New York – The Republican national chairman created a furor this week when he suggested Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is too “angry” to win the White House in 2008.
And to hear Republicans tell it, Clinton is just one of many Democrats with an anger-management problem.
Former Vice President Al Gore is angry. So is Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. The party is held hostage by the “angry left.” In recent months, GOP operatives and officeholders have cast the Democrats as the anger party, long on emotion and short on ideas.
Analysts say the strategy has been effective, trivializing Democrats’ differences with the GOP as temperamental rather than substantive.
Political history is dotted with failed presidential candidates perceived by the voters as too angry – think of Howard Dean’s famous scream in 2004 or Bob Dole admonishing George H.W. Bush in 1988 to “stop lying about my record.”
Both parties’ most revered figures in recent years, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, projected optimism and hope.
The latest example of the anger strategy came Sunday, when Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman said on ABC that Hillary Rodham Clinton “seems to have a lot of anger.” He cited comments she made in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day in which she likened the Republican-led House to a “plantation” and called the Bush administration “one of the worst” in history.
“I don’t think the American people, if you look historically, elect angry candidates,” Mehlman said.
Even she has employed the anger strategy. Six years ago, as a Senate candidate in New York, Clinton questioned the temperament of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was expected to be her Republican opponent.
Giuliani “gets angry very often,” Clinton said. “I don’t see the point in getting angry all the time and expending all the energy when we could be figuring out a better way to take care of people.”
