BuzzFlash presents P.M. Carpenter

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Get Negative, Stay Negative

by P.M. Carpenter

Republicans are big on giving Democrats advice these days, especially on how to conduct campaigns. It's like Tonya Harding coaching Nancy Kerrigan on the finer points of sportsmanship.

The advice is simple. If you guys, the Democrats, have any chance of winning in 2004, it's only by staying upbeat and positive in message. Negative themes and negative campaigning are voter turnoffs. You'll go nowhere just being against things.

One hates to appear ungrateful in the face of all this magnanimous Republican counsel, but thank you, no, Democrats should pass.

On the surface, the advice seems sensible. There's no question that voters say they prefer the positive to negative and prefer candidates who propose new ideas versus slamming old ones. That's what voters say, anyway. The reality is they love to see, and are often persuaded by, a gladiatorial contest in which the provincial underdog tears the Roman Goliath into little political pieces.

Conservatives began appreciating this concept when taking on "the liberal establishment" 30 years ago with fresh verve. A review of their tactics shows what put them in power. There was one key: New conservatives -- the New Right -- whined and fumed and grumbled and griped their way to the top.

They campaigned against everything.

They ridiculed government spending (remember those days?), always neglecting it included such things as immunizing Johnnie and feeding Aunt Maggie. They denounced federal deficits (remember those days?), a real conservative bête noire until the Reagan administration began racking them up with childlike abandon.

They portrayed labor unions as all-powerful people oppressors. (I recall receiving an "objective" questionnaire from Jesse Helms' political action committee once. It began, "Do you want labor unions to control your life? Yes [ ] No [ ].") They trashed environmental regulations purely as love interests of starry-eyed tree- and frog-huggers.

They ripped into abortion rights, homosexual rights, school busing, affirmative action, the Equal Rights Amendment, the U.S. department of education, school-prayer prohibitions, strategic arms limitation talks and the United Nations as Satan's commandments, notarized and executed by vile liberals out to close church doors and ban baseball.

Republicans were against everything but shiny new weapons programs. They went negative all the way, all the time.

As rhetorically significant was their wholesale rejection of critical social analysis -- the kind of policy wonking Democrats have a habit of droning on about in debates and on the stump. The New Right instead committed itself to sweeping, and simplistic, one-sided arguments. In this union of negativism, scapegoatism and one-sidedness, the movement collectively transformed itself into a political refuge for anxious working- and middle-class Americans looking to point the blame for whatever ailed them.

Sure, the transformation alienated some of the Old Right's intellectual base, but strategic newcomers didn't much care. Wrote New Right activist Kevin Phillips of the wordy Bill Buckley crowd: "We [cannot] expect Alabama truck drivers or Ohio steelworkers to sign on with a politics captivated by Ivy League five-syllable word polishers.... Most of the ‘New Conservatives' I know believe that any new politics or coalition has to surge up from Middle America." With a little help, that is.

The surge did come, and not from complicated policy analyses, upbeat messages and pleasant words from the right. The surge came out of anger transmitted through plain-spoken negative messaging. Newt Gingrich only made New Right tactics official when he advised colleagues in writing years later to "go negative early." That was the battle plan from the beginning. It worked.

It could work again -- for Democrats. And of course that's what Republicans fear. In fact, it's about the only chance Democrats have. Tearing into the conservative record of bloated deficits, corporate handouts -- oh hell, that list could on for pages -- would do more to dethrone Bush II than any campaign of political pleasantries.