The Next Four Years

As the parallels between 2004 and 2012 are striking and informative, it is worth recalling the Democrat's successful strategy.

They escalated, not moderated, their vocal criticism of the Iraq war, but did not block -- as they could have -- Bush's courageous and eventually successful "surge". At the same time they adopted positions -- on the deficit and corruption -- that Republicans once championed. One might say, on policy, they outflanked, rather than moderated. On the other hand, in 2006, they made a calculated effort to run moderate congressional candidates.

A similar G.O.P strategy would side-step the "big" issues like taxes and healthcare. The G.O.P. has no self-interest in negotiating Obama out of his job-killing gambits as they once did for Clinton. Instead, they would be well advised to focus on issues of government transparency and effectiveness and wait while core Democratic constituencies make it impossible for Democrats to deliver on their promises of good government (there is, in the end, a reason Mike Bloomberg ran as a Republican/Independent). A savvy G.O.P. might demand Obama propose a concrete deficit reduction plan, and then adopt it wholesale in exchange for a basket of items like ending baseline budgeting, closing campaign finance loopholes Obama exploited, auditing the Fed, requiring government adherence to standard, instead of Enron, accounting practices, an independent investigation into the shocking lack of criminal prosecutions following the financial meltdown, and constitutional amendments limiting debt-to-gdp in the long term to under 90% and banning future state bailouts.

On the other hand, what was new about 2012 should not be ignored either. In particular, the Obama campaign's retail organization. While our founding fathers may have envisioned a politics in which reason displaced passion, the reality is that voting choices are more more often driven by social dynamics than rational reflection. Obama's neighborhood campaign offices served as hubs for Obama-voting communities. If the G.O.P. wants to compete for minority votes, it will not be enough to, simply, communicate shared beliefs. Republicans must plant their own community centers in minority neighborhoods.