Via WaPo: Rove Offers Republicans A Battle Plan For Elections

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove offered a biting preview of the 2024 midterm elections yesterday, drawing sharp distinctions with the Democrats over the campaign against terrorism, tax cuts and judicial philosophy, and describing the opposition party as backward-looking and bereft of ideas.

“At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views on national security,” Rove said. “Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn’t make them unpatriotic — not at all. But it does make them wrong — deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong.”

This is hardly a surprise and is a combination of issues that the GOP has prominently featured in the last two electoral cycles. Given how those turned out, one wouldn’t expect them to be shelved.

Plus, despite the fact that polling on Iraq is not favorable to the President, Republicans in general still have an advantage over Democrats on the security issue.

Further, and more damning for the Democrats, is that they do not have a cogent set of alternative policy ideas, especially in the area of security, with which to combat the Republicans. I have been vexed for years by the general inability of the Democratic party (or at least some segment or leader therein) to put forth a true alternative to Bush and the Republicans that goes beyond simply critiquing the party in power.

The Democrats will try to run this year on corruption, and I concur it is an issue with traction. However, there seems to be this general hope that the corruption issue alone will win the day. That is a misunderstanding of the lessons of 1994, an election the Democrats would like to emulate in terms of the fortunes of the minority party at that time.

At the moment the Abramoff scandal is esoteric in nature, involves (granted, not in equal proportions) both parties, and hasn’t come to full maturity as yet. Are there other scandals that can be labeled “Republican” and used as campaign fodder? Certainly, but at the moment I am not certain a critical mass exists that would give the necessary weapons that would allow Democrats to dislodge entrenched Republicans in safe seats.

Further, the sitting President was in more public opinion trouble in 1994 than Bush currently is. On election day 1994 the VNS exit polls had Clinton at 34% approval. Mason/Dixon had him at 34% in June (source).

Also, the Democrats cannot rely on the fact, as the Republicans did in 1994, that there is a large number of districts that are ripe for party-switching.

If Democrats want to re-take the House, they are going to have to do more than hope that GOP scandals and the Iraq war will translate into an easy win.