Today's Philadelphia Inquirer offers a column by Dick Polman titled "Democrats' rare chance to go for gut." He starts by hypothesizing how Republicans would be treating a Democratic president who had done exactly what Bush had done. needless to say, the "nuanced" approach of the Democratic leadership isn't what he envisions.
Polman proposes that Democratic politicians should take this approach:
Grainy slow-motion footage of Osama bin Laden and activity at his training camps. Cue ominous music.
"Six years after Sept. 11, this man still roams free - thanks to George W. Bush and his Republican allies. They promised they would be tough. They promised to protect us here at home. But instead they took their eye off the ball, spending $2 billion a week in a futile war half a world away from our real enemy, imperiling our brave servicemen and women, and emboldening those who would come here to kill us. America can no longer afford the party of weakness. Vote Democratic, as if your life depended on it."
Now I haven't been in love with Polman's work; he usually strikes me as a second-rate Friedman. But he's dead-on about how the Democrats need to immediately and actively adopt a take no prisoners footing with Bush and the neocons. The Democrats need to make Osama their poster boy. They need to remind people that we went to Iraq because Bush let the Saudis push us out of the bases there (thus fulfilling Bin Laden's primary political goal), and they used the "Mission Accomplished" speech to cover up the fact. They need to make splashy ads about how Cheney and the other neocons have been unapologetic war profiteers.
Polman quotes political analyst Drew Westen
"Victory goes to those who fight, even if they sometimes fight dirty." Republicans make hyperbolic arguments, with few worries about offending voters, because, on balance, "voters prefer candidates who are clear on what they believe, even if it is not what [the voters] believe." (Witness Newt Gingrich, a notorious bomb-thrower while serving in the House minority; he wound up building a movement.)
At this point, there is no "clean, nuanced, principled" way to counter the danger resulting from this administration's callous indifference to its charge to govern for the benefit of the governed. I suggest that Democratic leaders take a page from the republican campaign text and make tough, didactic, inflammatory statements...and never back away from them.