The question of whether John Kerry should be talking about issues of domestic policy or foreign policy has gone round and round. Every political columnist, every blogger, has had a say. It's not a simple question, and Karl Rove's ruthless jujitsu can turn any strengths into weaknesses—but I say Kerry must address both.
People do care about healthcare and Social Security and the environment and jobs. These are the Democrats' core issues, and people know that Kerry will be on their side when it comes to such issues. Or, to put it slightly differently, by election day they must be reminded of what they know already: there are two Americas, and Kerry will take care of the one they belong to. Every speech and every ad must contain at least the subtext that Bush is for big corporations and the superrich, and Kerry is for you.
But that's not enough in these days of taut nerves and jangling fear. The dangerous worldwide anti-American hatred that Bush has stirred up, added to the psychotic atmosphere he conjured from the attacks of 9/11, requires the strong stance of a reliable guardian figure as well. We can no longer rely solely on Clinton's "It's the economy, stupid." That recognition is what the Democratic convention was all about, the salutes and the Vietnam stories and the flags, that John Kerry is a reliable guardian, a commander in chief with experience who can get it right. (It's also what the Swiftees and Cheney have been trying to undermine, of course.)
Kevin Drum, for one, thinks that foreign policy is the only thing that matters:
It's all about 9/11, Iraq, terrorism, and national security, baby. This election is going to be won on that issue, and Kerry needs to convince the country that he can handle it better than Bush. And really, considering the botch Bush has made of national security, that shouldn't be all that hard.
I don't believe there's any need to choose one set of issues over the other. It is possible for Kerry's language to make connections between both sets on semantic terrain that is friendly to Democrats. Security is what we need, security against both terrorist attack and economic shock, against bombs and job loss, against hijacking and ill health, against bad people and bad water and air. A guardian is who we need, someone who will protect our physical well-being and our economic well-being, who will be a guardian on the borders and in the corporate offices, in the airports and in the retirement funds, overseas and at home.
The narrative—and it's a better narrative for its essential truth—can then continue to say that John Kerry is that guardian, and he will be a more reliable guardian than Bush, because his method is ameliorative rather than confrontational, which is the only way to overcome the great rifts Bush has created at home and away. Two Americas will become one America again, and internationally we will again have more friends than enemies.
Some say, however, that whatever issues the Democrats choose to talk about, and however well they talk about them, it may not be enough to win. That's Michael Tomasky's thesis in The American Prospect this week:
Democrats … believe that they can win on the issues. So a Democratic presidential candidate's pollster goes out into the field and comes back with data proving that 54 of percent of the people are with us on this issue, and 61 percent of them are with us on that one, and so on. And so the pollster tells the candidate, "Just talk about the issues, and everything will be ducky."
Republican pollsters, meanwhile, conduct the same polls, and they study the same data.
They tell their candidates, "Actually, boss, we can't really win on the issues, so we'd better come up with something else." Well, after the past six weeks, we all know what that something else is. It's character. That is, make the election about the other guy's character.
Therefore, says Tomasky, Republicans singlemindedly ignore or obfuscate the issues and turn the campaign narrative into a story about character: Bush is the kind of person you can trust, and Kerry is not. Oddly, this is terrain that should be friendly to Democrats as well. Bush has lied about nearly everything, killed tens of thousands of people unnecessarily, destroyed the jobs he has not diminished, fouled the biosphere, gutted the Constitution, and heaped mountains of debt on our grandchildren. Every challenge, great and small, he has shirked or bungled.
As Kevin Drum, having made the case for issues, writes today, "there's nothing wrong with running on character anyway," adding:
George Bush, for example, has shown disastrously poor judgment in practically every area of his life and every area of his politics, and I'd very much like to see John Kerry make more hay out of this. After all, we're voting for a person, not a white paper.
So Kerry is clearly a more reliable, truthful person, and it's true as well that he supports the policies most Americans support. Republicans, however, have planted in many voters' minds the lie that he is unreliable, that he does not meet challenges head on.
Their success, incomplete though it is, stems partly from their well-funded, decades-long propaganda campaign, which has created and instilled in many Americans a simplistic narrative of weak Democrats and strong Republicans. This complex legerdemain is best explained by the linguist George Lakoff, who has described three contributing factors:
- linguistic distortions—like the Orwellian phrase "Healthy Forests"
- metaphoric drumbeats—like the misleading phrase "tax relief"
- the implied moral values of even deeper metaphors—like the newly dangerous world that calls out for a "strict father family"
It's essential for Democrats to engage Republicans on this linguistic-metaphoric basis, and that approach is possible in the course of this campaign. But the real work in this area will take a dedicated effort and many years, honing and publicizing the progressive message just as conservatives have done. (I wrote more about Lakoff's ideas in two notes, here and here.)
It's Mark Schmitt, writing in his thoughtful blog The Decembrist, who pulls together these ideas in the most satisfying and practical way:
If I were running the issues department of the Kerry campaign, or any campaign, the sign above my desk would not be James Carville's "It's the Economy Stupid": my sign would say, "It's not what you say about the issues, it's what the issues say about you." That is, as a candidate, you must choose to emphasize issues not because they poll well or are objectively our biggest problems, but because they best show the kind of person you are, and not just how you would deal with that particular issue, but others yet to rear their heads.
The specific challenges that will become most important over the next four years are not yet known. The candidate who wins will be the one who is seen to have the personality and the strength of character to face and overcome whatever challenges voters have imagined. Everything else is just uncorrelated data.
