Someone needs to explain to me how Democrats plan to nationalize this election against Republicans without identifying themselves as Democrats. I might also need a refresher course on how people are going to develop a better image of the Democratic Party if our own candidates refuse to identify themselves as Democrats. As a third request, I would like someone to explain to me how Democratic congressional challengers plan to win without people being willing to press the "Democratic" button on November 7th. Virtually no challengers are going to manage higher name ID than incumbents this cycle, so in order to win back Congress we are going to have to rely on large numbers of people being willing to vote for the Democratic Party itself, rather than individual Democratic candidates. Not only is that never going to happen if our own candidates refuse to self-identify as Democrats, we can also see from Republican quotes that avoiding partisan self-identification altogether is exactly what Republicans want in this cycle. We can't win back congress unless we are willing to be partisans.

Here's my theory about why candidates of both parties might be inclined to soft-pedal their party ID:

Perhaps Republican candidates are hesitant to identify themselves as Republicans for two reasons. The first is the obvious: the negative perception of Republicans indicated by the disapproval numbers for Bush & Cheney and the Democratic advantage in generic ballots rather disinclines them to ID as one of those despised Republicans.

But the other is a little subtler, if true. With the national leadership, spearheaded by Cheney, Rumsfeld and Mehlman demonizing Democrats as the ultimate partisans (tantamount to traitors), the Republicans, by not identifying themselves one way or the other, show themselves not to be partisans. If Democrats are partisans, and partisans are bad, and everyone recognized that "Republicans" are the partisans that oppose the Democrats, by not wrapping themselves in the Republican ID, they say, in effect, "You can trust me, I am not partisan."

If true (and I admit, it could well be ascribing too much subtlty to political campaign strategy), then it also helps explains why Democrats may be shying away from being upfront about their party affiliation. They may figure that with Cheney & Company blackening the reputation of Democrats as ultra-partisan near-traitors, sticking that ID on themselves may do more harm than good. They may think that flying under the public's radar for partisanship will get them through the election better than attacking it head on, because it's so difficult to undo spin once it's out there (cf. Gore and the Internet and other anti-Gore slurs).

There are clearly some problems with this way of thinking. If you can't undo the spin, you can neutralize it, but that requires a loud hard-hitting no-holds barred counter-attack, the kind we didn't see when Kerry was swift-boated.

In addition, you can hide, but you can't hide completely, because the Republicans will be happy to loudly and publicly brand you a Democrat even if you shy away from trumpeting it yourself.

The real problem is, as Chris says, that you can't nationalize the election without setting up a clear bad-guy (the incompetent, corrupt, unloved Republicans, both local and, especially, national) and an clear good-guy alternative, your local Democratic. One of the advantages to this is that the nationalization can be one-sided: your beloved local Democrat is, in effect, competing against those disliked National Republicans away in alien Washington D.C.

So there may be a happy medium, when local Dems don't identify themselves so much with the national party (and risk being sullied by Cheney & Company's lies) as with other local Democrats, preferably the most trusted of them in the area.