Why the GOP was so good at winning elections

Paul Waldman on the great visuals being produced by the Obama campaign:

The imbalance [between the campaigns] is more than just the two campaigns' relative talent at staging photo-ops. The fact is that in every aspect of campaigning, Obama's team is showing more skill and results than that of his more seasoned Republican opponent.

To say this is a reversal of recent history would be an understatement. Over the last few decades, we've gotten used to Republicans running circles around Democrats. In a book that was released in 2006, I note that the 2004 Bush campaign outperformed its opponents in field organizing, the one area at which Democrats had always excelled. As a consequence, the Democrats faced "an extraordinary realization: there is now not a single area of campaigning — not organizing, not message development, not candidate recruitment and training, not fundraising, and certainly not ruthlessness — at which Republicans are not demonstrably better than Democrats."

Why was this the case? The most important reason may be that Republicans have almost no interest in governing. Freed from the burden of coming up with new ways to more effectively deliver services that will produce tangible benefits to the public, they put their finest minds to work on the messy business of getting elected and keeping their opponents on the defensive.

The sophisticated techniques that the GOP developed — in framing political language, in staging photo ops, in pushing back on media bias, etc. — are now being used by Democrats. But, where the GOP had to hide their real goals (dismantling government and privatizing everything), Democrats are using these same techniques to enhance a genuinely popular agenda: using our government to make everyone's lives better.