By ADD SEYMOUR JR.
It’s ironic that it was 25 years ago this year that Arkansas
Governor Bill Clinton came out of nowhere and trounced Republican favorite
George Bush to win the presidency.
It’s a race that Republicans never got over and it inspired
a new kind of Republican Party. It also
ushered in a very troubling kind of American campaign system.
The result – no, not just Donald Trump - but the $50 million
Jon Ossoff-Karen Handle battle for the 6th Congressional District
seat that covers the northern suburbs of metro Atlanta.
In what has been one of the country’s most painful,
obnoxious and irritating Congressional races ever, it has been of prime
importance to both major parties. For
Republicans, every seat in Congress keeps them in power and buoys the
stink-filled Trump presidency. For
Democrats, any way to chip away at Trump and Republicans in power helps them in
the long term.
But the lessons of the past 25 years have shown themselves
in this local national election.
Republicans decided not long after the saxophone-playing
Clinton took the White House, Republicans realized they had to change. Not only them, but how they related to the
voting populace. Clinton, a native
Southerner, out-Southerned the Republican Party, and that became the final
straw in what politics had been for the previous 20 to 25 years.
The wonk-ish way of talking to voters was over. The idea that the other side had a version of
being right was abhorrent. Who is right and is wrong is most important. Not working together. Us and them.
The lines had to be drawn and they had to be deep.
Talking points gave way to simplistic messages that fed
emotional voting decisions, not rational ones. Labeling the other side with
names such as “liberals,” “big government,” “tax and spend,” and using them at
every point possible became the mantra. No matter who the Democrat was. That’s who they were.
At the same time, Democrats remained stuck in the mud. Maybe
it was the Clinton presidency. Maybe it
was the fact that the nation was deeply enthralled in an economy that was
chugging upward as information technology, cell phones and the Internet took
over. But the messaging was the
same. The talking points were the same. The
campaign style was the same. The
Democratic Party was Al Gore, while the Republican Party was building something
stronger with soldiers like Newt Gingrich.
The Gore-ish style has been a loser. The Southern Strategy, Part Deux, simply made
all of the nation’s changing style one in which it became immoral, costly,
unsafe and un-Christian.
Campaigning changed with it.
Look at the Handel-Ossoff campaign.
Ossoff started off with commercials that didn’t mention
Republicans. It was about fixing
overspending by both parties and keeping the nation safe by tapping into his
national security experience.
His plan: be the man in the middle that most Americans,
those in the middle who have tired of the politics of fear and hate, that will
fix the ills of both parties while doing what Republicans say they are best at –
keeping us safe and saving us money.
Problem one is he sounded a bit wonkish. Problem two is he didn’t currently live in the
6th District, even though that’s not a requirement and he did in
fact grow up in the District. Problem three, Ossoff overstated his national
security experience, though it wasn’t that big of deal.
But it was fuel to the Republican fire. Handel, buoyed by money from outside the
District (so was Ossoff but far from as much money as Handel got from
Republican coffers), leaped on Problems two and three. And never let it go. Handel could have been a piece of bacon, a
banana, an oak tree, or a can of soda.
At best, she has been a loyal Georgia Republican. Mainly, she has climbed the Georgia
Republican tree, accomplishing nothing more than name recognition. One of her ads touted one of the issues that she
championed was voter fraud. Problem is,
voter fraud has never been a problem in Georgia. That was a national strategy to push Voter
I.D. laws that made it tougher for mostly Democratic voters to participate in
this American process.
Anyway, she and her national money leaped on Ossoff’s
problems two and three and hammered them endlessly. Endlessly.
Television ads rarely touted Handel. They called Ossoff a liar who is a
liberal, would raise taxes, would only vote for Democrats and didn’t have “our
values.” Nancy Pelosi in California was
his closest ally, according to these ads, as was a complete lack of knowledge
in keeping America safe.
No facts. No
truth. Nothing even cited. Didn’t
matter. It was all about getting the
same Republican base angry at the immoral Democratic Party who wants to take
away the guns of Americans, raise their taxes and push the nation into the
brink of a cataclysmic bankruptcy.
Meaning, the politics of fear. The emotions coming from someone taking away
from REAL Americans who work hard while the other side wants welfare, health
care and everything else for nothing.
Ossoff is like other Democrats – swing back a little (his
ads talked about her accomplishing little in each political office she’s had
and even using a taxpayer financed Lexus for herself), but hardly with the verve
of the new Republican Party.
Ossoff’s ad spending paled in comparison to Handel’s. A commercial break in Georgia would be an ad
of older people calling Ossoff a liar and liberal without even trying to use
facts to back that talk up. And then before a commercial break ended, the same
ad again. Over and over and over
again. Ossoff’s ads were numerous, but
far less so. Look it up.
So the lessons of the past 25 years have had their
impact. It’s the campaign strategy based
on messaging and emotions versus the campaign of a little of that, but more of
the wonkish talk that meant George Bush and not Al Gore.
It’s a sad state of American politics. The Republican Party
and their campaigning on fear and untruths and getting people to vote “against”
and not “for,” is torpedoing our Republic. It is stoking the fire of a divided
America. The us against them dividing line they have drawn is killing this
great nation.
Democrats aren’t much better as they are slow to move and
slow to represent. And slow to represent
some of the issues that are credible Republican concerns.
Our country’s major political parties are failing
Americans. Because of it, America is
failing.
It’s a damn shame.
