The Power of Words

We're a week away from the Texas and Ohio primaries. By this time next week, John McCain should have the GOP nomination locked up, if the polls from those two states are to be believed.

And the battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination intensifies with each passing day.

It's become a battle over words. And that's the kind of battle journalists can never resist. Most of them have to jump into such a battle head first.

You know the old saying about an opinion being like a person's hind quarters? Everybody's got one.

I suppose, if everybody's got one, some are more substantial than others.

Nearly 30 years ago, Stephen Hayes writes in the Wall Street Journal, critics blithely dismissed Ronald Reagan's campaign for being heavy on optimism and light on specifics.

There are times when that's a good campaign strategy. One of Reagan's advisers, as Hayes points out, wrote that "Reagan's 'secret weapon' was that 'Democrats fail to take him very seriously.'"

If you're old enough, do you recall the catch phrase Republicans put on their bumper stickers to encourage voters to support Reagan and other Republicans on the 1980 ballot?

"Vote Republican. For a change."

And, in November of 1980, enough voters did vote Republican to sweep President Carter out of office, transform the Senate to a Republican majority for the first time in decades and dramatically reduce the Democratic majority in the House.

Hayes goes on to wonder if Republicans are making the same mistake with Obama. They may well be.

At the time of Reagan's election in 1980, Republicans hadn't been as dominant as they have been in recent elections. In the previous 20 years, Democrats had won three presidential elections and Republicans had won two. But, realistically, the Democrats' hold on the White House had been almost continuous since the Great Depression. The only exceptions had been the two Eisenhower victories in 1952 and 1956 and the two Nixon victories in 1968 and 1972.

Optimism (hope) combined with a call for change resonated with the voters in 1980, just as (I assume) it did in 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt's victory over Herbert Hoover turned out to be a generational transition during the darkest days of the Depression.

The desire for change may be so great in 2008 that Obama may be unstoppable.

But there is a down side to relying on change as the message, as Steve Kornacki points out in the New York Observer.

Four years before Reagan was elected, he lost the GOP nomination to incumbent President Gerald Ford, who remains the only man to serve as both vice president and president without being elected to either position.

Ford wasn't a very inspiring speaker, and his biggest selling point was his experience.

At a strategy session in the summer of 1976, Ford and his advisers decided to focus on what they believed were Jimmy Carter's vulnerabilities: "His lack of experience, his lack of accomplishments and his lack of specificity on the issues."

In 1976, Carter's appeal wasn't based so much on the concept of change. In an election coming on the heels of the nation's experience with Vietnam and Watergate, Carter's appeal was based on trust.

So in the fall campaign, Ford talked about the tough times he had faced in the job he had inherited and pointed out that "trust must be earned."

The strategy very nearly worked. By the time the votes were counted, Ford "came within an eyelash of a political miracle," Karnacki writes. He goes on to point out that many people still believe Ford would have won the election if the campaign had gone on for another week.

"Obama may prove a more durable fall candidate," Karnacki writes. "He’s been more specific in his proposals than Carter was (see: health care and diplomacy with hostile nations), and his personal bond with the electorate may prove deeper and more intense than Carter’s ever was. But if you’re tempted to think Obama has too much working in his favor to lose in November, just remember what very nearly happened in 1976."

Clinton has argued that the press has been giving Obama an easy ride, failing to subject him to the kind of scrutiny she has received since she and her husband became fixtures on the national scene in 1992.

For that matter, she was a punching bag for the Arkansas press when her husband was governor in the 1980s.

But that's not an effective argument for electing a president.

"Beating on the press is the lamest thing you can do," writes Obama supporter Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. "It is only because of the utter open-mindedness of the press that Hillary can lose 11 contests in a row and still be treated as a contender."

There is no doubt that words have power. But some words lose their power if they're used too much.