Campaign season: o6 and 08 are both underway

note: I have had much help in this post from my scholarship worker, Ben C.

For an interesting article dealing with campaigning, campaign strategies, party perceptions, and public opinion, find Women Wage Key Campaigns for Democrats, by Robin Toner. 'Mommy Party' Aiming to Take Back House.

First, note how the Democrats are using a common campaign strategies: building off the other party's failure, and using public stereotypes to send a message:

Democratic strategists are betting that the voters' unrest and hunger for change — reflected consistently in public opinion polls — create the perfect conditions for their party's female candidates this year.
"In an environment where people are disgusted with politics in general, who represents clean and change?" asks Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "Women."

Further, although it is not the main point of the article, it touches some on the importance of power through number of seats:

But Amy Walter, who tracks House races for Cook, said, "If you look at the top Republican targets this year, the success of Democratic women candidates will be very important in determining the number of Democratic pickups."
A net shift of 15 seats to Democrats from Republicans would turn over control of the House.
For all the enthusiasm on the Democratic side, experts say this will not be another 1992-style "year of the woman," the breakthrough year when the number of women in the House and Senate jumped by more than half. There simply are not enough competitive or open seats to make that kind of change likely.

Then, this article shows that good politics might not always be about perfect policy or great political skill, but rather more about timing and the current political landscape:

It is far easier for challengers to win an open seat than to oust an incumbent.
"It's not about how many women are running," said Ellen Malcolm, the president of Emily's List, the Democratic women's fund-raising organization. "It's about how many women are running where they have real opportunities to win."

Lastly, on campaign strategies, notice how the Republican strategy is different than that of the Democrats. Democrats are looking to turn the upcoming elections into a national campaign, while Republicans will focus more on specific local issues.


In an article entitled Bush is Facing a Difficult Path on Immigration issues of competing interests and the political power of the presidency are addressed.
Although Bardes,et al. tell us that the president plays a role of "Party Chief," this issue illustrates that a president requires cooperation:

He has lost control of his own party on the issue, as many Republicans object to his call for a temporary guest-worker program, insisting instead that the focus be on shutting down the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico.
In short, Mr. Bush is facing another test of his remaining powers as president.

Perhaps the bigger issue here, though, is the political limbo that Bush is caught in, as he tries to play to competing interests:

The discussion has intensified as Mr. Bush finds himself caught between two of his most important constituencies: business owners and managers on the one hand, conservatives on the other.
Philosophically, the president, whose own sensibility on the issue was shaped by his experience as governor of Texas, says he is committed to a program that meets the needs of business: the creation of a pool of legal foreign workers for industries that have come to rely on low-wagelabor.
But politically, Mr. Bush must satisfy his most conservative supporters. Many of them view illegal immigration as a strain on schools, the health care system and the economy, and some have warned that in their opinion the nation's cultural identity could be washed away by a flood of low-income Spanish-speaking workers.
For now, Mr. Bush is trying to navigate the storm with a proposal that tries to satisfy both groups: a toughened border enforcement plan coupled with a temporary guest-worker program that would allow some of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States to register for legal status and remain here for as long as six years.

In this whole discussion, political strategy is always in mind:

Mr. Bush dropped his immigration proposals as too risky for his 2004 re-election campaign, but took them up again in 2005. By then, in an effort to calm conservatives, he had switched his tactics, emphasizing the national-security part of the plan.

Two more articles speak to political strategy and the 2008 campaign.

First, remaining on immigration:

Senate GOP Fears Frist's Ambitions Split Party
Conflicts Seen With 2008 Aspirations

By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 30, 2006; Page A04

By pushing his way to the front of the volatile debate over immigration, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has reignited complaints that his presidential ambitions conflict with his leadership duties at times and put him at odds with his GOP caucus.

Frist (R-Tenn.) pointedly told the Judiciary Committee on March 16 that unless it produced a comprehensive bill by Monday, he would send his own proposal to the Senate floor. The committee worked overtime to comply, but Frist still arranged for his bill -- which places more emphasis on border security -- to draw several hours of debate before yielding to the committee measure as the vehicle for amendments and votes, which will start today.

And second, switching issues and candidates:

ABCNews illustrates the importance of playing to your base. This article, entitled McCain Woos the Right, Makes Peace With Falwell discusses John McClain’s political moves in an attempt to “woo” republican party elites; he recently backtracked on his stance against a marriage amendment:

McCain's outreach to conservatives on marriage is politically important because of the way he sharply denounced a federal constitutional ban on gay marriage when it was considered in 2004. McCain called it "antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans" because it "usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them."

As per the headline, McCain has been quite critical of Falwell in the past, while this year he is scheduled to give the commencement at Falwell's Liberty University.
As we have studied, primiaries often cause candidates to move to more extreme positions, since the (fewer) voters in primaries are more liberal (Democrats) or conservative (Republicans). When you go out of the mainstream (by definition) can you get back?