According to David Broder and Dan Balz of the Washington Post, Kerry is going local:
On the GOP convention’s final day, Kerry strategists told reporters in New York that they were launching a television ad campaign to emphasize the economic issues they believe are uppermost for voters in battleground states. They plan to portray Kerry as the candidate who cares most about local concerns, whether it is nuclear waste storage in Nevada or job loss in Ohio.
….
“What we [the Kerry campaign] have to do is look at all these different places, these individual battlegrounds, state by state, and figure out how we’re going to win each and every one of them,” Devine said. “. . . I think they have a national campaign and a national message, which isn’t going to differ a lot if you’re in Florida or Ohio or Nevada.”
Sounds like the Kerry forces plan to cede the Commander in Chief/terrorism/foreign policy issues to the Republicans, unless of course Florida and Ohio and Nevada have different foreign policies.
I’d been looking forward to an exciting final eight weeks and now it seems the election is all but decided, so I’ll toss out my uneducated opinion of what the Democrats should have done: run an Edwards/Lieberman ticket, portraying both as family men of faith; unconditionally praise Bush on the fight against terrorism, pledge to continue his strategy, call for an increase in military pay and benefits, denounce the conspiracy theorists, and then say nothing more on national security; focus relentlessly on jobs, outsourcing, health care, Social Security, Medicare, education, prescription drugs, child care, and college tuition costs, and declare that Bush and the Republican Congress have stolen from hard-working Americans, senior citizens, veterans, children, and the country’s future to benefit billionaire CEO’s and their multinational corporations.
Yes, I know it’s hardly an original message for Democrats, but I think it would have made for a much more interesting and close election.
Nels – I think such a ticket would have made a powerful appeal, and if Edwards/Lieberman would have had the courage to rejuvenate Lieberman’s pre-Gore position on racial preferences (he opposed them before running for VP) might have found some supporters in surprising places.
Lieberman and McCain have this in common: I like them both much better when they’re not running for president.
The “going local” strategy has one major flaw: it must ignore the underlying philosophy of the Democratic Party, which has been to federalize every issue it could identify for the past 60 years.