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HATE AND VENOM DO NOT WIN ELECTIONS
By Tim Siggia
March 27, 2004
Right now there is a piece entitled, "What Me Worry" floating around the Internet. It is yet another hate-filled, venomous, personal attack on President Bush, based, as most of them are, on distorted half-truths and outright lies. The title is an obvious reference to the long-standing cover boy of Mad Magazine, Alfred E. Neuman, to whom liberals are fond of comparing our president. It chronicle's Mr. Bush's biography from his college days to the present, depicting him as a liar, an underachiever in college, a deserter from the National Guard, a bumbling failure at business, a mass murderer as governor of Texas, and a president both inept and dangerously trigger-happy. It is not the first of such diatribes we have seen from the crowd that still believes Bill Clinton can do no wrong, and it will not be the last, up to November and beyond.
The Democrats and their liberal allies obviously still don't get it. And while, with this piece, I may be handing them a prescription for contention, if not victory, in November, I do so in the complete confidence that my admonition will not be heeded. If Alfred E. Neuman is the liberal depiction of President Bush, then their conception of the average American voter could probably best be personified by Li'l Abner, from the comic strip of the same name by the late (and conservative) Al Capp. So, believing as they do that liberals have a monopoly on culture, sophistication and intellect, and that the rest of us are simply the great unwashed masses, they will disdainfully discard my warning, which is simply this: Hate and venom do not win elections. Fair-minded Americans, for the most part, do not respond positively to negativistic mudslinging. What they look for is a positive message of intent on the part of each candidate: a resume of accomplishments and plans for the future from the incumbent, and from the challenger not only healthy criticism, but a statement of what he would do better and how he would do it. It is this second part that the Kerry campaign has to date not provided.
Ask a typical liberal why he is voting for John Kerry, and his answer, inevitably, will be something along the order of, "He's not George W. Bush." A statement of the obvious, which tells us nothing about Kerry himself. As a United States Senator, Kerry has come down on both sides of many key issues. Because his entire political career has been as a legislator, we have no previous record of governing to which we may refer in order to guage his potential as chief executive. All we have to go on is his campaign rhetoric, which of late shows him coming down with the same sort of foot-in-mouth disease that sent former front-runner Howard Dean tailspinning into oblivion.
Americans need a reason to vote for a candidate, not merely against his opponent. Republicans knew this in 1994, when they could have based their entire campaign on the misperformance of Bill Clinton, whose popularity, thanks mainly to the Hillarycare scheme, was at an all-time low at the time. Instead, they produced the Contract With America, a prescription for what they would work to accomplish if elected. Democrats responded in typical Democrat fashion: they pooh-poohed the Contract With America, calling it the Contract On America, with all the usual negative demagoguery. The positive message was the one that resonated, and Republicans gained control of both House and Senate for the first time in 40 years.
Bill Clinton knew of the need for a positive message also, though, in typical Clinton fashion, he would look for somebody else to provide it for him. Bill Clinton, from all the evidence, has never had an original idea in his life. His political genius, as it were, resides in his being a thief of ideas, rather than a creator of them. What he lacks in originality, he makes up for in his uncanny ability to recognize and seize an opportunity. Bob Dole gave him that opportunity in 1996, when he metaphorically offered himself up as a bridge to an earlier, better time. Clinton wasted no time, but jumped on that analogy, turning it around to his own advantage: he would build a bridge to the 21st Century. It was classic, typical Slick Willie, but the message resonated. Enough voters liked the sound of a bridge to the 21st Century that they returned Clinton to office, and didn't seem to mind that Clinton's bridge had a toll booth every fifty feet. In like manner, rather than go to the trouble of putting together a platform of his own, he instead co-opted many key provisions of the Contract With America, claiming the authorship as his own.
So what is the positive message of the Democratic Party today? There doesn't seem to be one. What would John Kerry, if elected, do better than George W. Bush is doing now? We don't know. In fact, Kerry, so far, has done little to truly define himself in positive terms since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. The only message America is hearing from the Democrats right now -- and that on a steady, ceaseless drumbeat -- is that which could be the headline of virtually every column Molly Ivins has written since Mr. Bush became governor of Texas: "I hate, loathe and despise George W. Bush." This message, of course, will fire up the True Believers who would have voted Democratic under any circumstances. But if this is all the Democrats have to offer the voters, they will find little, to their dismay, that the voters will offer them in November.
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