No Fair!

A few weeks ago, the Washington Post Style section profiled a new book with the couldn't-be-clearer title He's Just Not That Into You. The book offered its female target market a revolutionary new insight: If a man does not pursue a woman, it's because . . . he doesn't like her very much. When the author first explained his theory to his female friends in Los Angeles, they were thunderstruck: "It was like we were all punched in the stomach."

Male readers of the Style section must have wondered: Can half the human race really be so deluded about the fundamental facts of life? But that question is unfair. After all, a very great many of those male readers are national Democrats -- and they share exactly the same blindness as those Californian women.

If their candidate is trailing in the polls, as John Kerry is trailing now, they will try a million excuses before considering the possibility that the problem is . . . their candidate. He's got so much going for him! He's smart, he's handsome, he has medals: How could the voters not immediately fall in love?

Of all the roster of excuses Democrats invoke to explain why the voters suddenly go cold ("Maybe they have lost our phone number? Maybe they have commitment issues?") the absolute favorite is the excuse we have begun to hear this summer and fall: Their wonderful fella has fallen victim to Lee Atwater-style Republican dirty tricks.

In a September 1 syndicated column, former Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich explained how Michael Dukakis lost the 1988 election because of an Atwater-directed smear campaign: "We lost six points," she recalls, because Atwater deceived the voters into thinking that Dukakis had once suffered from depression.

In late August, Maureen Dowd revealed that "W.'s old pal and running partner, Lee Atwater, set up the Bush modus operandi: Lay in the weeds while craftily planting plausibly deniable surrogates to slice up your rival."

On the eve of the Democratic convention, Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson proposed that Kerry avenge defeated Democratic senator Max Cleland and a string of liberal victims stretching back to the McCarthy era with a reprise of the famous McCarthy-era zinger: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?"

It's as if the Democratic party has spent the past 24 years at some Terry McMillan-style pajama party, eating Haagen-Dazs from the carton and reassuring itself, "We're not to blame. It's those evil Republicans -- and those jerk voters."

The idea that Democrats are hapless victims will perhaps surprise Henry Hyde, Raymond ("Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?") Donovan, and a long line of Republicans stretching back to the Nixon and Ford administrations. As for the claim that the Republicans possess some kind of inbuilt advantage in getting their message out -- well, that's kind of a harsh verdict on the editors of the New York Times, who are doing the very best they can.

But let's go to the tape on the basic issue. Do Democrats lose elections because Republican lies cause the public to misperceive where Democrats really stand on the issues? In fact, those post-convention polls show a public highly alert to the genuine differences between the two parties.

One poll, conducted immediately after the convention by Newsweek, showed Bush 11 points ahead of Kerry. But look closer: On the issue of health care, where Kerry is making a costlier and more generous offer than the president, Newsweek found Kerry actually 2 points ahead. On the issue of jobs and foreign competition, on which Kerry has taken a wrongheaded but populist protectionist stance, the two candidates run neck and neck. And on the environment, Kerry's lead is huge: 50 to 36.

Where Kerry's lead vanishes is on issues of war and peace. Whether you ask about "foreign policy" or "Iraq" or "terrorism" or "better commander-in-chief," Bush holds a lead of anywhere from 16 to 28 points. Time's and Gallup's post-convention polls showed similar huge leads for the president on issues of national security.

There are something like 160 million registered voters in the United States. If the post-convention polls are right, up to 100 million of them trust George Bush more than John Kerry to protect their children and homes from foreign enemies. You don't move 100 million voters by surreptitiously placing scurrilous anonymous fliers underneath their windshield wipers.

Over a long period of months, President Bush has persuaded American voters that he is willing to do "whatever it takes" to keep them safe. Over that same period of time, John Kerry has persuaded those same voters that he will do something less. And who even among John Kerry's supporters would deny that the voters have perceived something true about these two men? Kerry supporters will say that their man is smarter, more accomplished, more cultivated, more appealing in a hundred ways than George W. Bush. I have never heard anyone say that he has a stronger will to win this war. And what even Kerry's supporters can't say, American voters won't believe.

Since 1968, Americans have perceived the Republicans as the party of American military strength and Democrats as the party of accommodation and negotiation. That perception cost the Democrats five of the six presidential elections from the Tet offensive to the end of the Cold War. Then, luckily for the Democrats, issues of national security receded. But while the Democrats regained their competitiveness in presidential elections, they never regained their lost credibility on national security. Indeed, the Clinton administration worsened the problem: From gays-in-the-military to its antiseptic Balkan wars, Clinton missed chance after chance to convince Americans that the nation's security ranked supreme on the list of presidential priorities. And John Kerry is a much more dovish Democrat even than Bill Clinton.

At the beginning of the election season, John Kerry told friendly reporters that it was a great political advantage for him that he had been both a Vietnam warrior and a Vietnam war protester. He thought this experience would enable him to bridge the gap between those who thought of Vietnam vets as gallant fighters in a tragically lost cause and those who thought of them as vicious baby-killers.

This particular apercu of Kerry's should have warned astute Democrats that their "electable" politician was not going to be so electable after all. Those of us who worried that George W. Bush might well be vulnerable in November could never understand why John Kerry never protected himself against the obvious points of vulnerability in his own record: the testimony to Congress, the jaunt to Nicaragua, the support for the nuclear freeze. But Kerry did not understand that these vulnerabilities were vulnerabilities. No wonder he and his supporters think that it is somehow a dirty trick to tell voters the whole story of his career: It's simply unfathomable to them that he could have been so badly damaged by the plain facts of his life story.

Lee Atwater was an effective campaigner, who trained other effective campaigners. But he was no magician. He won elections by practicing a few basic rules: stay strong on national security, stay connected to your voters' values. It's really not so difficult a formula. Yet all these years later, the Democrats continue to be surprised by it. No wonder they want to believe that the Republicans are led by evil geniuses. How else could anyone as superior as they are keep losing to the same people in the same way, election after election?