The Dems New Poll-Tested Word

The Dems have found a new word in their battle with Bush - imcompetent (you may remember one of their early ill-conceived uses of the word). John Podhoretz tells us the pros and cons of this approach:

The real story is that, for the first time in a long time, Democrats have found themselves a workable, poll-tested, focus-grouped sound bite that they are confident will help them in their quest to wrest control of the House of Representatives and the Senate away from Republicans in November. That sound bite is the word "incompetent."

If you've listened closely to Democratic politicians over the past 10 days, you've heard it spoken about a million times. George Bush is incompetent. His White House staff is incompetent. His war-fighting strategy is incompetent. His handling of Katrina was incompetent. The implementation of the Medicare prescription-drug benefit has been incompetent.

Incompetent, incompetent, incompetent.

This unified and very simple message represents a nimble change of course the canniest Democrats effected at the start of 2005. They've been relentless and effective in knocking down the president's primary strength with the American people - the popular sense that Bush is a strong leader with real convictions. They have, instead, painted him as a hapless bumbler who can't possibly believe the happy talk he offers on Iraq.

It has worked, to some degree.

The "incompetence" meme is the default position for Democrats. It's a unifying criticism; anyone can play. You can throw the term around no matter how you voted on the war resolution. It's entirely negative, but it doesn't smack of character assassination the way other anti-Bush arguments do. Calling Bush and the Republicans incompetent is a way of offering a critique. As an act of name-calling, it's far less incendiary than words like "liar" and "fascist" and "torturer."

But there are two major problems with it - problems that aren't solved by running away from Feingold's censure resolution.

Problem No. 1: Bush isn't a candidate in this year's election. If he were up in November, the president would clearly have an uphill battle. Fortunately for him, he's done facing the American people.

And the assault might well have peaked too early. At some point, the "incompetence" attack will start losing its teeth or will start becoming tiresome and familiar. Besides which, the ebb and flow of politics suggests that Bush will stage some kind of comeback this year, and odds are that if he does so it will happen in time to offer modest aid to Republicans.

Problem No. 2: The "incompetence" attack is an act of political cowardice, and voters can smell that kind of cowardice a mile off. Partisan Democrats don't think Bush is incompetent. They think he's a bad guy and a worse president. But they don't quite think they can make the case well enough to carry the day with voters passionate enough to hit the polls for a midterm election in November.

The whole Feingold censure thing took some of the wind out of this latest Dem tactic as everybody was suddenly more interested in running from the cameras rather than standing there and repeating "incompetent" as many times as they could. The other problem with word-of-the-day campaigns like this is that talk radio loves this kind of stuff because they can put together sound clips of multiple people saying the same thing, which just makes them all look like brainwashed dummies.

And of course, this didn't help either.