Wednesday, February 9, 2005
Bad News Donkeys
Bush has been particularly skillful at pushing Democrats into the corner with the dreaded "Pessimist" sign hanging overhead. Iraq is, for many Democrats, the most maddening example.
They believe Bush made a terrible mistake by starting the war and that he went on to execute it incompetently. Yet, by virtue of that very failure, he has put them in the position of supporting his policy as the only responsible way out.
It's never easy to be in opposition. You're always reacting. You can't present a unified message. You have a responsibility to criticize the incumbent and speak up for the neglected, but criticizing can easily be depicted as carping.
None of this is news to Democrats, which is why they sandwich every grumpy speech between declarations of optimism and paeans to the resilience of the American spirit. But a little Ronald Reagan rhetoric doesn't turn you into Ronald Reagan.
Fred Hiatt: Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry spent much of last year telling voters how badly off they were.
The economy had tanked, jobs had fled and George W. Bush (aka Herbert Hoover) "has caused these things to happen," the Massachusetts senator told the Detroit Economic Club in September.
As it turned out, there were at least three drawbacks to this line of argumentation.
One was that it wasn't true. Yes, Bush had inherited an incipient recession and the subsequent recovery had been slower than previous bounce-backs to generate jobs. But when the numbers came in last month, the U.S. economy turned out to have grown in 2004 by a very healthy 4.4 percent, producing a respectable (though far from record) total of 2.2 million jobs.
Second, misdiagnosis led Kerry to a number of misguided prescriptions, many of them centering on "Benedict Arnold" chief executives.
But worst, at least from a political perspective, the hectoring made Kerry look like a grump. A challenger can run on a bad economy if people really feel bad; if he seems to be trying to convince them that they should feel bad, he's in trouble.
Bush has been particularly skillful at pushing Democrats into the corner with the dreaded "Pessimist" sign hanging overhead. Iraq is, for many Democrats, the most maddening example.
They believe Bush made a terrible mistake by starting the war and that he went on to execute it incompetently. Yet, by virtue of that very failure, he has put them in the position of supporting his policy as the only responsible way out.
It's never easy to be in opposition. You're always reacting. You can't present a unified message. You have a responsibility to criticize the incumbent and speak up for the neglected, but criticizing can easily be depicted as carping.
None of this is news to Democrats, which is why they sandwich every grumpy speech between declarations of optimism and paeans to the resilience of the American spirit. But a little Ronald Reagan rhetoric doesn't turn you into Ronald Reagan.
Fred Hiatt: Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry spent much of last year telling voters how badly off they were.
The economy had tanked, jobs had fled and George W. Bush (aka Herbert Hoover) "has caused these things to happen," the Massachusetts senator told the Detroit Economic Club in September.
As it turned out, there were at least three drawbacks to this line of argumentation.
One was that it wasn't true. Yes, Bush had inherited an incipient recession and the subsequent recovery had been slower than previous bounce-backs to generate jobs. But when the numbers came in last month, the U.S. economy turned out to have grown in 2004 by a very healthy 4.4 percent, producing a respectable (though far from record) total of 2.2 million jobs.
Second, misdiagnosis led Kerry to a number of misguided prescriptions, many of them centering on "Benedict Arnold" chief executives.
But worst, at least from a political perspective, the hectoring made Kerry look like a grump. A challenger can run on a bad economy if people really feel bad; if he seems to be trying to convince them that they should feel bad, he's in trouble.
