I like the way this man thinks.
Will the leadership get it? Will they force a few tough votes between now and the election so that people will know where their candidates stand? Will they run the right ads, motivating the base and capturing Indy voters?
I think for the Dems, running only under a "We aren't the party of President Bush" is a risky strategy. Tell us how you would do better. What is your platform? Do Michael Moore, Teddy Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and the ACLU represent your party? Will Pelosi and Reid do anything different, other than getting their own snouts into the trough and continuing the attack on the President and his policies?
So far, given the comparison of the Lieberman support (who was selected to be their #2 man in 2000) in the primary by the Dems national leadership, versus the Chaffee support by the national Repubs speaks volumes about the parties and their agendas. Which seems to you like the tent more open to opposing viewpoints?
TR
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...ican_mome.html
September 15, 2006
Is There a New Republican Momentum?
By Jed Babbin
Those who wear their cynicism with pride often call this the "silly season," the period between Labor Day and the election when candidates do their best (and worst) to capture votes. This year it's reason season, time to motivate voters go to the polls and convince them to vote your way. Democrats seem content with nothing more than, "vote for us because we're not them." That may work for two reasons. First, the politically active media will spend the next two months telling voters that voting Republican will render the earth and Hollywood barren of life. Second, because Republicans control the White House and Congress, they can't escape responsibility for what does and doesn't emanate from them.
But - as Donald Lambro and I wrote last week, and as Rush Limbaugh analyzed with mathematical elegance Tuesday - Democrats are not in as strong a position as they say. The momentum shift of the past six weeks may be profound, and among the things it portends is not Democratic control of congress. The Dems are so worried that a deal reportedly has been struck this week between DNC Chairman Howard Dean and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Rahm Emanuel, whose disdain for each other cannot be exaggerated. Dean is giving money to Emanuel for 40 House races on condition that Emanuel stops trashing the DNC. But the breach between them remains: a huge gap between the faux moderates of the Democratic House and their hyper-liberal national party.
If Republicans are smart enough to follow the path set by three of their best thinkers, and launch the thematic ad campaign to nationalize the election, they can retain control of Congress and set themselves up for 2008. The thematic ad campaign has to tell a narrative, and connect all the pieces - war, the economy, the conservative vs. liberal contest - in coherent, connected steps. Three people who have it right are Sens. Mitch McConnell and Elizabeth Dole and former Bush-Cheney 2000 political director Tony Feather.
Republicans have to make this election about the Democratic Party and show America just who the Dems of 2006 really are. Mitch McConnell had it right when he said, "What they'll do is cut and run in Iraq, they'll raise our taxes and they'll try to impeach the president." Elizabeth Dole had it right, too. She said the Democrats will raise taxes and confirm judges who will threaten our values. McConnell and Dole clarify the differences between Republicans and Democrats and make the essential connection between domestic and war policies. Tony Feather understands how to write and get that narrative across.
Feather's group, "Progress for America," has put out a low production cost television ad that's a good start. No big-name actors, no million-dollar graphics. It's a series of images of terrorists with a narrator intoning that "some" want to cut and run from Iraq and "some" want to stop the surveillance programs that enable us to thwart terrorists' plans. Feather's ad is good because it's the kind that can be done quickly, the money saved on production to be spent buying TV time to show it and clone it in print media. That's the model for the ads the RNC should do.
The first ad should weld every Democratic candidate to the identities of their national leaders. It should show Howard Dean at his red-faced "blame America first" shouting worst, Ned Lamont's victory moment, John Kerry accusing American troops of terrorizing Iraqi women and children in the dark of night, and Jack Murtha pronouncing the war unwinnable. Run this on a video background of white flags and the last helicopter lifting off from the roof of our embassy in Saigon. The narrator should say that the Dems want to do to Iraq what they did to Vietnam. Linking "cut and run" abroad to the domestic security issues like the NSA surveillance program, the PATRIOT Act and weak ACLU-type judges builds a fence around the Dems that they can't climb over or tunnel under. End the ad with Ted Kennedy's attack on Judge Samuel Alito and show the incredible page-1 photo of Mrs. Alito in tears as a result of Kennedy's attempt to smear her husband.
The second has to be the "L word" commercial. The Dems are liberal, and the liberals are Dems. Voters should connect the two reflexively because, in truth, they are synonymous. "Liberal" is the most powerful negative word in America's political lexicon. Applied properly, as NCPAC did in 1980 and Reagan did in 1988, it's enough to win elections almost by itself. The RNC needs to show the Dems' close ties to the ACLU, to the lib media, wacky liberal college profs and Hollywood. Remember how Bush 41 made a big issue of Dukakis's ACLU membership in their first debate and how it stuck? The ACLU is the Dems' farm team for judges like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It's the anti-religious, pro-abortion ACLU that's at the forefront of every court battle against the values most Americans share. Show Michael Moore in Jimmy Carter's presidential box at the 2004 Dem National Convention. And remind voters that the Dems - the Ivy League, ACLU, cocktail party liberals - are elitists. The "E" word is second only to the "L" word. This is the cornerstone of the narrative the RNC has to tell.
The third ad is McConnell and Dole's penance for having good ideas. They are the ones who can best explain how the Senate works. They can explain how every senator votes to pick committee chairmen before they vote on bills or nominations. They can explain that Dems will put people such as Ted Kennedy, Dick Durbin and Barbara Boxer in charge of key committees. If Pat Leahy is chairman of Senate Judiciary, Sam Alito will be the last conservative confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Essential to the national ad campaign is the economy. Is Larry Kudlow the only person who understands that the Bush Boom is no accident? How many people remember that it was the 1994 Republican congress that created the economic recovery despite Clinton? Oil prices are falling and the stock market is rising. And the American economy - thanks in large part to the president's tax cuts - is much stronger than the Dems want to admit. Productivity is high, wages are rising and unemployment is down. The Dems can't engage in any debate on the economy for precisely this reason. Put a few Dem presidential wannabes on the screen talking about rolling back the tax cuts. Voters will get the message. So will employers and investors.
Another commercial should focus on other domestic issues. Is Harry Reid still proud that, for a moment, the Dems killed the "PATRIOT Act"? Why not put him on screen again? Voters need to be reminded - using the California example - that Dems use domestic programs to pay off the special interests that back them in election season. They make a mess, tax the middle class into stagflation and the Republicans have to come back in to clean up their mess. The Dems spent the past three years in a state of near-hysteria over the Plame nonsense, but uttered not a word about leaks published by the New York Times and Washington Post that did great damage to national security. Why should they not be held accountable for sympathizing with leakers who make Americans less safe?
Last, or perhaps first, none of this will work if the RNC doesn't go after the political activist media. The major media outlets that act as 527 Groups for the Dems will be working overtime to help them. If the Republicans don't go after the 527 Media - with humor, not anger - the hyper-liberal editorial pages, network news shows and others will sink Republicans in a deluge of daily "October surprises."
Once the Republicans get their ad campaign under way, they have to take the battle to every state, Red and Blue, and against the liberal lions of the Senate. 2006 is not 1980, but there are, in unlikely places, the beatable McGoverns, Churches and Bayhs of 2006.
If the Republicans push aside the consultants' advice that "everyone knows that" and tell the big truths about Dems, this could be a much better year than anyone can predict. I'm not predicting (yet) that Republicans will make gains in either the Senate or the House, but odd things happen in odd years such as 2006.
Jed Babbin was a deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration. He is a contributing editor to The American Spectator and author of Showdown: Why China Wants War with the United States (with Edward Timperlake, Regnery 2006) and Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe are Worse than You Think (Regnery 2004).
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