"Harry Reid Throws the First Punch"

[applegrove]

Harry Reid Throws the First Punch

By John Dickerson at Slate

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/01/harry_reid_s_face_the_nation_interview_the_majority_leader_went_on_the_offensive.html

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This year was always scheduled to be one for pushing and shoving from both parties. The president's team almost always loses seats in midterm elections. Since World War II, the average has been six seats when a president is in his sixth year, which coincidentally is the exact number Republicans need to take control of the Senate and demote Harry Reid. Seven of the seats that Democrats are defending are in states Mitt Romney carried. Six of those states are ones that Romney won by double digits. (Voters have increasingly chosen Senate candidates from the party they prefer in presidential elections.) Given these stakes, if Reid didn't push first, he was likely to be on the receiving end of a shove.


In 2010 and 2012, Democrats faced similar challenges with the electoral map and won by defining their opponents as extreme early in the process and then pouncing on mistakes. Democrats can only hope for candidates as helpful as Richard Mourdock, the Indiana Senate candidate who said that even rape was something that God intended, and Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, who said that pregnancy rarely results from “legitimate rape.”* These remarks put the candidates and party on the defensive and allowed Democrats to rally female voters, a key part of their base. In 2012 Democrats were so successful exploiting those two men as characteristic of the Republican Party that it came up time and again in conversations I had with undecided voters weighing their presidential choice. (Obama's campaign team worked to make this happen, of course.)

Replicating this success is a two-part process. First, Democrats must prepare the ground, then their candidates must shove their opponents into the hole. The two coming fights over unemployment benefits and the minimum wage are part of a larger economic fight about inequality. The policy reasons for talking about the issue are unassailable—even Republicans like Sen. Marco Rubio are talking about inequality—and these two specific measures are broadly popular. But there is also a larger strategy. Democrats are trying to define Republicans more broadly as unfeeling and uncaring agents of an extreme ideological wing. In the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, when voters were asked which party shows compassion and concern for people, 45 percent said Democrats and 17 percent said Republicans. The president in his weekly radio address on Saturday wasn't doing anything to kindle the bipartisan momentum of the end of last year. He said for Republicans to deny unemployment benefits would be "just plain cruel."


By hitting on these issues dear to the Democratic base, the party will continue to raise lots of money, but will the message actually move voters? Democratic strategists say that individual candidates need all the help they can get, so the national effort can't hurt. But for the message to be effective, Republican candidates will have to embody the stereotype as Mitt Romney did in the famous secretly taped video of his remarks about the 47 percent of the country that would not vote for him.




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[Dawson Leery]

1. k/r