Oh, Dems and Kristof "Get It," Alright
I'm afraid the normally spot-on Captain Ed Morrissey stumbles this morning with his missive on the DisLoyal Opposition's "re-branding" strategy.
First, here's what the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof had to say about the pied piper of re-branding and the person he believes will lead the Democrats back to glory: Hillary Clinton.
If the Democratic Party wants to figure out how to win national elections again, it has an unexpected guide: Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Senator Clinton, much more than most in her party, understands how the national Democratic Party needs to rebrand itself. She gets it - perhaps that's what 17 years in socially conservative Arkansas does to you.
I would suggest it was her's and Bill's eight years playing the Gingerbread Man game in Washington, D.C., but otherwise the principle holds.
Mrs. Clinton took a hugely important step in January when she sought common ground and described abortion as a "sad, even tragic choice to many, many women."
The Democratic Party commits seppuku in the heartland by coming across as indifferent to people's doubts about abortions or even as pro-abortion. A Times poll in January found that 61% of Americans favor tighter restrictions on abortion, or even a ban, while only 36% agree with the Democratic Party position backing current abortion law. ...
What has been lethal for Democrats has not been their pro-choice position as such, but the perception that they don't even share public qualms about abortion. Mrs. Clinton has helped turn the debate around by emerging as both pro-choice and anti-abortion.
That is potentially a winning position for Democrats.
Indeed it is. Or at least it was during the Clinton years.
But the Captain doesn't think it will work now.
[I]nstead of finding candidates who consistently represent th[e] mainstream, re-branding just means having the same people who pushed the party out of the mainstream suddenly shift their positions back.
Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? He fooled the townspeople once, then twice, but couldn't fool them a third time, and then the wolf showed up for real. The conventional moral of the story is that one should always tell the truth. The lesser known alternative lesson is that one should learn to tell more varied and creative falsehoods.
That is part & parcel of what made the Clintons so successful in winning re-election in 1996 and the second-term spin wars that followed. The secret of that success was not, in fact, much of a secret at all: audacity. They would say things that targeted demographics wanted to hear. And most of those targeted demographics would buy it.
I will freely admit that at the time I never believed this would be the end result of their serial dissemblings. Indeed, this attitude was an outgrowth of my disbelief that they'd ever get elected to begin with. After they did, and proceeded to brazenly heave every centrist promise overboard and bulldoze the country to the far left (as the Captain references vis-a-vie HillaryCare), the result was the 1994 GOP avalanche, and my cocksure certainty that Mr. Bill was dead meat in '96. I even speculated that he wouldn't be renominated, on the grounds that surely his party would see the handwriting on the wall and act rationally.
Sounds a lot like this argument, doesn't it?
People won't buy that again, nor will anyone outside of New York trust a politician who treats voters as if they were amnesiacs. Kristof uses abortion as the primary issue for Democrats and urges them to follow Hillary's example of paying lip service to pro-lifers. What he wants from Democrats amounts to the worst kind of cynical doublespeak...
There's only one slight detail that Mr. Morrissey is missing: people will buy cynical doublespeak. They did throughout the Clinton years, and with Hillary as standard-bearer, there's no reason to think they won't do so again.
Captain Ed is, I think, suffering from the euphoric myopia brought on in conservative circles by the stunning incompetence of the Michael Moore-on wing of the Democrat Party in throwing all nuance and subtley out the window in favor of utter, abject asshattery. The moveonniks now dominate their side of the aisle, pull the strings of their congressional leaders, and are frenziedly pissing away all the painstakingly reacquired mainstream credibility scammed by the Clinton machine.
Republicans are the slack-jawed beneficiaries of a collective act of political hari-kari without precedent in American history. And it's made a lot of pachyderms forget how the Clintons, with a bit of skill at "cynical doublespeak," ran rings around them not all that long ago.
Morrissey also draws the wrong conclusion from the failed flip-floppery of John Kerry:
One would think that after all the flip-flopping their presidential candidate did in the last election and the result he got at the ballot box, Kristof and the DNC would learn that "re-branding" won't fly. It allows the opposition to rip Democrats apart on the stump and "brand" them as untrustworthy and dishonest. Telling Democrats to lie about their political beliefs in order to get elected isn't a strategy - it's a recipe for eternal minority status.
Au contraire, if I may be permitted a lapse of ironic bilingualism. It wasn't the "how can we fool 'em today?" strategy that was bad; it was that their candidate was a hapless boob at its execution. Kerry wouldn't change positions from month to month or week to week - he'd change them daily. He was a liar the way an overturned tortoise is a streaker. The core of being a successful con artist is to be nimble; to never let your suckers pin you down; to keep all those plates spinning at once. Lurch was trying to juggle the plates with his hands tied behind his back. I knew this early on and predicted that after Kerry was formally nominated and came under increased media scrutiny, his bumbling deceptions would make him a national laughingstock. The Swiftboat Vets, as it happened, did the rest.
However, Hillary Clinton is no John Kerry. And what she may lack of her hubby's gregarious charm she more than makes up for in smarts and discretion. She won't spend the next three years playing shell games; she's already carefully rebuilding the New Democrat facade that got her (indirectly) her first couple of leases on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. By the time 2008 rolls around, and with Big Media reinforcement (and, thanks to the FEC, no blogosphere to pick at the stray loose end), her '90s escapades will be ancient history, her centrist mask so impregnably entrenched (including as a deficit hawk) that "the opposition ripping her apart on the stump and branding her as untrustworthy and dishonest" will be seen by the vast majority of the electorate as "mean-spirited desperation" that boomerangs on the Right and propels Mrs. Clinton to victory, just like it did her husband sixteen years earlier.
Politics has always been, and always will be, a matter of which candidate is the better salesperson. In this decade GOPers have drawn as foes lunatics and stiffs. In 2008 that hegemony by default will end.
I hope we'll be prepared for it, because if the Captain is any indication, we've got a long way to go.
UPDATE: Richard Vigilante provides me backup on NRO today. His conclusion:
"Don't forget, our people really are Christians. They really do believe there should be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 who had no need. Look at all the capital Joe Lieberman picked up with family-values folk over the years by talking our talk. Of course he's never actually done anything, but we swoon over him out of sheer desperate gratitude for a Democrat we can connect with on any level.
"Still, you are right about one thing. Hillary is going to be very useful. She is about to teach our coalition partners a very painful lesson, which is that she can talk the talk they've been talking for years and just as well. Gore couldn't, Kerry wouldn't. But she can and she will."
Hmmm. Maybe that's right. Maybe this time the only way out for our guys will be to actually do something on family issues, including some things many Republicans find hard, like maybe a marriage amendment. Up to now, conventional Republicans and supply-siders have never had to stretch for the family agenda. Now, thanks to Hillary, they're going to have to — or they'll lose.
First, here's what the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof had to say about the pied piper of re-branding and the person he believes will lead the Democrats back to glory: Hillary Clinton.
If the Democratic Party wants to figure out how to win national elections again, it has an unexpected guide: Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Senator Clinton, much more than most in her party, understands how the national Democratic Party needs to rebrand itself. She gets it - perhaps that's what 17 years in socially conservative Arkansas does to you.
I would suggest it was her's and Bill's eight years playing the Gingerbread Man game in Washington, D.C., but otherwise the principle holds.
Mrs. Clinton took a hugely important step in January when she sought common ground and described abortion as a "sad, even tragic choice to many, many women."
The Democratic Party commits seppuku in the heartland by coming across as indifferent to people's doubts about abortions or even as pro-abortion. A Times poll in January found that 61% of Americans favor tighter restrictions on abortion, or even a ban, while only 36% agree with the Democratic Party position backing current abortion law. ...
What has been lethal for Democrats has not been their pro-choice position as such, but the perception that they don't even share public qualms about abortion. Mrs. Clinton has helped turn the debate around by emerging as both pro-choice and anti-abortion.
That is potentially a winning position for Democrats.
Indeed it is. Or at least it was during the Clinton years.
But the Captain doesn't think it will work now.
[I]nstead of finding candidates who consistently represent th[e] mainstream, re-branding just means having the same people who pushed the party out of the mainstream suddenly shift their positions back.
Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? He fooled the townspeople once, then twice, but couldn't fool them a third time, and then the wolf showed up for real. The conventional moral of the story is that one should always tell the truth. The lesser known alternative lesson is that one should learn to tell more varied and creative falsehoods.
That is part & parcel of what made the Clintons so successful in winning re-election in 1996 and the second-term spin wars that followed. The secret of that success was not, in fact, much of a secret at all: audacity. They would say things that targeted demographics wanted to hear. And most of those targeted demographics would buy it.
I will freely admit that at the time I never believed this would be the end result of their serial dissemblings. Indeed, this attitude was an outgrowth of my disbelief that they'd ever get elected to begin with. After they did, and proceeded to brazenly heave every centrist promise overboard and bulldoze the country to the far left (as the Captain references vis-a-vie HillaryCare), the result was the 1994 GOP avalanche, and my cocksure certainty that Mr. Bill was dead meat in '96. I even speculated that he wouldn't be renominated, on the grounds that surely his party would see the handwriting on the wall and act rationally.
Sounds a lot like this argument, doesn't it?
People won't buy that again, nor will anyone outside of New York trust a politician who treats voters as if they were amnesiacs. Kristof uses abortion as the primary issue for Democrats and urges them to follow Hillary's example of paying lip service to pro-lifers. What he wants from Democrats amounts to the worst kind of cynical doublespeak...
There's only one slight detail that Mr. Morrissey is missing: people will buy cynical doublespeak. They did throughout the Clinton years, and with Hillary as standard-bearer, there's no reason to think they won't do so again.
Captain Ed is, I think, suffering from the euphoric myopia brought on in conservative circles by the stunning incompetence of the Michael Moore-on wing of the Democrat Party in throwing all nuance and subtley out the window in favor of utter, abject asshattery. The moveonniks now dominate their side of the aisle, pull the strings of their congressional leaders, and are frenziedly pissing away all the painstakingly reacquired mainstream credibility scammed by the Clinton machine.
Republicans are the slack-jawed beneficiaries of a collective act of political hari-kari without precedent in American history. And it's made a lot of pachyderms forget how the Clintons, with a bit of skill at "cynical doublespeak," ran rings around them not all that long ago.
Morrissey also draws the wrong conclusion from the failed flip-floppery of John Kerry:
One would think that after all the flip-flopping their presidential candidate did in the last election and the result he got at the ballot box, Kristof and the DNC would learn that "re-branding" won't fly. It allows the opposition to rip Democrats apart on the stump and "brand" them as untrustworthy and dishonest. Telling Democrats to lie about their political beliefs in order to get elected isn't a strategy - it's a recipe for eternal minority status.
Au contraire, if I may be permitted a lapse of ironic bilingualism. It wasn't the "how can we fool 'em today?" strategy that was bad; it was that their candidate was a hapless boob at its execution. Kerry wouldn't change positions from month to month or week to week - he'd change them daily. He was a liar the way an overturned tortoise is a streaker. The core of being a successful con artist is to be nimble; to never let your suckers pin you down; to keep all those plates spinning at once. Lurch was trying to juggle the plates with his hands tied behind his back. I knew this early on and predicted that after Kerry was formally nominated and came under increased media scrutiny, his bumbling deceptions would make him a national laughingstock. The Swiftboat Vets, as it happened, did the rest.
However, Hillary Clinton is no John Kerry. And what she may lack of her hubby's gregarious charm she more than makes up for in smarts and discretion. She won't spend the next three years playing shell games; she's already carefully rebuilding the New Democrat facade that got her (indirectly) her first couple of leases on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. By the time 2008 rolls around, and with Big Media reinforcement (and, thanks to the FEC, no blogosphere to pick at the stray loose end), her '90s escapades will be ancient history, her centrist mask so impregnably entrenched (including as a deficit hawk) that "the opposition ripping her apart on the stump and branding her as untrustworthy and dishonest" will be seen by the vast majority of the electorate as "mean-spirited desperation" that boomerangs on the Right and propels Mrs. Clinton to victory, just like it did her husband sixteen years earlier.
Politics has always been, and always will be, a matter of which candidate is the better salesperson. In this decade GOPers have drawn as foes lunatics and stiffs. In 2008 that hegemony by default will end.
I hope we'll be prepared for it, because if the Captain is any indication, we've got a long way to go.
UPDATE: Richard Vigilante provides me backup on NRO today. His conclusion:
"Don't forget, our people really are Christians. They really do believe there should be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 who had no need. Look at all the capital Joe Lieberman picked up with family-values folk over the years by talking our talk. Of course he's never actually done anything, but we swoon over him out of sheer desperate gratitude for a Democrat we can connect with on any level.
"Still, you are right about one thing. Hillary is going to be very useful. She is about to teach our coalition partners a very painful lesson, which is that she can talk the talk they've been talking for years and just as well. Gore couldn't, Kerry wouldn't. But she can and she will."
Hmmm. Maybe that's right. Maybe this time the only way out for our guys will be to actually do something on family issues, including some things many Republicans find hard, like maybe a marriage amendment. Up to now, conventional Republicans and supply-siders have never had to stretch for the family agenda. Now, thanks to Hillary, they're going to have to — or they'll lose.
posted by JASmius at 9:47 AM
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