Time’s Michael Scherer provides an interesting analysis about how modern-day White House hopefuls become president:
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.
