Anger is a great way to start a revolution but a bad way to win an election. John Kerry found that out in 2004 when he asked Americans to punish George W. Bush for his offenses, including winning the 2000 election and invading Iraq.
The idea was that once Bush had been thoroughly discredited, the American electorate would welcome any reasonable alternative. It was the second part of the plan that came up short.
Instead of selling Kerry, Democrats tried to get Americans to share their contempt for the incumbent and drive him from office. The message was pessimistic, mean-spirited and rooted in victimhood.
Kerry’s argument was that Democrats knew they been victimized by Bush, and the time had come for the rest of the country to realize they had been duped too. As long as the country remains a basically optimistic place, that approach is not going to work.
When Barack Obama launched his improbable, critic-defying rise last winter, it was precisely because he avoided anger as a tool that made him so appealing. Whether he spoke of race, partisanship, poverty or foreign policy, he spoke of a path to a brighter future. He sounded like JFK and Ronald Reagan, not John Kerry and Al Gore.
And Obama kept his cool even when the Clinton machine started battering him over and over again. Soft. Risky. Unready. Unknown. Obama just brushed the dirt off his shoulder and said he wouldn’t play along. He kept coming back to hope.
But the Clinton barrage took its toll. Obama, having used up his good humor just to get through the primaries, slumped into the general election contest.
After a summer of watching Republicans mock him as a celebrity whose accolades outstripped his accomplishments, undecided voters began to drift away from Obama. Building on the work the Clintons did to raise doubts, Republicans used Obama’s own penchant for grandiosity to make the presumptive Democratic nominee into the presumptuous Democratic nominee.
By the time Obama got to Denver two weeks ago, he was ready to fight back. The Democratic wise men, the victims of past Republican treachery, whispered to him “swift boat” and “Florida and “Rove.”
Obama stepped out onto the portico of the Styrofoam White House and made his pronouncement — “Enough!” he cried. And while his words still hung in the thin air at Invesco Field, a party that was ready to fight back and pay back leapt to its feet with roaring approval.
And the Democrats have been fighting mad ever since. The first shot at Sarah Palin from the Obama campaign was a sneering jab at small-town mayors. The foolishness of mocking such things in a nation of small towns dawned on the Obama team, and a kinder response was issued later in the day.
But the anger does not seem to have abated. When Joe Biden said that parents of special needs children shouldn’t oppose the use of fetal stem cells, as Palin does, there was anger in his words.
When Obama talked about the first Republican woman to run for national office day after day, suggesting that she is a charlatan and would “make stuff up,” there was anger there, too.
So when an obviously exhausted Obama slipped while searching for the right homespun phrase for something phony and talked about pigs and lipstick, some of that anger came flowing back his direction.
The Republicans pounced and have been enjoying playing the victims themselves. The cadre of officially aggrieved Republican women sprang forth, demanded an apology and spoke of the slights against all women.
John McCain should be careful, though. As much fun as it might be to turn the Democrats into the bullies for once, it’s hard to turn back from anger and outrage once it’s been tapped.
