Hey, Dems: Run against Bush -- and toughen up -- or lose in '08

Drew Westen, author of "The Political Brain," evaluates the Democratic presidential candidates' ads and the party's messaging in general. Short version: More Jim Webb, less John Kerry.

By Alex Koppelman

Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Politics, Bill Richardson, News, John Edwards, Barack Obama, 2008 election, Alex Koppelman, Chris Dodd

Aug. 27, 2007 | Fifteen months before the 2008 election, the Democrats are odds-on favorites to put one of their own into the White House. A solid majority of the country rejects the Bush administration and the war in Iraq he initiated. But psychologist Drew Westen says Democrats could lose yet again if they don't learn how to stand up for themselves and connect with voters emotionally.

Westen is a clinical, personality and political psychologist and a professor in the departments of psychology and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University in Atlanta. He's also a political consultant whose bestselling book, "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation," published in June, is a clarion call to Democrats to change the way they appeal to voters. Westen thinks the Democrats need to rely less on logic and more on emotion, and they need to understand that strength is less a function of defense policy than of backbone.

The six major Democratic candidates have all aired television commercials in Iowa. Salon spoke with Westen to get his take on whether those ads connect emotionally with voters -- and his evaluation of the Democratic performance in general.

Full disclosure: Westen says he has had contact with the campaigns of Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards, though he has not as yet been paid by any candidate and did not work on any of the ads he discussed with Salon.

What have you thought about the message that the candidates have been sending during the campaign so far?

If we focus on the people who are realistically most in this race, the three who have the best shot at this point, who I think are Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards ... they're all looking at how the voters who decide elections are the voters in the middle. The way Clinton and Obama are trying to do it is with centrist messages ... Obama is trying to capture the center by saying, "Why can't we all get along?"

Edwards is taking a different tack ... an alternative way of trying to reach the center. The center right now is actually pretty down on the [GOP], and independents right now don't like the Republicans and they don't like the war ... What Edwards is doing much more is saying: "These aren't people who you compromise with ... I'm not going to compromise with the people who've given you the Iraq war, and I'm not going to compromise with the people who don't want you to get healthcare because it's not in their interest, and I'm not going to compromise with the people who are ripping you off at the gas tank."

I think it's going to be interesting to see how that all plays out over the next several months, particularly in the Democratic primaries, where most Democrats are really enraged at the policies of the Bush administration, but they're also really unhappy with the performance of the Democratic Congress in not staring down the Bush administration. So I think it'll be interesting to see whether the candidates who are doing the more deliberately centrist appeals are going to have the most success in that environment.

Is there one thing Democrats need to be doing, or one message they need to be putting out about themselves, to win this time around?

Yes. I think the most important thing they could do is to make sure that they tie every Republican incumbent and whoever becomes the Republican nominee for president in with George Bush, because the reality is the Republicans are all going to run from George Bush as best they can in this next election. Elections are won and lost on associations, and right now, unless there's another terrorist attack on our soil in the next 18 months, the connection to George Bush is going to be a tremendous liability for any candidate ...

If the Democrats run against anyone other than Bush and the Republican Party, Bush and the Republican Congress, Bush and the Republican presidential nominee, I think they'll probably lose, because I think the Republicans are adept enough at getting out of those associations unless the Democrats start making them now.

On the flip side, are there any narratives about the Democrats that they need to work to defeat in this election cycle?

There's two narratives they need to tell. One is, they need to answer the narratives about them; and the other is, they need to tell a coherent narrative about themselves -- neither of which they've done. I think that the Democratic Congress thus far, despite having passed some legislation like a hike in the minimum wage, has largely supported the Republican narrative about who the Democrats are.

The brand that the Republicans have given the Democrats is that they're weak in the face of aggression, and the Democrats have repeatedly proven themselves to be weak in the face of aggression. The brand that the Republicans have given the Democrats is that they have no values, and the Democrats have repeatedly, on issues from abortion to gays to guns to, I mean, name your wedge issue, they have been hedging in the face of those values issues as opposed to saying what they believe. So in all of those cases they're supporting the conservative narrative as opposed to offering a counter-narrative.

The strategists for the Democrats in Congress seem to think that it's their words that matter, when in fact it's their deeds that matter, and the muddled messages that they convey when they back down in the face of an aggressive attack speak volumes to the American people about who the Democrats are. If they're trying to change the perception that the Democrats are weak in the face of aggression, the first way to do that is to stop being weak in the face of aggression at home and to stop being fearful every time the Republicans rattle their sabers.

This is where I think Americans have more wisdom than Democrats give them credit for. I think the American people understand when someone is showing cowardice, and I think they understand when someone is voting against his or her principles, and they reward that with electoral losses. And they should reward that with electoral losses.

So the fact that after the Iraq war vote in May, when the Democrats capitulated to a president who's at 28 percent in the polls pushing a war that's at 30 percent in the polls, the fact that the Congress' ratings in the polls dropped by 15 percent in the next two weeks should have been a signal to them that they should stop thinking about right and left and start thinking about right and wrong ...

The irony in all this is that attempts to win the center by capitulating because you're afraid that you're going to be called left are the most self-defeating thing that you can do to try to win the center.

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