What It’s Going To Take

What is the most important factor to winning a presidential campaign? More popular issue positions? A better message? A better stump performance? More discipline and endurance? More money? A greater ability to disqualify your opponent?

The conventional wisdom in Washington D.C. has long been that George Bush beat John Kerry in 2004 not by winning, but by making Kerry lose. As conservative activist Grover Norquist once told me, Bush would have lost if he ran against nobody. (I am reproducing that quote from memory, so there are no quote marks.) What he meant was that Bush won by disqualifying Kerry. As the general election now shapes up, much of this sort of chatter has returned. It is becoming a common meme that the victor of the coming contest will be the one who disqualifies the other one better. This is a cynical premise, and the coming election is hard to predict at this point, but it is as good a theory as any out there right now.

Over at The Page, TIME’s own Mark Halperin puts it this way, “Successful presidential campaigns are primarily about one thing — controlling a candidate’s public image. The contender who does a better job of projecting positive traits — and minimizing the portrayal of negative ones — wins.”

So if you want to know who is winning or losing, just pay attention to what positive and negative candidate characteristics people are talking about. To this end, Halperin has created a helpful scorecard of sorts after the jump. To the winner, goes the spoils.

Good McCain:

War hero
Maverick
Funny and affable
Able to nurture and benefit from bipartisan relationships
Media-friendly (popular with the press/charming on talk shows and comedy programs)
Accessible and relatable

Bad McCain:

Old
Angry and volatile
War monger
Represents the equivalent of a third term for Bush
Ignorant/out of touch about the economy
Washington insider
Ethically challenged/hypocritical

Good Obama:

Charismatic/inspiring/handsome
Unifying (with a broad appeal to Democrats, Republicans, and independents, and a personified promise to the rest of the world)
Representative of change (forward-looking/peace advocating)
Healing/post-racial
Eloquent
Brilliant

Bad Obama:

Fake/phony/inauthentic
Young/inexperienced/untested
Elitist
Unpatriotic (ties to Reverend Wright/reluctance to don a flag pin)
Muslim (not true about Obama, and only “bad” in the sense that some would try to appeal to prejudice by suggesting that Obama is not a Christian)
Haughty
Inscrutable/mysterious/different