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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
To close the sale with the public, the Democratic front-runner should can the populist rhetoric and talk to Americans about an "opportunity society."
Feb 2, 2004 | Let's face it: John Kerry isn't the Democrats' dream candidate. He's got a list of Senate votes and public statements as long as your arm (longer!) that the Republicans will use to typecast him as a stale, out-of-step Massachusetts liberal. And his campaigning style is, shall we say, not exactly electrifying.
But he is an improvement over Howard Dean in the electability department. And despite the problems mentioned above, he probably also has an electability advantage over John Edwards or Wes Clark (though this is less clear).
To radically simplify, a presidential candidate needs to impress voters in three ways: as a commander in chief and defender of national security; as a steward of the economy and a custodian of the domestic agenda; and as someone who can connect with voters as he campaigns for the nomination. In each of those areas, Kerry achieves threshold credibility -- that is, he's good enough to make most voters give him a closer look without saying, "No way can I vote for that guy."
Instead, voters (at least our typical primary voters) might say: Kerry as commander in chief? He seems plausible. Kerry on domestic issues? Well, pretty good. He seems to know what he's talking about. Kerry as campaigner? Not exciting, sure, but at least he's disciplined and doesn't say a lot of goofy stuff.
There you have it. Threshold credibility! Contrast that with Dean, who seems implausible to many as a commander in chief and who, as a campaigner, has shown an inability to keep a lid on it when he really needs to. Or compare it with Clark, who seems very plausible indeed as a commander in chief but seems painfully thin in the domestic area, and who has shown himself not quite ready for prime time on the campaign trail. Or with Edwards, who is a great campaigner, with a pretty good to excellent domestic agenda, but who falls short in the commander in chief department.
Looked at this way, Kerry, with threshold credibility in all three areas, is logically the guy Democratic primary voters would turn to as they move from protest to who-can-beat-Bush politics.
It seems possible -- even likely -- that Kerry will be able to parlay this threshold credibility advantage into enough support to get the Democratic nomination. But will that be enough for him to win the general election? Almost certainly not.
Credibility in these departments merely means voters will give him a careful look. He'll still have to close the sale, and there are reasons to worry that Kerry has not yet found the themes and signature programs that will enable him to do so. Certainly his revival of warmed-over Gore-style populism does not augur well. Kerry has been putting this populism front and center in his recent campaign speeches, including his victory speech Tuesday night in New Hampshire:
"I have a message for the influence peddlers, for the polluters, the HMOs, the drug companies, big oil and all the special interests who now call the White House home: We're coming. You're going. And don't let the door hit you on the way out."
Now, there's a lot to be said for such a theme. As it was with Bill Clinton in 1992, it is probably an effective way to consolidate the support needed to get the nomination. And it can and should be an important part of the case to be made against George Bush in the general election campaign. Polls consistently show that Bush and his administration are viewed as being on the side of big corporations and the wealthy, not the average American. It would be political malpractice on Kerry's part not to emphasize this.
But that emphasis -- especially "the people vs. the powerful" rhetoric --shows what you're against more than what you want to do. (Kerry would do well to borrow some of Edwards' more optimistic approach as well as Edwards' whole frame that Bush's tax and other policies are a radical shift toward rewarding wealth instead of work.) To succeed, Kerry needs to get beyond populist critique to a positive, compelling vision of where he wants to take the country. Here are some ideas.
Start with the economy. Criticizing its shortcomings is fine and, even with the pickup in growth, there's still likely to be plenty to find fault with in 2004. In all likelihood, the Bush administration will wind up presiding over a net loss of jobs -- particularly manufacturing jobs -- which is quite extraordinary by historical standards (not since the disastrous administration of Herbert Hoover, to be precise). But compared with the situation that helped doom Bush's father's reelection chances, both the unemployment rate and the level of economic pessimism are likely to be lower than they were in 1992.
Therefore, even more than Bill Clinton's campaign in 1992, Kerry's campaign has to be about the future of the economy and the country in general -- a future that Republican policies have seriously compromised. As pollster Stanley Greenberg argues in his new book, "The Two Americas," the future that would resonate most with American voters is an opportunity society of the type envisioned by the Democrats of John F. Kennedy's era. Such a society would give everyone access to the resources and education to get ahead and would be radically counterposed to where Bush is taking the country.
