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Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David S. Broder is best known for the twice-weekly political column he writes for the Washington Post, where he has been on staff since 1966. Before joining[…]

Broder talks about the challenges of sharing a party with an unpopular president.

Well the challenge for the Republicans – and particularly for whoever emerges from that field as the nominee – is going to be to define for the American people how they would be different from the Bush administration. It’s pretty clear that Americans are ready to move on beyond, and in a different way from, where Bush has taken us. Republicans have the challenge because it’s much easier for Democrats to say, “We’re different. We were not part of that.” Republicans who have, at this point in the stage . . . in the campaign, mostly identify pretty closely with the Bush policies, will at some point have to separate from those policies if they’re going to have any chance of winning. Well with rare exceptions, there’s not a lot of eloquence so far in the American campaign. And the tendency to reduce everything to a sound bite – the willingness of the people who are formatting the debates, for example, to limit candidates to one minute or 30-second responses – it makes it almost impossible to . . . for people to have extended thoughts in graceful language. Recorded on: 9/13/07


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