Dems need to get in there and fight

Boston Phoenix blogger Adam Reilly offers an insightful post-mortem on talk radio’s role in Scott Brown‘s election to the U.S. Senate. The bottom-line: Relationships and engagement matter — a lot.

True, most Beantown talkers were ideologically pre-disposed to support the Republican Brown.  But Brown also benefited tremendously from his long-time courtship of  the radio crowd.  Even before the U.S. Senate campaign, then-State Senator Brown would often call local shows unannounced just to share an opinion or bit of news. Conversely, Democrat Martha Coakley‘s campaign typically didn’t even bother to return calls from shows they deemed hostile.  The result: hosts who were inclined to disagree with Coakley came to dislike her. (Coakley is not unique in this attitude.  I’ve seen it many times, including at WMAL/Washington, where we were never able to get Democratic candidate/Congressman Chris Van Hollen (MD-8) on the air — not even with our easy-going morning guys.

The lesson Reilly offers is the same one we learned in the climactic scene of Top Gun: You can’t win the dogfight unless you overcome your anxiety and engage your opponent.  Of course, you need the skills necessary to mix it up with a professional talker, but most hosts aren’t that daunting.

While a liberal politician may not “win” every talk radio encounter, their very appearance can help blunt the harshness of future criticism.  As WTKK-FM/Boston personality and former political activist Jim Braude observes in the Phoenix post: “Democrats should start dialing. Most if not all conservative talk-show hosts are paper tigers. It’s also hard for any human to completely eviscerate someone who talks to them, and most talk-show hosts are human. And in my experience, after I called a show, I’d get e-mails saying, ‘You know, I hate everything you stand for — but I gotta give you credit for having the courage to come on.’