The Issues Have Been Reframed

I've been saying that since just after the thwarted Heathrow terrorist attacks in early August. Though I wish I could take credit for that headline, I'm honor-bound to admit that it's actually the title of another great Michael Barone column. Here's what Mr. Barone has to say:
He who frames the issues tends to determine the outcome of the election. That's an old rule of political consultants, the first and most important rule, really. It's a rule that George W. Bush's chief political strategist Karl Rove knows well. And it's a rule that he and Bush, and events, have put into operation over the last few weeks. For months, the central issue of the off-year election has been, Hasn't Bush kept us too long in Iraq? Now, the issue seems to have become, Who can keep us safe against the Islamofascist terrorists who want to kill us and destroy our society? The first question tends to help the Democrats. The second tends to help Bush and the Republicans.
People don't like the Iraq war because of the impression that we aren't making progress but that won't be the deciding factor in more than a handful of races this November. On the other hand, preventing terrorist attacks is something that alot everyone cares about, including the people in New England. People in the northeast also care alot about illegal immigration, especially Pennsylvania. I've been saying it for a month now, & I'll preach it until November, that Republicans that run on the issues of aggressively interrogating terrorists, using the NSA intercept program to thwart terrorist attacks & enforcement first immigration reform will clean Democrats' clocks.
Events have played a part here. The breakup in August of the London plot to bomb airliners over the Atlantic came just hours after Ned Lamont's defeat of Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary put an antiwar face on the Democratic Party. The fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 put the burning Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Shanksville, PA, back on television screens. "The Path to 9-11" docudrama on ABC, the No. 2 rated program on Sept. 10 and No. 1 on Sept. 11, reminded us that the terrorists were on the attack as long ago as February 1993, the date of the first World Trade Center bombing.
Exactly Michael, exactly. Democrats haven't figured out how to deflect the images of them being weak on national security. Ned Lamont's putting "an antiwar face on the Democratic Party" is only part of it. Couple his anti-war rhetoric with John Murtha's "immediate redeployment" plan and Harry Reid bragging that they'd "killed the Patriot Act" and Nancy Pelosi celebrating Anna Diggs-Taylor's ruling that the NSA intercept program violated reporters' First Amendment rights. Facts are stubborn things and right now, the facts point to Democrats fighting against every successful government program that's been used in preventing future terrorist attacks.


Posted Monday, September 18, 2006 3:41 PM

August 2006 Posts

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