Republicans bad strategy

Ok, so I’ll work on this whole “regular” thing. I read somewhere that if you want your blog to earn a readership you need to post at a consistent time so people can eventually integrate reading it into their habits. Perhaps if I had more faith that I will one day have a “readership” or anything that resembles more than a hodgepodge of curious friends and family I would be better at this “schedule.” I’m happy to write for my hodgepodge though, and I’m sure my hodgepodge doesn’t lose sleep over my irregularity (is there a bowel movements joke here?)

I am motivated to return to my Interneting by an argument I would like to make about the Republican Party. I firmly believe that they are focused on a myopic and short-sighted goal: discredit Obama. There is no strategic vision here. You’ll never win elections with “them the bad guys.” There has to be some believable element of “we are good guys.”

If the Republicans vote almost totally against the stimulus, water it down, fight it tooth and nail, they can later argue that Obama wasn’t able to transcend partisanship. Sure, they look like assholes, but he also looks like he failed in his mission. Given how impossible it will be to fix the economy in 2 years, they can also argue that the stimulus didn’t work and was wasteful spending. Here is the problem, they also look like assholes. They look petulant and uncooperative. I don’t think they care. I think they honestly believe that 2010 will be all about Obama: if he looks good they loose, if he looks a bit tarnished maybe they have a chance.

The Republicans are at a rare crossroads and have a real opportunity to reinvent themselves and their message yet all they want to do is drag down the President (in a time of full crisis no less). Here is some evidence of what it is like inside their heads. This is part of a transcript taken from the post-election conference at the Dole Institute (soon to be published on the Dole Institute website, just as soon as I can finish editing the transcript for them : )

The broader context of conversation is basically this: it is suggested that McCain could have beat Obama on the strength of his character but that his attempts to trash Obama ruined that strength of character. The McCain campaign managers respond that the whole election was only about Obama and if they didn’t discredit him they would lose. The participants in this particular conversation are Nate Silver from fivethirtyeight.com, Kelly O’Donnell from NBC News, Sarah Simmons, Deputy Director of Strategy for the McCain Campaign and Christian Ferry, Deputy Campaign Manager for the McCain Campaign. (the program also had campaign managers from every significant primary campaign, two from Obama’s, and representatives from the New York Times, New York Post, TalkingPoints Memo, Edison polling, and maybe something else I’m forgetting but these other participants weren’t speaking up at this particular point of dialogue).

Nate Silver:
It seems to me that the in between would be to have one message but to have it be John McCain’s message. Sometimes it felt like it was a more generic Republican, Steve Schmidt message and not John McCain’s message.

Kelly O’Donnell:
For example?

Nate Silver:
Well, the celebrity thing, which I think was effective in the short term. That’s not really McCain’s brand. If you’re concerned about campaign finance and not going with public financing being against his brand, well so is Britney Spears, I think.

Sarah Simmons:
I actually thought that was completely consistent with his brand. He was saying that he was a guy of substance. We were running against a guy who had basically gotten into this race and had turned into a celebrity such that reporters didn’t ask him serious questions. Voters would parrot back his message with, “we’ll fix that economy with a dash of hope and a splash of change.” Part of our argument was that there wasn’t a substantive message coming out of the Obama campaign. I think that is a reasonable thing to discuss on a political campaign. You guys probably disagree, I hope you disagree, but I think that’s a reasonable thing to be discussing on a campaign.

Christian Ferry:
We decided early on, and I’d be curious to know your thoughts, that this campaign was about Barack Obama. This was a change election. We’ve said it over and over again. The primaries were about change. There was going to be a new direction and a new president and change. From our perspective this campaign was going to be about Barack Obama. If Barack Obama could clear the hurdle and show that he had the experience, that he had what it takes to be President of the United States, chances were he was going to win this election. The celebrity ad, you say that is not John McCain’s brand, but it wasn’t about John McCain, it was about Barack Obama.

Nate Silver:
This is where I disagree. If you look at the head to heads with Obama and other Republican candidates back in the primaries, Romney was losing to Obama by 12 or 15 points. Fred Thompson was losing by 12 or 15 points. Giuliani was losing by 10 points. Only McCain was competitive in the first place. That says that it is a lot about McCain. The things that make McCain not Mitt Romney were important and some of those were lost.

Christian Ferry:
I would disagree. I mean, this was a change election. Looking back on primary polling to make that conclusion is useful but at the end of the day it was going to be a match between someone who had won a Republican primary and someone who had won a Democratic primary and at that point you’ve got to reexamine the race and look at it all over again.

Sarah Simmons:
Barack Obama’s candidacy changed between the primary and the general election too. I think he became, I do think the process was very good for him as a candidate. I think he became stronger. He became more articulate. He became better at delivering his message. I watched a lot of the primary debates and there was a lot of “um” and “uh.” You guys are right, he is better in a long format because it’s difficult for him. I don’t know if it’s difficult for him or if he wasn’t as practiced at delivering his message in a short format. I also think that’s like comparing apples to oranges.

Christian Ferry:
I do believe that in this environment John McCain was a particular kind of Republican who had a chance to win in this difficult environment. But in order for him to have that shot people needed to come to the conclusion that the change Obama was offering wasn’t the direction the country needed to go.