As part of his series on the "achilles heel" of the presidential candidates, John Dickerson of Slate argues that Rudy Giuliani's strategy of attacking the Democrats "risks damaging his chances in the general election by alienating moderates and independents."
Something tells me that they're not really worried about this at Giuliani headquarters.
What Dickerson is doing is recycling the age-old cliche about presidential candidates "playing to the base" in the primaries and then changing tack to appeal to "moderates and independents" in the general election.
However, the cliche desperately needs to be updated if it's going to apply to the 2008 election.
Because things have changed.
Most importantly, the partisans in both the Democratic and Republican parties have become much more ideological over the last six years. Given that Dickerson's writing about Rudy Giuliani, let's just consider the Republicans here. Republicans have become much more conservative than they were in 2008 and demand that their candidates toe the conservative line. In other words, conservatives want to hear that the Iraq War is good, torture is appropriate, global warming is a myth, the Bush administration is not conservative enough, and the Democrats are effeminate and ineffective if not treasonous.
The activist Republican base wants to try Giuliani on for size as a result of his performance during 9-11 but also have major doubts as a result of his divorces, pro-choice stance, and basic social liberalism. If Giuliani is going to maintain his 25-27% support among Republicans, he therefore needs to deepen his support among activist conservatives. And that's what Giuliani's baiting the Democrats is about. Every time Giuliani throws some red-meat to the base by bashing the Democrats, he solidifies his support with the right-wingers who already like him and makes himself more credible with other Republicans.
Otherwise, Giuliani has no chance of winning the Republican nomination.
What about appealing to moderates in the general election?
There's several reasons that's not going to happen.
First, there aren't that many people who are genuinely independent. As Matthew Dowd established while he worked in the Bush White House, most moderates and independents vote for one party most of the time and the real number of voters who have to make a decision is something like 7 or 8%.
There could be an argument for the number of independents increasing for 2008. Given the tremendous unpopularity of the Bush administration, a percentage of Republican-leaning independents might have moved over into the "undecided" category. But it's also likely that a number of formerly undecided voters have moved over to the Democratic-leaning camp. So, I'm not sure that argument pans out either.
Second, the media is heavily focused on the "consistency" and "authenticity" of presidential candidates. Of course, partisan bloggers keep a close eye on the consistency of candidates and criticize them heavily for wavering. But the mainstream media also likes consistency stories. Because such stories involve so little reflection, they're an attractive way for hard-working political reporters to punch out articles on deadline.
As a result, it's much harder for candidates to get away with changing their story line for the general election.
Not that this particularly bothers the Republicans. What the Republican Party has often done is mount smear campaigns against Democratic candidates during the general election campaigns. The Swift Boat campaign and the Willie Horton ads were vicious, hyper-partisan, and successful because they convinced enough independent voters that the Democratic candidate could not be a credible president.
It turns out that Republicans like to "appeal to the middle" by being even more viciously partisan than when they're appealing to the base.
That's one reason why Giuliani's focused on his current put-downs of the Democrats. If he wins the Republican nomination, he'll have to rev the partisanship up further.
