Dems unified by hatred
by David Keene

As House Republicans prepared for the 1998 election, Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) suggested time and time again that since history was on their side, they shouldn't do anything to make it difficult for voters to move in their direction. All things being equal, he argued, the party in the White House would lose seats in the midterm elections following an incumbent president's reelection.

It didn't turn out that way, of course, and Gingrich is no longer Speaker. His strategy was to forgo laying out the sort of issues agenda that propelled the GOP to power four years earlier and, instead, rely on history and his partisans' almost visceral dislike of President Clinton, his wife, and everything they represented.

Their hatred of all things Clinton, he believed, would drive Republican voters to the polls in record numbers on Election Day.

The advice of those who suggested that Republicans that year needed something else -- like a program of their own -- was ignored, and Republicans around the country simply told voters that they should be elected because they weren't like Clinton.

Gingrich learned too late that year that while hatred of one's opponent may be a great unifier, it usually isn't enough to get people to the polls. Voters want more.

They want to know what those seeking their votes would do and why they represent a better choice than the alternative. Candidates who can't answer these questions usually come up short as even some of their own people stay home.

Voters are generally smarter than the candidates who seek their votes and the consultants who tell those candidates that voters can be fooled. Their reaction to the Gingrich strategy in 1998 was simple enough. It was as if they were saying, "OK, we get it. You don't like Clinton and the Democrats, but why does that mean we should vote for you and your friends?" That was a question the Republicans didn't answer that year, and it almost cost them the House.

The Democrats this year are in the same boat the Republicans were in then. They are unified going into Boston not by a vision of the future, but by their hatred of the opposition. Their animosity toward George W. Bush is, if you can believe it, deeper and more bitter that the Republican antipathy to the Clintons in 1998.

Their primaries were orgies of Bush-bashing and, as The Washington Post reported just last week, their presidential candidate's fundraisers have depended not on support for him and his policies, but on a hatred of this president by some well-heeled segments of American society who have contributed millions to John Kerry's campaign.

The word is that at least some Democrats do recognize the problem and are working desperately this week to change Kerry and his campaign into something more than a quasi-holy crusade to drive the force of Satan from the White House.

They are, we are told, trying to police things by admonishing convention speakers to go light on the Bush-bashing, and are committed to transforming the haughty New England liberal elitist they are nominating into a smiling, positive, quasi-populist ... a sort of grown-up John Edwards.

It's going to be tough, and will, if it works, amount to just the "extreme makeover" Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman suggests they are attempting, but they've got to at least try if they want to win. It'll mean exiling the Whoopi Goldbergs of the world and perhaps quietly suggesting to George Soros and Michael Moore that little more can be gained by comparing the president of the United States to Adolf Hitler.

Their problem is that the hatred of Bush goes so deep within the core constituency on which Kerry will depend for energy and votes this fall that he may not be able to get away with moderating both his tone and his policies.

Core Democrats seem willing to allow him to tell us how much he likes to hunt birds and loves the Second Amendment and have accepted as necessary the 1,001 other flip-flops designed to convince undecided and potentially hostile voters that his Senate voting record has been little more than an 18-year long aberration, but will they forgive him if he fails to share in the daily vilification of a president they loathe?

One wonders. The weakness of an "Anybody But Bush" campaign with Kerry cast as "Anybody" is masked by the fact that there are a lot of folks who will cheer such a campaign and the relatively even partisan and ideological division that characterizes the politics of the nation these days, but it is likely to turn off the voters he needs to win and help the Republicans mobilize the voters Kerry wishes would stay home.

Besides, what will the speakers who take the podium in Boston this week have to say if they forgo Bush-bashing?

 

Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, is a managing associate with Carmen Group, a D.C.-based governmental-affairs firm (www.carmengrouplobbying.com).