Failures are, perhaps, the most sound source of positive lessons you could ask for. Given that, what better place to go to for lessons than that epic failure, George Bush? We are already well versed with the Rovian tactic of attacking your enemy where he's strong. What we seemed to have missed is that strategy works particularly well with it's complement: own your weaknesses to make them your strengths. Granted, this can't be done with every weakness, but it can be done with enough to make a difference. Witness Bush's collection of monumental weaknesses and how he made them appear to be strengths: he was an unserious, idiotic drunken, drug addict who skated by on his family name his whole life. How did he transform these into strengths? Well, the media narrative was that he was an affable, repentant man who may be prone to misspeaking, but who isn't?
Make no mistake, this was Bush's skill from a lifetime of compensating for his own personal weakness, not Rove's or anyone else's. We can see an example in the anecdote from Bush's congressional run during 1978 in Texas when he was challenged that he wasn't even from TX, his response was something to the effect, "Well, my mother was on CT at the time, so I thought I should be there, but I always wanted to be a Texan." (I'm having trouble finding the source for that - I recall it from some documentary of some sort on Bush).
It was the same thing Bush was trying to do at the WH Correspondents Dinner when me made the jokes about looking for WMDs in his office. So you can see that it is a delicate skill to master, but highly useful.
Why does it work? Who knows. Perhaps because it comes across as authentic in a world full of politicians who lie to us all the time. Any candidate who tries to use a similar strategy will certainly need to be careful not to create echos of Bush in the voters' minds.
So, how can the Democratic candidates use this? Well, I have only one concrete example in mind, though I'm sure there are more: the Edwards hair kerfuffle. The campaign paying for a haircut should be chalked up to a clerical bookkeeping error, if it hasn't already, for starters. Then Edwards is going to need to deal with the hair thing in general. I don't think there's any way around it - he needs to deal with this head on. The best way I can think of for owning it would be going on Saturday Night Live and doing a skit where he does something like that scene in There's Something About Mary where she gets the spike in her hair. Or perhaps he can do a skit as if Kerry had won in 2004 like Gore's skit that somehow incorporates jokes about his hair.
Does anyone else know of weaknesses the candidates should be owning instead of ignoring or running away from? Better yet, does anyone have an idea of a non-suicidal way to own them?
Edit: fix spelling error.