... is their ability to come up with one label and push it everywhere. This year the label is "flip-flopper" (with "tax hiker" coming in close second). I don't mean to be bashing Bush here: the simple fact is that in political campaigning, facts are irrelevant, or at the very least only fodder for distortion. Bush is very good at it. Kerry's still trying to find his voice.
Kerry's current strategy seems to blame Bush for anything that goes wrong. Jobs in the toilet? Bush's fault. High gas prices? Bush has something to do with it. Breakfast tasted a little stale this morning? Gotta be Bush. To sum up, Kerry's attacks just seem to be opportunistic, shoulda-woulda-coulda hindsight's 20-20 sort of thing. They also have the tendency to bite him in the ass if the numbers improve. "Hey, jobs are up this month; ergo John Kerry doesn't know what he's talking about. Again".
Another way that Kerry's strategy fails is that he's relying too much on voter education. Let's say that Kerry decides to make Bush's failure to buy dirty nukes the central campaign issue this year. Most Americans have never heard of this idea. It doesn't get around in the press much. Unlike Saddam Hussein, Americans haven't had ten years of negative associations to guide them into knee-jerk instinctive reactions to this political failure. As a result, raising this issue is only going to appeal to a small minority; the rest of America really couldn't give a shit -- even if it is an important issue relating to national security
Kerry can't afford to educate America at this point. Rather he needs come up with a label for George Bush and push it all the way to November with the single-mindedness that the GOP machine pushes their memes. But what should the label be? It needs to be something plausible: "Bush: soft on terror" won't work because it has a sort of up-is-down quality to it in the minds of voters (Bush has spent his entire candidacy defining himself as the Terror President. I mean, War on Terror President). I would like "irresponsible" seeing what Bush has done to our armed forces and federal budget.
But what I really think would be effective is a "Bush: secretive and unaccountable" campaign -- raising comparisons to Nixon's presidency whenever possible. It's plausible -- hey, presidents can be corrupt, and Nixon has a knee-jerk negative association even among Republicans. They are similar in their tight, secretive, unaccountable mannerisms; their attempt to control negative media with an iron fist. This could really punch up Bush's negatives without making Kerry seem like a big meanie for mentioning it.
What do you think?