment and not help with gas prices; 44 percent say it is a good idea and will decrease gas prices). Even among liberal Democrats, only 51 percent support the environmental position here. Among young people facing a heavy financial burden—an overwhelmingly Democratic group (58 percent Democratic, just 16 percent Republican)—nearly 48 percent believe drilling in coastal regions is a good idea.

Tha analysis concludes:

Maintaining or even expanding the youth vote means speaking to their biggest issue—their real financial challenges. Arguably, neither Obama nor McCain has directly addressed their economic concerns in a fashion that meets young people where they are in their lives. It is about holding McCain accountable for the current economy (see last Youth For The Win report) and providing an alternative that can have a direct impact on their lives and economic standing….

DCorps’ next youth survey will address “what young people believe is at stake in this election and what they hope to change in this country.” No doubt it will find attentive readers among candidates and campaigns who are in it to win on November 4.


Ohio Opportunities

In what could be good news for Barack Obama’s campaign, Ohio election officials have announced plans to establish a one-week window from September 30 until October 6 when eligible voters can simultaneously register to vote and then cast early ballots. The window seems tailor-made to facilitate a strong turnout among first-time voters, particularly college students, of whom there are an estimated 470,000 in the Buckeye State. In national polls, Obama has been beating McCain by better than a two-to-one margin among younger voters (66-30 among voters 18-29 years old in the latest Washington Post/ABC poll).
There’s another small but potentially significant Ohio opportunity for Obama that I’ve been meaning to write about. One of the odd data points contributing to George W. Bush narrow win in 2004 in Ohio was his relatively strong performance among African-Americans: 16%, as compared to 11% nationally. (A gay marriage ballot initiative is generally thought to have been a factor in skewing the black vote in a conservative direction). Black turnout wasn’t particularly impressive, either (African-Americans accounted for 10% of the statewide vote, as compared to 12% in the Ohio Senate race two years later). There’s every reason to think that Barack Obama will improve on Kerry’s 84% support-level among African-Americans, perhaps by a significant margin, with much higher turnout. For all his appeal to certain categories of Democratic and independent voters, John McCain probably has less of a natural connection with black voters than Bush, if only because of the latter’s famous religiosity. If McCain’s campaign and/or supporters are perceived as engaging in race-baiting (a pretty good bet, as Peter Beinart argues today in the Washington Post), , then Obama’s advantage among African-Americans could become a real factor in a close statewide contest.
All in all, this supports Tom Schaller’s contention that a major investment in minority voter registration and turnout in Ohio by Democrats would be a very good idea.


Hump Day Grab Bag

The ‘Obamacan’ Movement got a nice bump yesterday, when two Republicans, Rep. Jim Leach (IA) and Jim Whitaker, mayor of the Fairbanks North Star Borough in Alaska, endorsed Obama, reports Kate Linthicum in today’s L.A.Times. Whitaker, also a former Alaska legislator (99-03), who supported McCain in the 2000 Republican primary, cited Obama’s stronger “intellectual capacity.”
In his NYT op-ed today, Thomas L. Friedman comments on McCain’s “perfect record” in opposing federal support for renewable energy and Greg Sargent amplifies the point in his TPM Election Central post,McCain Supports Tax Breaks For Oil Industry — But Not For Wind Power.” McCain is not only a good candidate for the ‘Big Oil’s Errand Boy” meme, but his commitment to ethical campaign finance, especially when Big Oil’s interests are at stake, is being questioned, according to McClatchey reporter Greg Gordon.
CBS News media columnist Jon Friedman urges Senator Obama to bristle less and relax more when confronted by press intrusions, which are only going to get worse — often hard to do, but generally good advice for any candidate, just about any time.
“To help the party doofuses and pundits — and the candidate himself — spare all of us another suicide-inducing election night,” Michael Moore has an advisory up at Alternet, “How the Democrats Can Blow It … in Six Easy Steps.”
Bill Cotterell of the Fort Meyers News-Press reports that Dem registration in Florida is up more than a quarter of a million this year, while new GOP registrants are up less than 100K and independents just under 50K. See also Rachel Kapochunas’s CQPolitics.com piece on the play of issues and demographics in the Sunsihne State.
Writing in The Guardian UK, TNR Senior Editor Michael Crowley echoes the argument that Obama must resist the temptation “to cruise at high altitude” and Dems must get engaged in unraveling McCain’s “political mythology.”
Political Animal Kevin Drum makes the case that Obama’s “McCain is the real celebrity” ad is pretty limp for an ‘attack’ ad.
So that’s what McCain really means by “drilling for oil.”


The Politics of a One-Term Pledge

There’s been some buzz over the last couple of days about a hint dropped by McCain operative Rick Davis that John McCain might revive the earlier-discarded idea of promosing to serve only one term. Steve Benin of the Carpetbagger Report provides a full analysis, and weighs the pros and cons (as does Tom Schaller at Salon’s War Room, where he concludes more emphatically that it makes no sense).
I dunno. McCain’s age isn’t the only issue here. Pledging to serve just one term–aside from creating some serious media attention thanks to the sheer novelty of the strategem–would reinforce McCain’s claim to be just a highly patriotic guy who’s answering a call to service rather than pursuing his own personal ambitions, or his party’s ideology. It might also appeal to voters who have doubts about both candidates, but who might be persuaded to prefer four years of one to a presumed eight years of the other.
But one thing is for sure: a one-term pledge would significantly raise the stakes on McCain’s Veep selection, who would immediately be viewed as a 2012-presidential-nominee-in-waiting. So it could really backfire on McCain if he chooses a running-mate who either (a) offends any of the various tribes of the conservative movement, or (b) has any potential 2008 general-election vulnerabilities. It would narrow his options significantly.


Abortion Plank: Meeting of the Minds?

Yesterday I characterized the abortion plank in the draft Democratic Platform as “the most forthright pro-choice plank in party history,” and noted a few factors in the wording that led me to this conclusion.
But today a lot of people who want the Democratic Party to be more hospitable to anti-abortion points of view are hailing the platform plank as a step forward from that of 2004, mainly because it endorses some measures that “abortion reduction” advocates have promoted.
Now it could well be that each side in this argument will notice that the other side seems happy, and reconsider its own positive feelings. But as someone who has been tangentially involved in platform drafting in the past, I know how hard it is to write something coherent on a subject like abortion with everyone watching every turn of phrase. And for now at least, you have to give this year’s Democratic platform wordsmiths a big gold star for coming up with language on one of the most emotional topics in the world that seems to please all Democrats.