|
 n
a perfect world, elections wouldn't be decided in favor of the candidates
with the sharpest commercials or the most disciplined message. Campaign
spin doctors would take a backseat to the power of ideas. Elections
would be won by principled reformers, and lost by third-rate apparatchiks.
Bret Schundler's
defeat in the New Jersey governor's race on Tuesday is yet another
painful reminder of the truth that we do not live in such a world.
In our world, strategy and message matter at least as much as policy
when it comes to winning elections.
The conservative
movement's instinctive reaction to Schundler's loss will be to ignore
this inescapable reality. We will express astonishment at the Jim
McGreeveys of the world who "lie" and distort to get elected,
and imagine our pious selves blindsided by their tactics. We shouldn't
be so naïve. The way to defeat liars isn't to cry foul as Bret
Schundler did repeatedly on guns and abortion — semi-informed,
cynical voters generally have better thing to do than take pity
on you. It is to outfox them.
Conservatives
knew well that Schundler was a perfect candidate on pure substance.
Real Republicans who can win over the hearts of minority voters
as Schundler did in Jersey City are indeed a rare breed. But we
should have realized all along that Schundler's intellectual heft
and his storybook mayoralty wouldn't sell themselves. Left unexplained
and undefended, they became liabilities that the Democrats used
to paint Schundler into a box. In an ironic twist, it was Democrats
who baited comfortable suburbanites by associating Schundler with
the worst of Jersey City's problems — when by almost all measures,
things improved under his tenure. (Inverting reality actually works
quite well as a campaign tactic against candidates whose only response
is silence.)
Schundler's
intelligence was also made to work against him, this time, by his
own doing. After the primary, the Schundler campaign sought to neutralize
the abortion issue, a necessity in perhaps the most pro-choice state
in America. Schundler tried to do this with a wonderfully clever
piece of logic that must have stumped many a debating partner he
had back at Harvard:
If [McGreevey]
believes I am an extremist and unfit for office because of my
pro-life position, than he believes that any Catholic who adheres
to the teachings of the Church is also an extremist and unfit
for office. What I said today is that only in places like the
Ayatollah's Iran, are there religious tests where adhering to
a certain belief can disqualify you from serving in government.
The newspapers
didn't get the argument, and the next day ran headlines like "Schundler
calls McGreevey an 'Ayattolah.'" Because few people other than
Schundler had never quite thought about the issue in that way before,
most voters shrugged off this sophisticated (but untested) argument
as yet another crude political attack.
After months
of this, Schundler couldn't even buy a break. In the last weeks
of the campaign, he was pummeled on the airwaves by Democratic state-party-committee
advertising. In these ads, the maverick mayor had been thoroughly
redefined as yet another cog in one of the worst state Republican
machines in the nation — the inversion of reality strategy
at work again. In the last weekend of the campaign, I saw dozens
of political ads in the Philadelphia media market, which services
traditionally Democratic South Jersey — and not a single one
of them had anything nice to say about Bret Schundler.
Schundlerites
will say this all changed on 9/11, when fundraising dried up and
the underdog campaign was denied the political oxygen it needed
to mount an effective challenge. On the contrary. The tragedy created,
for a while at least, an environment perfectly suited for a Schundler
ascendancy. What the attacks made abundantly clear was that the
gauzy, bite-sized Clintonian politics that McGreevey specialized
in had come to an end. Suddenly, McGreevey's trump cards —
a symbolic commitment to unrestricted abortion that a New Jersey
governor has nothing to do with enforcing, a pledge to support all
gun-control measures no matter how ineffective, inflexible opposition
to choice in education — didn't seem that meaningful anymore.
In this new
environment, it was Schundler who had the upper hand. The very qualities
for which he was ridiculed for before September 11 — a reputation
for toughness, principle, and confrontation — became the very
qualities that Americans now demanded of their wartime leaders.
On leadership, Schundler could have drawn a strong contrast with
McGreevey, an awkward political cipher who seemed desperately out
of his league in these epic times.
Schundler could
have grabbed hold of the mantle of strong leadership, run with it,
and won. Polls suggested that an electorate that certainly hadn't
cut Schundler any slack ranked his ability to lead in a crisis as
his most compelling attribute. After September 11, the things voters
liked about Schundler mattered more than anything else. And the
things they liked about McGreevey seemed suddenly less important.
Mysteriously, Schundler failed to capitalize on this moment. Had
he done so, he might have connected with liberal New Jerseyans who
disagreed with him on virtually everything else in much the same
way that President Bush has won over these same voters with his
steadfast, unwavering response in the aftermath of September 11.
The same impulse that makes some ex-Gore supporters glad their man
isn't leading us into war could have worked in Schundler's favor
in confounding the received political wisdom in New Jersey.
Mike Bloomberg's
remarkable victory in New York City is proof that Schundler could
have pulled it off. Schundler and Bloomberg were alike in ways that
mattered profoundly in this election: both were former businessmen
who could promise outside-the-box solutions to the economic crisis.
One built a multibillion-dollar-business empire from scratch. The
other was a former investment banker who took a sick city and made
it a key player in the economic recovery of New Jersey, building
brand new office complexes that now serve as a refuge for businesses
from the World Trade Center. Schundler was at least as credible
as Bloomberg on the issue of reviving the economy after the attack.
And yet the fate he suffered stands in marked contrast to Bloomberg's
success. The difference was message: Bloomberg won because he turned
his business experience into a campaign mantra that was pounded
into the subconscious of New York voters day and night (and yes,
Bloomberg's millions were a factor, but not as big a factor as Giuliani's
endorsement and Mark Green's implosion). Schundler lost because
he got too distracted discussing the need for things like cowpox
vaccines and defending himself on losing wedge issues like gun control.
Schundler's
loss didn't have to happen. Rather than signaling any sort of partisan
trend, the victors of all three major elections on Tuesday prove
that good campaigns do matter more than anything else, including
partisanship. Two of the three winners, Bloomberg and Mark Warner,
ran strong campaigns that actually overcame partisan disadvantages,
in Democratic in New York and Republican Virginia respectively (although
the media will mistakenly focus on their self-financed campaigns).
If they won, Schundler could have won in Democratic New Jersey.
Conservatives can and should take solace in the fact that Schundler's
loss wasn't a function of his conservative ideals but of an unfocused
campaign that simply didn't promote the unique strengths Schundler
could have brought to the governorship, post-9/11.
|
