John Rapley - FOREIGN FOCUS WITH JUST six weeks left to go before the US presidential election, John Kerry's campaign is struggling to gain traction. Time is running out.
It is not that he is falling behind, because most polls show the race is still close. But given President George W. Bush's growing difficulties, Mr. Kerry probably should be pulling ahead by now. The fact that he isn't, and that his support base shows greater risks of eroding than Mr. Bush's, is apparently raising concerns in the Kerry campaign.
In recent weeks, Mr. Kerry has shaken up his team, bringing more of the old Clinton team on board. It is rarely a good sign when a candidate changes his advisors in mid-course. But I think the switch to the Clintonites symptomises serious problems for Mr. Kerry.
CONSTITUENCY
From the start of this election campaign, I have maintained that the outcome will hinge on who can deliver his core constituency to the polling booths. After some early wobbles, President Bush seems to have shored up his base, and it now appears that Republican voters will turn up in healthy numbers come election-day.
Things do not look so rosy for the Democrats. Back in the primaries, Howard Dean fired up disaffected supporters with his anti-war rhetoric and return to traditional Democratic themes. But the centrists, fearful he was too radical for their all-important swing vote, helped to put an end to his candidacy and elect John Kerry.
CLINTONITES
Prominent Clintonites were then saying that if not exciting, Kerry was at least safe. Mr. Clinton himself has reportedly been overheard telling Democrats that they don't need to fall in love, they need only to fall in line. The reasoning all along has been that the Democratic base is locked up: Democrats so dislike President Bush that they will turn out to vote. What Democrats need to do now is appeal to swing voters. To do that, they need a moderate candidate. This, of course, is a rehash of the much-vaunted 'triangulation' strategy that won Mr. Clinton two elections in the 1990s.
I have always believed the Clintonites overrated this strategy. While Mr. Clinton won two elections, the Democrats lost ground in both Congress and the nation's state houses over the course of his presidency, largely because many of their key supporters found the party lacking in vision.
SIMPLE SCRIPT
In 2000, Al Gore lost the presidential election because more Democrats, disaffected with the drift in their party, stayed home (or switched to Ralph Nader) than Republicans. Whatever you think of George W. Bush, you cannot call him lacking in vision. Democrats may despise that vision, but the truth is that Mr. Bush sticks to a simple script that allows little room for nuance.
In recent years, Republican policies have flowed from a coherent, often rigid dogma. In pragmatic times, like the 1990s, Americans distrusted dogmatism. But in post-9/11 America, strong and coherent vision seems to be something they yearn for. The Clintonite strategy of the 1990s eschewed vision and ideology for market research and focus groups. It was the height of the era of the political consultant, a marketing specialist whose task was to identify market segments in the electorate, and then develop ways to sell his product - in this case, a politician.
That might have been fine for the 1990s, a brief era of peace and prosperity. Just a few years on, it is starting to look painfully outdated. And yet, despite signs of erosion in some of the Democratic Party's core constituencies, the Kerry's Clintonites are still trying to connect Kerry with swing voters.
The latest approach seems to be shift the focus on the war - the one issue that has really excited Democrats this campaign - to domestic issues. This race will probably continue to be a dead heat until near to election-day. But if, along the way, the Democrats lose support at the edges of their bases, John Kerry is headed for trouble.
This may be a case of fighting a war with the last century's tactics. American voters - on both the left and right - want vision, not just focus-group tested marketing sound-bites.
Until the Democrats wake up to that reality, I believe they will continue warming opposition benches.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
