At first it appeared that Jonathan Chait’s analysis of the Democrats’ defeat in The New Republic (online Nov. 8, print Nov. 18) would be interesting. “The Democrats,” he wrote, “did not lose the Senate because of any tactical or strategic miscalculation. There’s nothing they could have done that would have resulted in any appreciably better outcome.”
It also appeared that he was going to reject the argument of those who blamed the defeat on
the Democrats’ catastrophic inability to communicate their message. This sort of explanation has, in the past, been used to make defeat seem contingent and easily reversible; after presidential defeats by Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis in the ’80s, liberals maintained that the party didn’t need to change its message so much as it needed to find a more telegenic messenger. Alas, in this instance, the Democrats’ communication problem is structural and self-reinforcing.
But in the end those first appearances were deceiving. Despite his apparent opening criticism, Chait offered nothing more than a warmed-over “what we have here is a failure to communicate” argument. Nothing wrong with the message, or even the messengers. What was initially said to be a “structural” problem turns out to be nothing more than the fact that “the Republican Party enjoys certain basic advantages when it comes to getting its message across,” such as money.
The GOP also enjoys allied media outlets like Fox News and talk radio, which disseminate its message to its base in a way that Democrats can’t duplicate.
What are the New York Times and Dan Rather, potted plants?
Perhaps the Democrats’ biggest problem is not a “structural” problem of communications but the fact that at the moment the Republicans’ base, or at least their voting base, is larger. Or does Chait believe talk radio is dominated by conservatives because of a cabal of plutocratic station owners?
UPDATE – Daschle on Dems’ Defeat: “Don’t Blame the Message”
Tom Daschle has been reading too much New Republic, or vice versa:
Rejecting critics’ suggestions that Democrats lost the battle for Congress because they had the wrong message — or no message at all, Senate Democratic Leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.) said yesterday it was really just a failure of communication.
Democrats were effective in pointing out deficiencies in the Bush administration’s economic policies but less successful when it came to selling their own strategies, Daschle said at his first press briefing since Democrats lost the Senate and the GOP solidified its hold on the House in Tuesday’s elections. “It isn’t for lack of a strategy,” he said. “It’s for a lack of articulating that strategy effectively.”
You have to expect them to say things like this, even if they are furiously looking for ways not to just repackage their message, but possibly also to change parts of it.
Focus-group city. They’re probably going to spend an awful lot on that.