Late-Breaking Policy
In any Presidential election year, candidates and their staffs spend endless hours worrying about last-minute, election eve developments — and often planning them. This year, given the neck-and-neck Democratic race, the whole timetable for such interventions is changed. Forget about the classic “October Surprise.” That’ll come after eight more months of monthly, weekly, daily “surprises” that are the product of everything from campaign dirty tricks to random international events.
Today we have examples from across the spectrum, just in time to influence voters in Wisconsin, Hawaii and Washington state.
Take, for example, the “plagiarism” charge that the Clinton campaign lodged against Obama on Sunday. Well-timed and serious enough, as charges go, to require a rebuttal. So an entire TV news cycle (actually more) gets monopolized by the charge and the explanation. Tactically, a brilliant move if one thinks that a charge of this nature will pay dividends among primary voters. Without knowing for certain, in a close race the temptation is great to try it. One of the blogs yesterday said that Clinton’s campaign was using Wisconsin as a test of negative ads. If she wins today, we can expect more of the same — more tactical “surprises” — in the two-week run-up to Texas and Ohio.
The Castro announcement and the Pakistani election results are examples of another kind of “surprise” — the foreign affairs event that suddenly inserts itself into the campaign. By late this morning, all the candidates, Democrat and Republican, had issued statements, on camera when possible, stating essentially the same thing: We hope this means freedom soon for the Cuban people. Ditto for the clear defeat of Musharraf in Pakistan. Such an important and apparently positive development, impacting a key U.S. ally, rates a rapid, authoritative comment by all the candidates. Here the wordsmiths in the various campaigns compete to produce “earned media” — quick, newsworthy comments that can get their candidate a few more seconds of airtime that they would otherwise have to pay for.
We are at opposite stages in the two Parties’ struggles: Democratic partisans are looking for a victor among two evenly-divided candidates, Republicans are looking for closure. But late-breaking policy pronouncements offer all camps something.
Stay tuned.