Good Luck With That!

There are times I shake my head at the Republican Party’s inability to get its act together. But then the Democrats come along and prove that incompetence is a trait both parties share in abundance. What got my attention this weekend was that the Democrats finally put their “strategy” for 2014 on full display, and it’s a laugher. I can't imagine any of it working.

Rather than coming up with a platform that could win over a broad swath of the public, the Democratic plan involves agitating their supporters in the hopes of raising voter turn out among the faithful. That's a legitimate strategy for a low-turnout election like an off-year election. But the Democrats' supporters are demoralized by broken promises and six years of Democratic failure, so they need something rather dramatic to energize them, and this strategy just offers more of the same. Observe:

● Attacking the Koch Brothers: The first part of the Democratic strategy involves attacking the Koch Brothers as invading Huns determined to force something unexplained upon the good people of America. Washington Democrats have been attacking the Kochs for a couple years now and ads have been running for months in places like Colorado. These ads accuse the Koch Brothers of trying to steal democracy but never really say how. Unfortunately for the Democrats, outside of pure wonks, no one knows who the Koch Brothers are. So this won't motivate anyone to turn out who wasn't already coming. What's more, Koch Industries has been fighting back by running some nice ads explaining what they’ve done for the state in terms of jobs and progress. This makes the attacks on the Koch brothers sound like paranoia. Further, the one billionaire whose name does seem to be sitting poorly on the public's lips is Michael Bloomberg, who has openly spent tens of millions to push things the public doesn't like, i.e. gun control. All told, this strategy is a failure.

● War on Women Redux: As with every other recent election, the Democrats are pushing the idea that the Republicans are trying to turn women into sex slaves by banning abortion and contraception. Essentially, they are running ads accusing every Republican of being far-right religious right, with Debbie Wasserman-Schulz leading the charge on this. Sadly for them, the GOP doesn’t seem to have any Todd Akins this time who will lend credence to this idea. To the contrary, most of the candidates were smeared as mushy moderates in the primaries. In fact, the Colorado candidate is even taking the position that birth control pills should be available without a prescription to reduce the chance of unwanted pregnancy. I doubt the Democratic push will motivate many women, even liberal women.

● Race Anger: The Democrats are hoping to push whatever outrage exists about the events in Ferguson to turn out black voters. This is the same strategy they tried with Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012. Unfortunately for them, Obama’s black vote actually fell in 2012 because the Martin thing didn’t resonate, and Ferguson hasn’t resonated either nor will it be remembered by election time. Moreover, Team Obama and the rest have put more effort into whining about the Washington Redskins name than they have in turning Ferguson into an election issue. I doubt this will motivate blacks to turn out in November.

● Immigration: The Democrats accuse the Republicans of standing in the way of immigration reform and of racism. The problem here is that they have done nothing themselves to push immigration reform. And having Obama say he was going to do something by executive order, and then letting it be known that he would wait another year (after waiting several years already) sure sounds like a politician playing politics rather than carrying out his promises. With the Republicans shutting up about this issue, there is no open racism to agitate Hispanics to turn out either. All in all, I would be surprised if this turned out any Hispanic voters.

● Poor Michael Sam: There doesn’t seem to be a gay strategy this cycle except to talk about Michael Sam. Even the gay marriage stuff seems to have stopped being discussed publicly as the courts have taken over and the advocates have run out of easy states.

● Minimum Wage: The Democrats are still pushing the minimum wage issue, even though it has yet to gain any traction anywhere outside of Seattle. Nader and Biden are pushing this one. The problem here, of course, is that only a million or so people would be helped by a raise in the minimum wage (assuming they keep their jobs), whereas tens of millions of working poor will be hurt when prices at places like McDonalds and WalMart go up.

Interestingly, Obama and Biden are both pushing this using the phrase "take back the country." The problem with this is that (1) they have been in charge for six years, and incumbents can't really complain about the country having lost its way, (2) this is a decent populist phrase, except that there is zero substance behind it except the minimum wage stuff, which hardly defines the state of upset-ed-ness with the state of America, and (3) this sounds like a political slogan without anything else behind it.

● The “Do Nothing” Congress: Finally, the Democrats (Obama himself actually) continue to push the idea that the GOP has run a “do nothing” Congress. The problem here is that (1) the Senate has done even less and that is run by Democrats, (2) there was no shutdown or implosion that can be pointed to as being caused by the Republicans, and (3) the Democrats haven’t enunciated a platform that was stopped by the Republicans. So the do nothing charge rings hollow. And given that Democratic supporters had a long list of demands and expected those to be pushed hard, which the Democrats did not do, it will be hard to motivate their supporters with this claim.

All in all, this election strategy sounds played out to me. They tried all of this before, but none of it had any traction in 2010 or 2012, so I don't see why it would work in 2014... especially with the Republicans being less stupidly confrontational. And ultimately, I just don't see anything exciting or outrageous enough to bring out their base here.

Thoughts?