Kos vs. Rove – Round 1

I haven’t read either article in depth yet, but here is what strikes me about the first efforts from the new Newsweek diametric duet.

In their first articles Karl Rove discusses how to beat Hillary, while Markos Moulitsas’ focus is beating George Bush.

Rove concludes this way:

The conventional wisdom now is that Hillary Clinton will be the next president. In reality, she’s eminently beatable. Her contentious history evokes unpleasant memories. She lacks her husband’s political gifts and rejects much of the centrism he championed. The health-care fiasco showed her style and ideology. All of which helps explain why, for a front runner in an open race for the presidency, she has the highest negatives in history.

While the prospective Republican nominee is talking about her now, the time will come soon when he must spend more time telling his story. By explaining to voters why he deserves to be our next president, he will also make clear why that job should not go to another person named Clinton.

Moulitsas looks at 2008 this way:

Democrats, on the other hand, believe government can be a resource for promoting the common good and thus are invested from the beginning in governing competently, efficiently and fairly. Their ideology demands it. And what better way for Democratic candidates to illustrate this contrast than by running against the Republican trifecta—the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court—that governed throughout most of Bush’s eight years in office?

Democrats should and will use Bush and his destructive policies on the campaign trail as the primary example of what happens when people who hate government are elected to run it. The message will be that Bush isn’t a historical anomaly: he’s the embodiment of modern conservatism.

I think that this dichotomy is an accurate look at the difference between the two parties in several ways.

The right (for the most part) does, and should, focus on what they will do. The left (for the most part) focuses on what they won’t do (ie. be like Bush).

More ironic is the fact that the Republicans and the right look to the future of our country and the things that make it great, while the so-called “progressives” are mired in the past of Vietnam and a president who won’t be on the ticket in 2008.

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