The problem with President Ronald Reagan being called “the Great Communicator” is that it showed how much worse other Republicans were at political messaging. The Gipper would not have earned the compliment if the GOP wasn’t so bad at it. It still is.
Democrats are far more often successful at framing debate, not least because they wake each morning and all sing from the same hymn sheet. They do not care how much gall it takes to utter their chosen message. They will shamelessly attack President Donald Trump on inflation even though prices rose nearly three times as fast under President Joe Biden. Today’s 3.4% consumer price inflation rate is nowhere near as bad as Biden’s 9.1%, but Democrats, helped by their media handmaidens, stick to their guns, and the blue party manages to put the red on the defensive.
Granted, voters care more about what is happening right now than what happened five years ago, but if you can’t draw attention effectively to your opponents’ failures, you shouldn’t be in the comms business. Good political communicators on the right should be able to make the electorate think with more concern about handing the government reins back to those who betrayed the public’s economic interests so lamentably, painfully, and recently.
But Republicans head toward the midterm elections with Democrats marginally ahead on economic management and 7.9 points ahead in the RealClearPolitics generic congressional vote.
Trump’s tariffs and war with Iran have pushed prices higher than they might otherwise be, but Republicans should still be spending less time defending their weaknesses on this issue and more attacking Democrats where the leftists are woefully deficient. You don’t, for example, hear nearly enough from Republicans about violent crime having fallen to its lowest level in more than a century under GOP control of the White House and Capitol Hill.
Nor do you hear much from Republicans about their party’s spectacular success ending mass illegal immigration in contrast with the willful failure and cynical treachery by Democrats on that issue. Why aren’t the GOP’s midterm election ads a video stream of aliens swarming in their millions across the border between 2020 and 2024, accompanied by the question, “Do you really want to go back to this?”
It has long been the calculation of some politicians that they should not fix anything, reasoning that if you make a problem go away, it drops out of voters’ concerns, and you lose it as a campaign issue. As the brilliant economist Thomas Sowell noted, “No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems — of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.”
HAKEEM JEFFRIES GETS READY TO GOVERN
As if to prove the point, President Barack Obama notoriously ignored congressional Democrats and refused to work on immigration reform during his first term. He did so because he wanted “dreamers” front and center in his 2012 run for reelection. It was supremely cynical, but voters did not punish him for it.
Trump and Republicans have been less cynical since returning to power. They fixed a few things voters care about, but then made the mistake of allowing voters to forget about them.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
