Rove to make security the top issue in November 2006

Karl Rove has stated that Republicans should make Security the top issue in the up-coming election in November 2006. This is to counter the effort of Democrats to emphasize the Republican culture of corruption which is clearly growing more visible daily to anyone who reads the news.

Good move on Rove's part. He got Bush barely reelected based on the security issue and when times get tough, the tough fall back on tried-and-true methods.

Reed Hundt at TPM Cafe describes Rove's routine technique. Rove normally takes a weakness of the candidates he supports and turns that weakness into an attack on his candidate's opponents. But has he gone to the well with this technique too often?

Hundt points out several ways the Democrats can turn this attack back on to the Republicans by strongly and repeatedly making the point that protecting American security is a major failure of Bush and the Republicans. Do this by first emphazing:

• the failure to catch Osama bin Laden (as well as Mullah Omar and Zarkawi.)
• the failure to train Iraqi soldiers and police (as well as the failure to foresee the insurgency and prepare for it, particularly the failure to listen to Gen. Shinseki who predicted the need for more troops during the occupation.
  
• The failure to bring in Peacekeepers (which is an outgrowth of failure to get international support for the invasion in the first place and the anti-diplomatic methods of punishing international opponents of the invasion of Iraq.)
• the failure to stop the violence in iraq (see failure to foresee the insurgency above as well as the failures to provide enough troops to actually occupy Iraq once it was conquered.) and
  
• the failure to promise to leave Iraq, even if the date is not made clear in advance.
  

[Items above in parenthesis are my opinion, not Hundt's.]

Second, the Democrats need to defuse the Republican attack that the Democrats are the party of wealth redistribution by taking from the wealthy and giving the resulting to the poor. This can be done by demonstrating that the Republicans are the party of redistrubution. They take from the poor and middle class and give the results to the wealthy and super-wealthy.

Third, attack the Republican culture of corruption, not be claiming to be better than the congressional Republicans but by presenting a series of remedies that would correct the Executive's behavior.

This is a strategy that the relatively unified Republican political machine could easily implement. Democrats, with their traditional tolerence for mavericks, will find it difficult to get everyone on the same sheet of music because the mavericks get the press, not the majority. Reid and Pelosi will need to herd their democratic cats to prevent the failure mavericks offer to the Republicans. Biden, Lieberman and Ben Nelson of Nebraska all need to take careful note.