Every now and then a political journalist mines true gold as opposed to so much of the pyrite we are used to from the breed--I am tired of the "pundit" word, and some political reporters deserve a loftier moniker. At this moment I have elevated Jonathan Rauch, a senior writer and columnist for National Journal, to that position, based in part upon the article excerpted below, which in this incarnation is a reprint by REASON Magazine. Mr. Rauch's article, is at once a brilliant work of presidential electioneering-history reportage and analysis, and a brilliant piece of strategical campaign advice. I will entice you with a couple of lede graphs; I fully expect that you will want to read the rest:
This year as in every presidential year, it's the economy, stupid. "I'm reasonably relaxed about it," the first President Bush said recently of the upcoming election, "because I believe that elections are decided by the economy. I know mine was." And so Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, needs to establish his bona fides on foreign policy and national security without upstaging the bread-and-butter issues that will seal the race.
Right?
Wrong. This year Kerry would be better advised to throw the post-Vietnam Democratic playbook out the window and reconnect with a different Democratic strategy, one whose time, after 44 years, has come again.
It is 1960. A Democratic senator from Massachusetts faces Richard Nixon, a candidate who boasts eight years of White House experience and is arguably the fiercest Cold Warrior in the mainstream of the Republican Party. The retiring Republican incumbent is no less a personage than Dwight D. Eisenhower, the beloved general who won World War II. As if that were not daunting enough, the Democratic nominee faces a credibility gap. He is young, inexperienced, and little known to the country. The Democrats do have one strong card, which is that the economy is struggling to emerge from a recession. What the Democrats should do, then, is obvious: Shift the race to favorable terrain by focusing on the economy.
John F. Kennedy does not do that. He does the opposite. He attacks the Nixon-Eisenhower incumbency on, of all issues, national security—not from the left but from the right.
