A week ago I was lamenting the lack of any real branding effort for candidate Darcy Burner in Washington State's 8th Congressional district. Apparently I was premature. Ms. Burner and her team have turned a comment made by the Vice President (Dick Cheney) to her Opponent David Reichert into one of the biggest political PR wins in a good long while. (I'll get to why this relates to branding in a minute.)

Cheney jokingly offered to Reichert that he would be willing to campaign for Burner if it would help Reichert win. No harm no foul, right? Most opposing politicians would probably laugh it off or ignore the comment. But Burner didn't. She latched on to the statement and used it to great effect - and it has brought her campaign national attention in the blogosphere, and I'm betting it will boil over into the more established national media soon. Why? Because she took cheney up on his challenge. (Click the link to view the text of the letter.

This seems to be Darcy's first move into branding herself on a national stage and I think it went quite well. She got many of her main points across and did it in a way that can't be answered directly without political risk. It will be interesting to see if either Reichert or Cheney responds. Here's why I think this was genius: The Republicans invested a large amount of money to get Cheney out to Washington to support his team. They publicized the event, worked hard to make their candidate look good, and after all that time and effort… it turned into a PR vehicle for the Democrats. How does this relate to branding? Well, think about it – Here Reichert was essentially trying to show that he knows how to play the game by telling cute stories to get laughs, and he tells the one story that turns out to make him seem a little unintentionally oafish. He was branding himself (and the VP) as sly and humorous and ended up branding himself as politically naïve. His ‘off-the-cuff’ remark was perhaps worse than saying he wanted to raise taxes. (“Off the cuff” is in quotes, since we know wasn’t off the cuff. NO ONE would ever slam one’s own party VP even as a joke without getting permission first. To do it with permission is funny; to do it without permission is political suicide – especially when the VP just spent a whole lot of time and money to come out for an endorsement trip.) How else can the Democrats tell it is a win? Well, no Republican has commented on it, for one. Both parties know that the first thing you do when someone does something that makes your party look bad is… nothing. You gotta wait and see if it blows over. If the Republicans are lucky it won’t get picked up in the papers. What can Reichert do to preserve his brand? The traditional misdirection play would probably be the easiest. I would not be surprised if we saw him back a Bill, put out PR about fund raising levels, or make a statement about our dire need for more security in our seaports and airports. For someone so connected to the anti-terrorism movement it is probably difficult to keep the hand off the switch that can raise the threat level... okay, this probably doesn't warrant that much action, but stranger things have happened.

If he wanted to play Burner’s game he could actually respond on behalf of the VP (again, with permission – since he likely got the Veep into this in the first place) letting Burner know that the VP’s calendar is suddenly quite full until after the election, but he'd be happy to go on the tour with her after she has more free time. It’d be a minor recovery and would show that he has responded in kind...

Best case for Burner is that Reichert gets fighting mad about this. I truly doubt it will happen, but it would bring national attention to this little race. Burner likely has the local press in her favor, and I’m betting that the local bloggers are going to be pestering their buddies with press cards to ask Reichert what he thinks about the letter, or about the prospect of the VP coming to visit on behalf of Burner. If anything can peeve a candidate or politico it is a press corps that won’t drop a meaningless issue. And yes, this is – however entertaining – really a meaningless issue. It’s an incredibly effective one, one that establishes Burner as a force to be reckoned with as a political player and strategist on a local level, and one that will probably have Reichert scrubbing his speeches to ensure Burner doesn’t win more easy points – but the subject isn’t important. Here’s what is. The voters got to know Burner through the letter. She’s got moxie, spunk, or whatever you want to call it. So, even though the issues she is talking about may not win her many votes (they’re polarizing issues), the manner in which she got those issues out in the open very well might. Burner just sent up a fireworks display that may well have gotten some “ooohs” and “ahhhs” from fence-sitters in the district. That’s just about perfect for this point in the campaign. Now she can get back to the core values of her brand (deeper than moxie) to try to get ‘em to stay for the picnic when she takes office. This one gets two thumbs up. (And will likely lead to another missive from me on how to recover from something like this after we see what Reichert does…)