Until recently, the Republican campaign for president was conducted on a remarkably high level, focusing almost entirely on issues like taxes, immigration, social questions, and war. But Iowans are set to hold their caucuses in less than six weeks, and the campaign has entered a new phase. The big issues will still dominate, but the last weeks of the campaign will bring us steadily escalating oppo wars — battles in which candidates attack their opponents’ character as well as positions.
But the war this time around might be different from the past. “The oppo is all online now,” one veteran of several campaigns told me recently. “There’s no hiding it anymore. We used to dig all this stuff up, and now it’s on the Net.” That means negative material has gotten into the public sphere, and perhaps been absorbed, earlier than in the past. And that means in coming weeks the news will be dominated less by new and startling revelations than by the campaigns’ attempts to shape publicly available information about their opponents into narratives that voters can easily grasp.
The biggest fight, at least at the moment, is between Mitt Romney, leading in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, and Rudy Giuliani, leading in the polls nationally. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, open warfare broke out between both sides, and in the coming weeks, we’ll likely see the campaigns working hard to pin stories on the other in a battle that might be called the The Cronyism Narrative vs. The Authenticity Narrative.
“The narrative is cronyism,” a member of the Romney camp told me over the weekend, speaking of Giuliani. “He has a lot of these people who really have no other existence than being his guy. You can run a city that way. You can’t run a government that way. You can’t say, ‘Hey, I’m gonna put my 24 year-old driver in charge of the Treasury Department.’“
The “24 year-old” part is a bit of an exaggeration, but the Romney camper is referring to Bernard Kerik, Giuliani’s former driver and now-indicted close aide. And the Romney camp is suggesting that Kerik — or, more importantly, the narrative that he represents — will make Giuliani unelectable next November. “The Kerik issue has emerged as a narrative that seems to be the one dominant issue that the Giuliani campaign has to deal with,” another member of the Romney circle told me. “It seems to distract the campaign, and people don’t have a lot of confidence that someone who is distracted by that issue can make the clear contrast in November between the candidate and the Democratic opponent.”
Not long after the two Romney campers spoke those words, the candidate himself made precisely the same point publicly, saying in New Hampshire that Giuliani is “in the same position as Hillary Clinton” on, among other things, the “ethical history of his administration.”
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