The article A Page or Two from the Tea Party Book had some good points with which I could wholeheartedly agree.
Merely saving the House and Senate is not enough. … We must increase our majority in the House by ten votes and take two or three additional seats in the Senate.
I couldn’t quite agree with some of the pages to be taken from the Tea Party Book, especially the ones about negative campaigning. My two responses to the article contain thoughts that I have expressed on this web site before and in many other places.
My first response was titled A Positive Kind Of Negative Campaigning.
Negative campaigning works really well for the underdog. For the assumed leader, not so much.
Just ask Senator Martha Coakley from Massachusetts and retired, under-dog politician Scott Brown who ran against her. What? Did you say it’s Senator Brown and Coakley went back to her job as Attorney General. I thought that was just a nightmare. You mean that really happened?
It is easy for the underdog, out-of-power to attack the programs of the assumed leaders and the in-power. There are real disappointments in any actual program and great promise in ones that have not been tried and tested. Scare tactics are not so easy to use against the underdog and out-of-power unless everything is going just great – and even then there are problems. Just ask President Al Gore.
I suggest positive kind of negative campaigning and ads. You keep driving home the reasons why your programs are necessary. You keep driving home how much better things will be when you do even more than what you have done so far. In passing you can mention the negative consequences of not marching boldly ahead. You can talk about what happens when you don’t have the courage to face the future and want to return to the false safety of an imagined past. You don’t even have to mention the other party nor the other candidates, or not hardly mention them. You might make it clear in the way you describe the good and bad alternatives that the ones that are good are yours and the ones that are bad are theirs.
If you cannot come up with a slew of positive reasons for your being in office and remaining in office, then perhaps you don’t really belong in office. People who really believe in the principles are disheartened by weak kneed defenses of those principles. Anything less than a vigorous defense of the positive cuts your chances of winning in three ways. 1. It emboldens your enemies. 2. It doesn’t attract many uncommitted. 3. It disheartens your supporters.
If you still can’t muster the strength to get up on your hind legs and fight, then you are the problem as much as the Republicans are. If the grass-roots have to teach the politicians how to do it, then teach we must.
With this positive kind of negative campaigning, you can win and even feel proud of the way you won. You can feel proud that you didn’t have to destroy politics to save it.
My second response was titled Pretend This Campaign Is A Job Interview.
If you can pretend this campaign is a job interview, then you can imagine the interviewer has asked you what are you greatest strengths. After you answer the question, they ask you what are your greatest weaknesses.
The savvy candidate says that the greatest weakness was not pushing hard enough for his superior programs. Another weakness was allowing the people who did not know how to run the country to water down your programs for the sake of bipartisanship. Another weakness was letting the minority threaten you without your standing up to the threat. When you have the strength, a bully will back down when confronted. But, you have learned from your mistakes. Tomorrow is a new day, and a revitalized candidate will hold onto her strengths and overcome those aforementioned weaknesses.
What the voters want to see is confidence that appears well justified. I don’t think the phrase, “I am confident that if I appease the Republicans just a little more, then we’ll get more done.”
If the Democrats appear to be backsliding a little from their program of the last few years, it just adds fuel to the idea that they were wrong and the Republicans have been right. Even for the Democrats who never really believed in the program in the first place, they ought to realize that there is no reason to vote for a faux Republican when they can have a real one. If you don’t go down fighting for your team, you will go down anyway.