Monday, May 21, 2012

Booker's Teachable Moment

If you want an example of a Democrat's problems when running for president, look no further than the blowback from Democratic Mayor Cory Booker's "Meet the Press" appearance over the weekend. It is truly a defining moment, though not in the way the Obama campaign would have preferred. Booker basically gave Mitt Romney and Bain Capital credit for positive economic outcomes while criticizing the Obama campaign for its political ads questioning the Bain Capital track record of profiting at the expense of failing businesses. Today, Republican campaign managers are popping champagne corks in celebration of a black Democrat providing ammunition for their own ads, released today, stating the case for positive private equity outcomes and offering further "proof" of Mitt Romney's claim that his Bain experience qualifies him as a economic savior in waiting.

Booker is only the latest in a long string of Democratic voices placing one of their presidential hopefuls in the awkward position of having to explain or cover for the poorly worded, bumbling and undisciplined statements of surrogates. Who knows what Booker had in mind by defending Bain Capital. Let's remember that Obama's road to reelection requires that his campaign defines Mitt Romney to align with the reality that is truly nauseating: radical Republican policies that exploded the national debt, deregulated us into the Great Recession, and drove our economy into the weak performance that greeted President Obama on his first day in office, from which he has almost singlehandedly extracted us even as the radical Right in Congress has dedicated itself to his failure.

Whatever Booker might have had in mind, he certainly must have gotten the memo that job creation for the middle class is central to the president's reelection. He had to know that Mr. Obama is going after the sordid record of job destruction under Romney's Bain. He admitted seeing the Obama campaign TV ads highlighting those job-killing outcomes. Does he underscore that message on "Meet the Press"? No, instead he goes out of his way to distort the message of those ads and deplores their use by the Obama campaign. Almost as damaging, he drew false equivalence between those ads and the radical Right's proposed fallacious broadside on Obama using Rev. Jeremiah Wright. What was Booker thinking? Was Booker thinking at all? Did he consider how destructive his words would turn out to be? If part of Booker's message needed to be communicated, why did he not consider summarizing them in a private message to the president's campaign instead of freelancing them in front of millions of potential voters?

A presidential campaign with about six months till the election can recover from a gaffe such as Booker's, but not if that type of gaffe becomes a recurring string for which the president's campaign must spend precious days and weeks backtracking to put out the brush fires. If defining the Republican candidates as insensitive to the middle class is going to take hold, Democrats perhaps needed a defining moment showing them what happens when a surrogate goes rogue. Booker's boneheaded words have provided that. The Obama campaign and supporting Democrats now must rededicate themselves to perfecting the discipline required to make their definitions stick -- a discipline that Republicans historically have mastered along the road to the White House, which they have occupied 68 percent of the time since 1953. That fact has to make even Mr. Booker nauseous.