What’s the big deal?
That’s what some partisans argued after the release last week of a thick stack of memos meant to guide the Senate campaign of Democrat Michelle Nunn. The memos were first published by National Review, which reported the 144-page document was accidentally uploaded to the Internet last December by the Nunn campaign before being quickly removed.
For many of those pages, the “nothing to see here” crowd has a point. Much of the document details the mundane minutia of planning a statewide campaign, from staff positions to the number of votes Nunn probably needs to win (1.4 million). Her spokesman called the document a “draft” that has been revised.
Still, a number of details should make campaign life harder for Nunn.
These go beyond the fact Republicans now have a handy list of the ways Nunn’s team thinks she is vulnerable, particularly from her time as a nonprofit CEO. Some quotes from the memo are already part of an anti-Nunn ad unveiled Friday: “too liberal”; a “lightweight”; not a “real Georgian.”
There’s the fact Nunn, whose opposition to the Citizens United court ruling is one of the few political opinions she’s made clear so far in the campaign, was counting on $16 million in the “independent expenditures” that have taken off since that ruling. That’s beyond the $15 million her campaign planned to raise on its own by having Nunn spend more than 70 percent of her time raising money.
That’s a lot of focus on money for someone who decries money in politics and has challenged Republicans to forswear outside spending in this race — which is practically impossible because candidates and outside groups legally can’t coordinate.
There’s also the stark, borderline-crass way in which Nunn’s Democratic consultants broke down potential supporters by race, ethnicity and religion.
Here we have Democrats playing the worst kind of identity politics: judging the content of entire groups’ bank accounts by the color of their skin; targeting some racial and ethnic groups for money but not votes, and others for the reverse.
A Republican candidate who was caught doing the same would be excoriated by Democrats for treating African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews and other groups as a series of stereotyped monoliths. It’d be a “macaca” moment of the kind that derailed Sen. George Allen’s 2006 re-election bid in Virginia.
Maybe worst of all, some of the memos underscored what few policy ideas Nunn brought to the race. Jobs, education and health care, three of the foremost issues for many voters, all needed more “depth” and “specifics.” Eight months later, Nunn has said precious little to demonstrate progress.
Voters would like to think people run for office because they have some concrete ideas about how to make things better. If not, why are they running? For their own good? To keep their party in power?
Nunn has spent the better part of this campaign trying not to define herself or her vision beyond gauzy platitudes. That’s no longer possible, and it’s her own campaign’s fault.
