As Democrats meet in Denver this week for their third try at taking the White House in the post-Clinton era, we’re about to find out whether they’ve learned one of the key lessons of their 2000 and 2004 defeats.

Four years ago I described what I then called the Republicans’ “bitch slap” theory of electoral politics. The idea goes like this. Stuff like the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry and McCain’s celeb/P. Diddy assault on Obama aren’t really about the attacks themselves. In themselves, they’re often too cartoonish to be believed in any literal sense.

Sen. McCain’s “celeb” ads may be tinged with race and sex, but they’re mainly about ridicule, an elaborate unmanning of Obama, the message of which is the attack itself. The point is to smack the other guy around and make him take it. Because there’s no better way to demonstrate people’s lack of toughness or strength than to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves — thus the rough slang I used above. In the politics of security, someone who can’t or won’t defend himself certainly can’t be relied on to protect you or your family.

That not only makes the other guy look weak, it also transforms him into an object of contempt — which together are politically fatal. It’s this meta-message of weakness that resonates far beyond the literal claims of the attacks. And it’s this that Democrats so often seem to miss — explaining the factual inaccuracies of the claims, demanding that the attacks stop, all the while reinforcing the intended message of the attacks in the first place.

You could even catch a glimpse of the mentality in the McCain camp’s huffing and puffing the afternoon the candidate housing confusion story broke. The rushed and improbable line from the McCain camp was that they’d actually been doing their best to go easy on Obama, to hold back the stuff that would really make him suffer. But now that Obama had gone ahead and raised McCain’s inability to remember how many houses he owns, he was really gonna get it with a super-mean Rezko ad, and maybe even the Rev. Wright. “He’s opened the door to this,” a McCain official told Marc Ambinder, in a campaign version of the wife-beater’s “You brought this on yourself!” As if McCain and his Rove lieutenants paid much mind to closed doors.

When it hit YouTube, the purportedly devastating Rezko attack ad turned out to be pretty weak. Which is pretty much what you’d expect for an ad put together in three or four hours by a campaign shell-shocked from a media firestorm they couldn’t put out by screaming “POW, POW, POW!”

But where does this go from here?

What we’ll see this week, in the choreography of the convention and surrogates’ remarks during the convention and going forward, is whether Obama builds the House gaffe onslaught into a broader and continuing series of attacks or whether this was a one-off, reactive pickup of a McCain mistake that was simply too good to resist. The house gaffe exposes two of McCain’s biggest vulnerabilities — 1) the contrast between his old soldier pseudo-mystique and the pampered life he’s led for almost 40 years and 2) the age-related wobbliness that has his campaign aides keeping him largely off-limits to the traveling press. These dovetail with his loose-cannon approach to critical foreign policy questions.

These issues are substantively critical ones. 1) above is to the extent that it sheds light on McCain’s general ignorance and indifference to bread-and-butter economic issues. How else do you go from espousing progressive tax policies to a full embrace of Bushite policies in just a couple years? But the tempo of this election and the fallout from the “celeb” attacks on Obama won’t be determined by the factual particulars, either of his defense or subsequent attacks. It will be driven by whether or not Obama can show, through the totality of his campaign, that when someone hits him hard, he hits back twice as hard. It’s not a time for cowering or ignoring or complaining.

This is about the score and not the libretto.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com.
His column appears in The Hill each week.
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