The Race to Frame 2008 Is On, and the Winner Could Take It All
By Anne E. Kornblut
Sunday, August 12, 2007
President Bush came to office after the so-called "Seinfeld" election -- the mindless campaign of 2000, a race filled with chatter but fundamentally about nothing, like the hit television show.
Now that Bush's second term is winding down, a very different election is underway. Call it the anti-Seinfeld race: a campaign about everything, from the war in Iraq to oil policy to the environment to the "war on terrorism" to health care and beyond.
How do you frame an election this sprawling? Figuring that out is an urgent priority at more than a dozen presidential campaign headquarters, where Democrats and Republicans are busily trying to align the national zeitgeist with their candidates' strengths.
With Bush's approval ratings at historic lows, almost everyone on both sides agrees that the race could be summed up at this point in a single word: change. But a change to what?
Will 2008 boil down to continuing the U.S. commitment to the Iraq war and simply changing the commander in chief who's waging it, as several of the Republican candidates hope? Or will it be about a more radical sort of change -- a shift to the first female president, to the first African American president, to a new generation of leadership or even to a third-party candidate?
Will the electorate's primary consideration be competence and experience, after the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina and its mournful aftermath? Do voters want to relaunch the 21st century? To catapult forward into a different era? Or to return to the easier and more prosperous days of the 1990s?
"Elections are often more rejections of the prior administration than something brand-new," said the historian Garry Wills. "Even when Ronald Reagan was first elected, the exit polls said the main motive was to get rid of Jimmy Carter, not to elect Ronald Reagan. So the Democrats will have that going for them insofar as the election is retrospective."
On paper, Sen. Barack Obama would appear to have the edge when it comes to freshness. National polls show that he runs about even with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton when respondents are asked which Democrat "represents change," but his résumé is all about a break from the past -- about having spent only two years in Washington, opposed the war in Iraq from the outset and come from a different generation. "When you talk about the strength of his candidacy, if there is a national zeitgeist right now, it belongs to him," said Bill McInturff, a veteran Republican pollster who is doing work for Sen. John McCain of Arizona. To reinforce the point, Obama is embarking on a "Road to Change" tour of Iowa this month.
So is 2008 all about "turning the page," to borrow a phrase Obama has been using and reusing since the February speech that formally declared his candidacy? Not so fast. Clinton, with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, has declared her own vision of what the election is about, using dual parameters that suit her: experience and something new. Hence her campaign's double-barreled slogan: "Ready to Lead, Ready for Change." The concept is to offer two sides of the same coin, her advisers say -- a strategy that allows her to be about change and experience at the same time.
Strategists in both parties have learned from past elections that the candidate who successfully defines the debate often wins it. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush based his case for reelection on his foreign policy experience, arguing that a little-known Southern governor could not manage the perils of the new post-Cold War world. Bill Clinton took a completely different tack, based on the famous campaign mantra, "It's the economy, stupid." Clinton's framing of the race resonated far more with voters' concerns, and he went on to win.
More often not, a presidential race has two separate narratives, one Republican, one Democratic. Sometimes those storylines run close together; sometimes they're miles apart. The parties "always, to some degree, run at cross-purposes to one another," said the historian Robert Dallek. "If they're agreeing too much, they don't feel like they're setting forth a real program to attract voters."
The 1992 race hinged on two starkly different views of the campaign, but in other years, the Democratic and Republican nominees have fundamentally agreed on what the election was about. In 2004, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and President Bush both ran "national security" campaigns; Bush was just better at it.
Historians point to other examples where both candidates were on the same page. In 1932, the election was about the Depression (both Herbert Hoover, the Republican president, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his Democratic challenger, vowed to improve the economy). In 1984, it was about the Cold War and the size of the federal government (Ronald Reagan promised to keep the government small, while Walter Mondale said he would raise taxes to cope with the deficit, but they were both essentially talking about the same subjects).
So sometimes the campaigns revolve around the obvious. "Some elections are battles for what is the major issue facing the country," noted Michael Barone, the author of "The Almanac of American Politics."
"Usually the more pain we're in, the more things are going in a bad direction, the more elections seem pretty simple -- which is a call for some sort of change," said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist who worked on McCain's 2000 presidential bid. "When public opinion is a little less focused, the election is about smaller things, and it's harder to paint it in broad strokes."
Sometimes, Barone said, voters see around the corner before politicians do. "In 1972, the Democrats thought it was about ending the war [in Vietnam], but Nixon had already basically ended the U.S. involvement by the time the election came along," said Barone, who counts himself among the then-Democrats who thought that Vietnam would define that race, only to see the antiwar candidate, George McGovern, lose.
War is a major undercurrent again in 2008. But will Iraq be what the campaign is ultimately about?
Obama, who was against the Iraq invasion from the get-go, is counting on it, especially since the front-running Clinton voted to authorize the 2003 invasion.
But it remains to be seen how national security -- still a major factor in the national psyche just seven years after al-Qaeda's September 2001 terrorist attacks -- will fit into the equation. And will the "war on terror" (a term already rejected by former senator John Edwards of North Carolina as a simplistic bumper sticker posing as a foreign policy) continue to drive voters? Or has the electorate evolved into a post-post-9/11 mindset?
That's certainly what Edwards is counting on. He has become perhaps the biggest gambler in the top tier of Democrats, deciding to stake his candidacy not only on the Iraq war (which he voted for but now vehemently opposes) but also on domestic issues, particularly poverty. Though there has been little to suggest that the general election will be about the poor, Edwards has calculated that paying attention to domestic concerns will entrance the Democratic Party base enough to win him the nomination -- and that he can figure out the rest from there.
Douglas Brinkley, a Tulane historian, said that a campaign that's about Iraq plus national security would tend to favor the more seasoned Clinton, or perhaps another candidate who is advocating a careful, responsible withdrawal rather than an immediate departure. "It's like what Nixon faced in 1968: peace with honor," Brinkley said. "I don't think the country's mood is as antiwar as you think. It's more, 'We've done what we were supposed to do; it's time to come home.' "
Meanwhile, the Republicans are banking on the election's being about national security (traditionally one of the party's electoral strengths), firmly intertwined with the war in Iraq. That's a formula that worked for Bush in 2004 but failed his party miserably in the 2006 midterm elections, in which the Republicans lost control of both the House and the Senate to a Democratic Party galvanized by the war.
For all the public's misgivings about Bush's handling of Iraq, the GOP candidates hope that the electorate will still be reluctant to hand the mess over to the Democrats. In particular, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, the Republican front-runner, is betting that national security will trump all else -- and praying that the images of his dash to the scene of the 9/11 attacks will outweigh his pro-choice stands during the primaries.
For his part, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who is credited with cleaning up the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, is hoping that the election will hinge at least in part on a desire for a more competent executive. But even he -- a Republican who more or less agrees with Bush on the issues -- is running on change, using his experience outside the Beltway as his chief asset. Last Wednesday, he began airing a new ad in Iowa titled, "Change Begins." "Washington politicians in both parties have proven they can't control spending and they won't control our borders," Romney says in the ad.
McCain, meanwhile, has made several ill-fated gambles in recent months: that although the election will be about Iraq, it will also be about staying the course and winning; and that although immigration is a sticky issue with Republican voters, the Arizona senator would be rewarded for sticking to his unpopular principles. Neither bet has so far proven right, and McCain is dragging miserably in the polls.
Or could the election wind up being about something unexpected that happens between now and next summer? After all, with the ever-shifting campaign calendar, the parties' nominees may have nearly a year to compete before Election Day 2008 -- a span of time in which any number of events could shake the political landscape, from another terrorist attack on U.S. soil to a crumbling stock market to worsening chaos on the ground in Iraq to an international cataclysm still unforeseen. In presidential politics, candidates are even taught to expect such unexpecteds, known universally as the "October surprise."
Or could 2008 just turn out to be yet another personality-driven campaign, about which candidate voters would like to have a beer with -- or watch on television?
For all the serious issues at hand, the race's celebrity lineup so far suggests that the latter could still occur. Giuliani has rocketed to the top of the Republican field more for his 9/11 fame than for his other accomplishments. Fred Thompson, the former Tennessee senator, is rising in the polls more because of his starring role on NBC's "Law and Order" than for his record in the Senate. Clinton, of course, is perhaps the most famous woman in the world. And Obama is an international celebrity in his own right, chased by paparazzi, photographed in his swim trunks and scrutinized as much for style as for substance. Which might mean that 2008 could prove to be a sort of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" election -- a sequel campaign, in the image of the HBO show that followed "Seinfeld," which is not so much about nothing as it is about celebrity.
Anne E. Kornblut is a political reporter for The Post.
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