TPM Reader PB reads Josh’s mind …

If the Democrats want to achieve a substantial victory in November there are two words they need to excise from their vocabulary, “ashamed” and “politicized.” Those words need to be replaced with “failure” and “accountability.” Every time a Democrat gets the understandable urge to cry foul and say the President should be “ashamed” for having “politicized” national security, they need to exercise some self-censorship, and go on the offensive and attack the President for his many failures and promise the American people to hold him accountable.

Unfortunately, looking at the Democratic response to Bush’s speech last night I feel like Bill Muarry in Groundhog day. It’s the same thing over and over. Bush uses the memory of 9/11 to advocate for his policies and like Pavlov’s dogs the Democrats cry foul. How many times can Democrats pretend to be shocked that Bush would politicize 9/11? Republicans have done it the last three elections, and each time it worked. Of course they are going to do it again.

The simple fact is that Bush’s approach works. Any psychologist, advertiser or propagandist will tell you that people will be more receptive to your message if you soften them up emotionally first. The Republicans understand this, why don’t the Democrats? If the Democrats are serious about re-taking power they need to stop complaining about what is acceptable in political discourse and start running ads with footage of people standing on rooftops in New Orleans, chaos in Iraq, and bin Laden still on the loose and remind the American people all of these things are Bush’s fault. Republicans will go wild complaining that it is not fair and it politicizes tragedies. Let them.

Rather than trying to work the refs, Democrats need to remind the American people over and over that this President has failed at everything he has done: he has failed to capture bin Laden, his policy in Iraq is a monumental failure, and he has failed to make the American people safer. Every level of government has broken down because of Bush’s mistakes. These guys can’t even get the little things right let alone the big stuff. And voting Republican only means more of the same.

Working the refs has its place. Definitely. But fundamentally, making this the centerpiece response is just whining.

I’m always reminded of the president’s notorious Mission Accomplished speech on the aircraft carrier off San Diego. At the time, the Dems were complaining that he’d delayed the return of the sailors and airmen on the ship, that it was political and all the rest. But as long as he was riding high it was all just words in the wind. Needless to say, the event became an albatross that still hangs around the guy’s neck.

That didn’t change because anyone realized it was political when they hadn’t realized it before. It changed because the ‘victory’ he was crowing over started to seem more and more like a failure. People will accept a lot from someone who delivers. But they’re merciless when a leader fails.

Today, the record is really quite clear. Pretty much everything the president has done on the foreign front since 9/11 has been an abysmal failure. Even the things were legitimate successes early on, taking down the Taliban, for instance, have turned into failures.

If the president is politicizing 9/11, which he is, people who are open to seeing that, can see it already. And the way to focus attention on that is not to state the obvious. It is rather to point out the almost countless ways in which his record is one of failure. Where’s bin Laden? Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Is Iraq part of the problem or part of the solution in making the United States safer from terrorism? All these questions all but answer themselves. And all in ways profoundly damaging to the president. Start asking them. And stop whining.

Oh my … Parody just can’t make a break on reality down in Virginia with the flagging campaign of Sen. George Allen (R-VA).

Here you can see a screen shot from Allen’s website, where he’s providing a photo gallery of his special “ethnic rally” where he invited potential non-white supporters for a quick meet-n-greet. I guess ‘ethnic rally’ was better than ‘brown people outreach’ and that probably would have been better than ‘macaca day’.

Is Abramoff pal Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) in danger of going down on November 7th? Seems so.

“Nobody ever asked me before.”

Rep. Heather Wilson’s (R-NM) answer to why she’s only now revealing today her claimed misgivings about one of the Bush administration’s key rationales for the war in Iraq.

Washington Post taps key Iraq War bamboozler for gig writing a column on the OpEd page.

Allen campaign adds video of ‘ethnic rally’. (Scroll down on left side of the page.)

So Majority Leader John Boehner today wondered “whether Democrats are more interested in protecting the terrorists than protecting the American people.”

And this comes with a chorus of Democratic complaints about whether the president was politicizing 9/11 in his speech last night.

This might be a moment when everyone should look to their own senator or representative, look at how they’re approaching this election fight and let them know if they’re screwing up.

The response to all of this should be really simple. It might go something like this. “I wouldn’t mind if the president were politicizing 9/11 so much if he hadn’t failed so badly at rounding up the people responsible for it. The president pulled our troops out of Afghanistan for Iraq when they had Osama in their grasp and he’s still at large 5 years later. And he’s still pretending that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. People need to make a decision on November 7th. Is five years of failure enough? If people think President Bush is on the right course, they should vote Republican. If they think it’s time for a change, they should vote Democratic.”

It’s that simple. Remember, the issue of politicization should be an afterthought. Failure is the issue.

Had enough?

The Republican National Committee’s new attack ad against Dem Sherrod Brown brings the total amount of RNC cash dumped into the Ohio Senate race to over $1,000,000.

Via Kos, Laffey aides in Rhode Island are talking like they think they’ve won. That according to The Hotline.

Besides the obvious national significance, I’m going to be watching this one pretty closely tonight as I used to live in Rhode Island and the place still has a special place in my heart.

Here’s the election blog of the major Rhode Island paper, the Providence Journal.

If you’ve got reports from the ground, let us know.

Early word of historic turnout in the Rhode Island primary. On its face, that sounds good for Chafee since he needs a lot of non-Republicans to vote — indies and Dems reregistering as indies. But I think it may be harder to predict than that CW indicates.