Credibility and legitimacy

Eddie Mahe Jr., a "veteran G.O.P. strategist," may get kicked out of the Spinmeister's Club for publicly advocating a heresy.

Mahe's heterodox notions are quoted in this Los Angeles Times story by Mark Z. Barabak and Janet Hook. The article is all about the Bush campaign — its ads, its strategies, its struggle to find a politically effective message. The assumption underlying the whole piece — and underlying most campaign coverage — is that elections are won or lost on the basis of such strategies.

Mahe commits a kind of treason against his class by suggesting that reality — actual events and conditions in the world — could be just as important in an election, and that substance can matter almost as much as style.

"No jobs are being created. They did not find weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, said Eddie Mahe Jr., a veteran GOP strategist. "That provided the constant stream of attacks a level of credibility and legitimacy they otherwise might not have."

The radical new theory here — new for the world of political strategists and the journalists who cover them — is that attacks on a candidate will be most effective if those attacks are based on something true.

Contrast Mahe's notion with the conventional wisdom as expressed by "one outside campaign advisor, who also requested anonymity," who said, "We've got a real vulnerability on the jobs issue if we can't get that discussion going in a different direction."

The conventional wisdom says that if a candidate is vulnerable on "the jobs issue," then you need to change the subject and make the election about something else — a Mars mission, gay marriage, anything. The way to overcome this vulnerability is to take the discussion "in a different direction" and to come up with a winning phrase that can be used to sidestep the issue.

But if Mahe's crazy notion were true, then the best way to respond to a "vulnerability on the jobs issue" would not be with politicking, but with policy. The candidate should adopt policies that promote the creation of jobs.

His topsy-turvy insight is that Pres. Bush's vulnerability on the jobs issue is not the result of some devious Kerry campaign strategy, it's not the result of the Democrats' unity during their primaries, nor of their accelerated primary process. No, in Mahe's theory, Bush is vulnerable on the jobs issue because 2,000,000+ jobs have disappeared during his tenure and the president's only response has been to call for tax cuts that kick in years down the line.

Still, we probably shouldn't make too much of this. Mahe is one of about a dozen people quoted in the article, and none of the others mentions substance or policy as having any relevance to the president's fortunes in this election.