Republican Message: Democrats just want to impeach Trump

Tempting message.

Republican Greg Walden is trying to write the Democratic message for 2018: Impeach Trump, subpoena, drama, logjam, and kill the economy.

Democrats should take it as a warning. 

Democrats win when they talk about jobs, wages, housing affordability, and a fair shake for hard working people. They look like soreheads who want more drama when they say the purpose of their election is to stop Trump.  

We can learn from listening to Greg Walden, when he was talking on a local radio talk show on Friday. The show has an audience that skews heavily to Republican, male, white, and elderly.  He was talking to the GOP base. He was framing the Republican story on the election. Note that he wasn't defending Trump. He was describing Trump's opponents. 

There is a lesson there. Greg Walden is too savvy to be caught saying this election is about Trump. Trump is always one tweet away from doing something embarrassing. The core Republican message is built around condemnation of the liberal opposition to Trump. 

Trump's opponents--as Walden describes them--are the ones who want drama and chaos. Walden understands that Trump's drama is exhausting, and impeachment is more drama and disfunction. Walden wants to associate Democrats--not Trump--with the mess in Washington.

On Friday there was this exchange:  Click to hear it yourself, minute 15. 

Question from Host:  On cable news its been nothing but impeach, impeach, impeach, impeach, impeach, with what’s been happening with Cohen, the Cohen plea.

Walden's response: “There’s a group, led by Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Walters, all these liberals on the Democratic side in Congress that have never accepted the outcome of the election. I mean let’s face it, I’ve had protesters outside my office every week or thereabouts. They’ve never accepted it. I’ve accepted the outcome of the last few elections, every election.  I think they would like nothing better than to impeach Donald Trump, but they’re not going to say that during the campaign because they’ve read the polling and they know that’s not popular. So they are saying—look at what Pelosi’s saying—‘we can’t talk about that right now, we’re not going to look at that right now’—and so that’s where they’re headed, and they will do nothing but tie the hands of the administration through subpoenas, and they’ll just try to pin him down and not let us move the agenda of the country forward. And I think we’ve accomplished a lot in the last year and a half, you think of the economy today, they don’t want to talk about that because it’s the best economy we’ve seen in thirty years, they don’t want to talk about the tax reductions, they want to repeal them and make you pay higher taxes, they don’t want to talk about the regulatory relief we’ve granted that’s helped spur this economic growth, they don’t want to talk about any of that. . . . [If Democrats win] just look at whose going to head up every one of these committees and what their agenda is, what their philosophy is, and you tell me if that matches our values in the second District."

There is a lesson here. The message of "Resist Trump" motivates Democrats but it is the wrong message. Democratic officeholders can rest assured that people disgusted with Trump already get the message. The message of Trump-hating, though, is a trap. It is a distraction from the message the public wants to hear, that Democrats will govern better. The way to show they would govern worse would be to focus on Trump instead of the real issues that concern the American people.

Trump's brand is chaos and disruption. The Democratic brand needs to be sound, practical government with its eye on the ball. The best evidence for this is Greg Walden. He is telling his audience who Democrats are, trying to define them away from their strongest message. That is his game. 

Democrats should not let him do it.