Dick Morris on the single most amazing thing about this year’s campaigns

(Note: a commenter explains how the congressional race in his distrct backs up Morris’s observations to a “t”.)

Morris and his wife Eileen McGann write in today’s New York Post:

Running from Bam

The single most amazing thing in this year’s campaigns is that no one is defending President Obama’s legislative accomplishments.

Obama’s impact has been revolutionary: radically changing our health-care system, betting our national solvency on “stimulus,” erasing the line between the public and private sectors. Yet there is an almost total lack of support for his program on the stump.

Democrats’ campaigns consist almost entirely of personal attacks on their opponents. If they dabble in issues, they go for those on the periphery of our politics, trying to milk fear from GOP discussions of privatizing Social Security and tax reform.

But nobody is arguing that the stimulus worked or that ObamaCare is a good thing or that GM is recovering because Obama bailed it out.

Most Democrats mention Obama or his program only to distance themselves from the man and his ideas. Even those who vote with him 95 percent of the time herald their “independence” and run as far from him as they can.

The only Democrat who has stepped forward to boldly defend ObamaCare in his campaign is Wisconsin’s Sen. Russ Feingold. Yet, since he started airing ads applauding the president’s health-care reforms, he’s fallen from 8 points behind to 12 points—which offers a clue as to why nobody else has taken up the chant.

Even as the Dems go far out of their way to avoid a national message, Republicans are remarkably disciplined in their advocacy. They cite the Obama legislative record, often in quite impartial terms, and leave it up to the voters to turn against the Democrats who support it. They have only to mention the words—“stimulus,” “TARP,” “ObamaCare”—to drive voters to their ranks.

It’s not unusual for candidates from the president’s party to avoid him on the stump and beg off from his events in their districts. But this is the first time so many lawmakers have run away from their own voting records.

One can well understand if they refuse to embrace Republican descriptions of their bills. But they won’t even step up with their own descriptions, to try to sell the positive aspects of their own legislation. The president’s program is an orphan.

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Alexis Zarkov writes:

Dick Morris wrote, “Democrats” campaigns consist almost entirely of personal attacks on their opponents. If they dabble in issues, they go for those on the periphery of our politics, trying to milk fear from GOP discussions of privatizing Social Security and tax reform.”

I certainly see that in my Congressional District (CA-11)—challenger David Harmer running against Democratic two-term incumbent Jerry McNerney. McNerney’s local television ads are almost exclusively personal attacks on Harmer. It’s actually hard to understand what the ads are saying. They seem to boil down to criticizing Harmer for having once worked for a bank. They accuse Harmer of taking the TARP money. McNerney voted for TARP. The only non-attack ad shows McNerney working along a road with war veterans (or people posing as such) because he takes credit for a new veteran medical facility located in the Central Valley.

McNerney won’t hold constituent meetings, and he won’t debate Harmer. They did have one rather lame debate in August, but at McNerney’s insistence it was closed to the public. The two candidates appeared with a questioner in a empty studio. The two candidates did not question or otherwise engage each other. They might as well have been sitting on different planets. During the debate McNerney appeared terrified. As someone said, he looked like a kidnap victim making a ransom video. Evidently his campaign strategy is to “go dark,” and avoid any kind of public scrutiny of his voting record. Incredibly McNerney is packaging himself as an “independent.” But he voted for Obamacare, TARP, the stimulus package, the Waxman-Makey Climate bill. Harmer claims that his voting record matches Pelosi’s something like 93 percent of the time. I haven’t checked this figure, but it’s credible.

If the other Congressional races look anything like mine, then the Democrats are in big trouble.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 13, 2010 10:55 AM | Send