It's been an unusally good couple of weeks for relations between the Democratic Party and the press. Kerry has seen his profile dramatically heightened, and during that time has received very little in the way of cheapshot Gore-ing. In fact, his record of military heroism has constantly been both implicitly and explicitly contrasted with Bush's ne'er-do-well, half-assed stint in TANG. As a result, the first bid media wave to introduce Kerry to the majority of Americans has portrayed him as the model citizen-soldier, one who fought honorably in a war that he never supported, but returned to fight just as hard to end the war. Not a bad first impression.
Meanwhile, the Bush campaign has been overtaken by malaise. The "Mars Attacks" strategy went nowhere. The SotU was a bust that left even Noonan wondering what went wrong. Bush turned in a diffident performance on MTP, was forced to play defense, and failed to resolve any of the difficult questions imperiling his image as a bold, trustworhy leader. Indeed, the major news story of February has been whether or not Bush was AWOL, a story that most Dems had resigned themselve to seeing ignored.
The results of the focus on AWOL are clear. Kerry is cleaning up in the Dem primaries and is building a lead over Bush in national polling. But I worry that the Kerry campaign and the Democratic Party are not taking full advantage of the situation. Today on MTP, Charlie Rangel turned in a pretty damn good performance. He promoted Kerry's record and vision, and made Bush look fairly awful. But when the subject turned to AWOL, Rangel got caught up in the partywde habit of focusing on the legalities of AWOL, and the question of "was he or wasn't he there." True, Rangel did also raise the questions of "why did he go into TANG?" and "why'd he leave early to go to Hahvard?", but he didn't tie those questions to a larger theme. He didn't say, "you know Tim, the problem is that George Bush got special treatment because of his social status, because of who his father was. And that's the kind of thinking that has affected his entire administration. That's why he thinks it's OK to give tax cuts to millionaires while public schools crumble -- he's always lived in a world where the wealthy elite, like him, get special treatment." And that's what we need to start doing -- not only on the AWOL question, but on every issue.
It's a truism that the most successful campaigns are those that manage to stay on message, who bring everything back to the campaign's theme. Kerry may have the seeds of a theme, but it's certainly not as well-developed as Edwards' brilliant Two Americas. I like Two Americas a lot, and would love to see Kerry lift it -- but if he doesn't, he needs to quickly develop a theme that is as simple, compelling, and easy to integrate into every facet of the campaign as Two Americas has been for Edwards.
Instead of just shouting "AWOL! AWOL!," we need to begin tying the micro issue of Bush's military misadventures into a larger theme about privilege and, yes, "Two Americas." We need to make the AWOL issue part of a seamless metanarrative about the fundamentally elitist vision of the GOP. If we don't, we risk having to hop from sexy issue to sexy issue, riding each until they flame out -- or backfire, leaving us looking like purveyors of dirty politics. Indeed, the AWOL issue may be reaching its end, and an insistance on talking about it, in the absence of a larger reason to do so, may well end up hurting the Dems. But if we tie it into a broad theme of GOP elitism -- along with tax cuts for the rich, the war on working people (overtime, OSHA standards, etc.), and the continuing quagmire in Iraq -- we'll be able to keep AWOL alive, and keep it in the minds of Americans well past the point where it would have faded into memory had it been treated as a campaign scandal-of-the-month.