Negativity Rising

Liberal Oasis has a typically trenchant take on the latest polls that comports with my gut feeling about the state of the race at this moment. There’s plenty of good news, so go ahead and click the link and read the whole thing. But I’d like to focus on a specific point that I think we still need to keep in mind:

There’s no getting around Kerry’s negatives were raised by the GOP convention onslaught.

Even in the dead heat polls, Kerry lost ground in areas like leadership, personality, ability to fight terror, flip-flopping and favorability.

Of course, there’s still conflicting data.

In the Gallup poll, Kerry’s favorable-unfavorable rating is 53-43, down from 57-37 after the Dem convention.

Not good, but manageable (Bush is a similar 55-44).

The CBS poll, which appears not to have pushed undecideds to choose, has far worse data for Kerry: 32-41 (with Bush at 47-39).

Can a candidate win with unfavorables in the 40s?

Well, yes. Bill Clinton did in 1992.

Near the end of the race, his fav-unfav was similarly polarizing and conflicting: 51-45 (Gallup), 52-45 (LA Times) and 33-39 (CBS/NYT).

It’s not that there was widespread love for Clinton, who was dogged with attacks on his “character” by Poppy Bush, and won with just 43%.

In fact, a late CNN/Time poll had vastly more people saying Poppy was more “honest and trustworthy” than Clinton.

But Poppy’s fav-unfav was still worse than Clinton, with his unfavorables generally in the low 50s.

That’s Kerry goal, to jack up Bush’s negatives.

Like any Bush campaign, this race will be filled with muck, making it impossible to stay positive and generate warm feelings.

Kerry can’t expect his unfavorable numbers to go back down to the 30s.

But with Bush probably at his high-water mark, just after his convention, Kerry should be able to get Bush’s unfavorables higher than his.

This is not to say Kerry shouldn’t try to talk himself up and articulate his compelling, alternative agenda.

It’s always a balancing act: promoting yourself, tearing down the other guy.

And since Kerry can’t single-handedly put this campaign on the high road, going after Bush is the bigger priority.

One of the keys roles that we in the blogosphere could play is to keep hurling the negative crap out there, build on good stories from the widely read blogs like Atrios and kos and just keep up a relentless pace. If the Killian documents prove to be a distraction from the ongoing negative stuff, just pull back and pick something else. There is plenty to choose from. This isn’t pretty, but it’s absolutely necessary to raise Bush’s negatives over the next couple of months and to do that we have to be a bit….icky.

Kitty Kelley’s book has some interesting items, I’m sure. Sy Hersh could provide a new angle. Cheney says something stupid almost every day. We should take a page from Rove and Cheney and Card and Condi and do as they did when they were building their case against Saddam. “We just keep hurling stuff against the wall and hope that some of it sticks.”

I know it sounds unattractively shrill to keep pointing this out, and there are those who do not believe that anything substantial will change in everyday Americans’ lives if Bush is elected to a second term, but I truly believe that winning this election is more vitally important than any in my lifetime. (My first typewriter was a manual, which after our recent crash course in typewriter history should tell you that I’ve observed a few.) George W. Bush and the modern Republican party are not business as usual.

I think the country is far more likely to survive a negative campaign from the Democrats than endorsing what George W. Bush has been doing for the last three years and validating the very worst beliefs about America all over the world. This is as serious a problem as terrorism itself. We just have to win.