Huffington's broadside against caution in the Kerry camp rings true from here on a number of points. Kerry always wanted to run as an incumbent - that's really all he knows how to to for a very long time. Each time in the Democratic Primaries he tried to get the aura of inevitability, and then walk forward saying little that hinted at his core. It worked only when there was a massive "stop Dean" ground swell, and there ever afterward, he could never break free of Bush.
Where I disagree is on "the economy" versus "national security". The two issues aren't seperable. The Republican pitch to red counties was "you will be handsomely paid for protecting the latte drinkers from the towel heads". This unifying message - however warped it might be - meant they could talk the same game on either side of the domestic/foreign divide. Kerry ended up saying that he would be better about doing this, which made people go "well, why not stick with the name brand terrorist killing, deficit running conservative?"
The problem wasn't that Kerry went out after the economy, it is that he could not draw the winning combination for defeating an incumbent: proving the foreign failure is proof of domestic incompetence. The domestic game is the ground game of politics, but to knock of an incumbent requires that you pull their ground game back: and that means stretching out the field.
Every defeated incumbent since Hoover has been defeated by a combination of domestic concerns combined with foreign policy failure:
- Truman in 1952 chose not to run because of a weak economy and the unpopularity of Korea. Eisenhower then defeated the Democrats by saying he would be in command.
- LBJ chose not to run because of the unpopularity of currency control policies and questions about the stability of the boom - combined with Vietnam.
- Carter was defeated by recession and inflation - combined with Iran.
- Bush I was defeated by the "jobless recovery" combined with his failures of diplomacy. (See throwing up in Japan).
The worse the economic failure, the less the foreign policy needs to be there - but the connection is simple and emotional. Economics is like meteorology - most people don't understand the technical jargon, but they do know they don't like to get soaked. But foreign policy, with its sharp and decisive actions, people have an emotional feeling as whether the CinC is sinking or not.
To win against an incumbent who is not presiding over a total economic meltdown (and it should be noted that the dominant issue between the election and inauguration in the Hoover-FDR transition was foreign debt relief, not the banking crisis) - is to show that their foreign policy is out of control and therefore the domestic crisis is the President's fault. Kerry could repeat over and over again that things were bad, but, until he could draw the parallel that it was the fault of Bush he could not make progress. The result was that a depressed electorate voted for status quo.
Strategy is not hard. You look at how poeple think about the world, and ask yourself which ones would come to a different answer if they thought about matters differently: if they had a different frame. The hard part is creating that imaginative frame and using language to do it. The wizardry is in the execution, which is very, very hard.
But the top level is very simple. Bush' plan from last year was "hold the states of 2000 and run up the score with the base to get a mandate". He attacked into the mid-atlantic to keep Kerry on the defensive, but largely spend his money on getting 5 million more votes than the time before, so that he could either overturn a narrow electoral defeat, or govern strongly with a majority of the popular vote. This is why the Republicans did not back Nader strongly - they didn't need him to divide the Democrats, and they didn't want anyone bringing out more left votes that would not have been there. The calculation this time was right wing turn out - driven by trying to nullify the "full faith and credit" clause.
Kerry's strategy was to be an incumbent - it nearly lost him the Democratic nomination twice. It won only in the Iowa slugfest, and took NH on momentum. After that, it was over. But Kerry really only went 2-3 with the one big upset of Iowa. Plenty of bad football teams do the same thing - the way Kansas City upended a better Atlanta team, and looked very good for awhile. That he lost the Presidential campaign is not surprising.
But I don't want to end with that: because Bush ran a truly horrible campaign. No victorious incumbent has had shorter coattails - even the embattled Clinton. No re-elected incumbent has gained fewer states, nor produced less enthusiasm. With a media that simply would not investigate Abu Ghraib, 911, Iraq, the economy - and a system where by headlines and pictures are slanted hard to the right - he could not manage to convince almost anyone that he was the man to trust. Reagan - starting from a landslide in 1980 managed to do more by 1984 - and he presided over two of the worst years for the American economy ever.
However, the difference is that Bush really is the incumbent: so when Kerry agreed with Bush on almost every substansive point, he talked to the ponyhawks like Friedman, and others who wanted "national security off the table" as an election issue - but not to the country at large, who wanted someone who would connnect the dots.
In short, the marketing rule applies: never go head to head with the brand leader without a differentiation.
