Fighting back vs. fighting fair

Josh Marshall, blogging on the surprisingly tight Senate race in TN, comments on the recent race-baiting radio spot put out by Republican candidate Bob Corker:

Begging the refs to throw a flag in response to a vicious ad only telegraphs the message of weakness that was the aim of the attack in the first place. And in recent days not a few of you have written in to say, 'Josh, you always say Dems should not complain but hit back. So why are you turning the sites over to complaining full time about the Tennessee ads against Ford?

It's a good question. And there's certainly a tension there, if not an outright contradiction. But here's my response.

I see the two cases as fundamentally dissimilar. When it comes to GOP race-baiting, calling them out, revealing them for who they are and what is they do, is fighting back. It's that simple. The dynamics of the issues are fundamentally different.

Josh is right that Dems need to hit back, but he’s wrong that “calling out” the GOP on race-baiting constitutes hitting back. Political candidates (and parties, for that matter) who run effective campaigns have two jobs vis-à-vis their opponents:

1. Fight their opponents.
2. Make their opponents fight fairly.

Calling someone out on race-baiting is trying to make your opponent fight fairly, but it isn’t “hitting back” in the sense that Marshall means. To use an overwrought sports analogy, it’s probably useful to express a certain amount of outrage when an opposing soccer player, say, takes a dive. If the victims of a cheat won’t stand up for themselves, even if they’re not the official referees, why should anyone else?

If the complaining is the only expression of your outrage, however, then it becomes problematic. No matter how crucial the play, if the other teams gets an advantage by taking a dive, it’s still only one play. There’s the rest of the game to play, and only very rarely does one call make or break a game. If you’re outraged and you don’t play harder because you’re pissed, and because you don’t want these lying, cheating, primadonna panty-eaters to win, then you’re probably not going to win often. If a bad call, or even several, takes all the wind out of your sails, that’s a sign of psychological weakness. Let everyone know you think the call stinks, but dig in and play harder too.

It’s absolutely not enough simply to call out Corker. Ford needs to call him out yes, and in addition to that he needs to hit Corker where it hurts. (In this election, Iraq and Bush are the two softest spots on every GOP candidate’s political face.)