COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

The postmortems are starting already.

Here's Dick Morris:

The Fox News poll asked Kerry supporters if their vote for the Democrat could best be described as motivated by support for Kerry (41 percent) or by opposition to Bush (51 percent). By contrast, Bush voters emphatically say, by 82-13, that they are voting for the president rather than against the challenger.

To paraphrase Animal House's Dean Wormer, "Rabid, drooling, and angry is no way to win elections, son."

Read the whole thing. Morris actually does some real reporting. He comes up with poll numbers and lays them out. He makes his case.

Contrast Morris with this foot-stomping, blue-in-the-face temper tantrum from The American Prospect:

The problem begins with the fact that majorities of the public tend to agree with Democrats on the issues. This isn't universally true, of course, but it's true with regard to more issues (perhaps many more issues) than not. On health care, the environment, investment, education, just about everything except national defense, majorities lean toward the Democratic position.

This sounds like a good thing. But in fact, it's an incredibly bad thing, because it leads Democrats to 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.

The premise that 1.) Democrats have a clear advantage on "issues, and 2.)The Kerry Campaign has actually RUN on issues are each laughable.

On the first point: George Bush had already erased Democratic advantages on Social Security privatization (a plan Bill Clinton had already seriously floated himself in 1997), and much was made of Bush's ability to co-opt Democratic issues such as education in 2000.

The pro-voucherites have penetrated the African American communities and defeated Democrats there on that issue.

Here's a column written in March of 2001, on the issue by issue attitudinal shift among voters:

And when all voters were asked specifically about education, which party came out ahead? Republicans were preferred over Democrats by 7 points, 45 percent to 38 percent. Other private polling shows a slightly smaller Republican edge on education. The GOP's advantage represents an amazing turnaround from the days when Democrats owned the issue and Republicans were trying to recover from their efforts to kill off the U.S. Education Department.

On partial birth abortion and gay marriage, conservatives can bend Democrats over the lumber pile almost at will, forcing Democrats into a Sophie's Choice like scenario simply by forcing a vote on legislation no one even expects to pass. They've done it time and again. And Kerry's got to be hoping nobody puts him on the spot about it during the debates. (Ya wonder why he's not been giving interviews?)

As for the author ceding the Republican advantage on national security, well, news flash: Democrats are not going to win without at least parity on national security issues because NATIONAL SECURITY HAPPENS TO BE PRETTY DAMN IMPORTANT RIGHT NOW, GENIUS!!!!



Any Democrat claiming they've got a 'clear advantage on the issues,' and whistfully wishing to themselves "if only this campaign could be on the issues, everything would be fine" is at once delusional about the state of the electorate and ignorant about the finer points of game theory.

Delusional because they are operating in a political world which doesn't exist, and running against an opponent they WISH they were running against (Jerry Falwell or Jesse Helms) while the actual candidate is running rings around their decision cycle.

Ignorant about game theory because they fail to grasp this inalterable truism: the clearer an advantage one side has on the ISSUES, the less likely it is that the campaign will actually focus on them. If one side feels it is at a clear disadvantage on the issues, they will simply not allow a general engagement on the issues, for the same reason a master swordsman in a blood feud is more likely to get shot than stabbed.

Now, which side feels it is at a clear disadvantage on the issues?

Discounting the PAC attacks on both sides, which the campaigns themselves do not directly control, it's pretty clear that John Kerry took his biggest moment in the limelight thus far--his prime time speech in the Democratic primary--and made it NOT about the issues, but made it almost entirely about the character issue, almost entirely about Viet Nam.

Even his most memorable sound byte--the ONLY memorable sound byte of his speech--was "I'm John Kerry reporting for duty." (Apparently he was absent the day the CPO's were teaching the proper way to render a salute).

If John Kerry really felt he could win on the issues, then why is he running on bits of colored ribbon?

No. The Democrats thought they could ignore the issues and win on character. The Swift Boat Vets blindsided them. And they can't take responsibility for their own message--or lack of it.

Splash, out

Jason