Going into the 2008 elections, Cole faces a daunting list of challenges. To date, 29 of his party’s representatives in Congress have retired, an unusually large number, leaving open politically marginal seats that incumbents might have held but which will be more difficult for challengers to defend — Deborah Pryce’s seat in Columbus, Ohio; Mike Ferguson’s in central New Jersey; Heather Wilson’s around Albuquerque; Thomas M. Reynolds’s in Buffalo. Reynolds, Cole’s predecessor at the N.R.C.C., just narrowly held his seat in 2006. Rick Renzi, a Republican congressman from Arizona, was indicted last month on federal corruption charges, putting what was another safe Republican seat in play. These vacancies mean that in a year when, by historical standards, his party would be expected to win back seats, Cole will have to defend many more seats than he will be able to attack (only six Democratic incumbents have announced they are leaving office). His committee has approximately $5 million on hand, roughly one-eighth the amount of cash on hand as its Democratic counterpart, which at latest count had $38 million. Worse still, the National Republican Congressional Committee recently discovered, during an internal audit, accounting fraud so extensive that it had to call in the F.B.I., which is now investigating embezzlement by the committee’s former treasurer. Many conservative activists have become so dissatisfied with the party’s heresies, particularly on immigration and government spending, that as Cole’s staff took over, the committee’s fund-raising pleas were being ignored and, on at least one occasion, returned in an envelope stuffed with feces.So classy the Repugs are; the "circular file" just wasn't good enough, I suppose.
And what to do in response?
Cole’s strategy is not complicated, but it does contain an essential difficulty: at a moment when Washington is deeply unpopular, he wants his candidates to run as insurgents, but voters still identify Republicans with what they don’t like about Washington — they prefer a generic Democratic Congressional candidate by a margin of 49 percent to 35 percent, according to a March 7-10 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll; in an ABC/Washington Post poll released in early February, they preferred Democrats to Republicans on seven out of seven issues. Cole’s basic challenge is to try to flip the popular perception of the capital so that more voters identify Washington with the Democrats than with the Republicans. He says he wants to use his party’s resources to define Nancy Pelosi as a national character, the face of a Democratic Congress that is once again too liberal for the country. (“Those three little words — ‘San Francisco liberal’ — are just magic for fund-raising,” one of Cole’s staff members told me.)And oh yes, speaking of fundraising (putting aside that typically idiotic Repug boilerplate for a second), this tells us the following (buried deep in the comments)…
A great deal of (the Democrats’) 2006's success can be attributed to the fact that Dean's 50-state strategy was in place -- he had candidates in FAR more races than was usual, had party assets in all states, and while he didn't create the wave -- he made sure we had candidates to ride it. That wasn't the case in 2002 and 2004, where WAY too many Republicans ran unchallenged.Good to know (and here’s more on what happened to some of the GOP’s dough, by the way, alluded to earlier; the Times story tells us that when House Minority Leader John Boehner is asked to assess the committee’s fundraising so far, he replies, “It stinks. No other way to put it.”).
If you look at the way things are organized and how everything works, there's one unavoidable truth: The GOP is screwed, money wise. On every front. The DNC/RNC area is the only place they have an edge (Everywhere else is total blowouts), and that's a meaningless comparison. Factoring in what the DNC has actually started doing with itself, and even that's not a positive for the GOP.
Lack of money is NOT a problem on the Democratic side. Anywhere.
Back to Cole (tee hee)…
He has tried, when possible, to choose candidates whose biographies can reinforce the anti-Washington theme, even if they have no real political experience. And he is counting on McCain’s emergence to permit the party to distance its image from that of Bush. Cole might have come up with a grand and unifying policy vision for his insurgents to run on. But Cole is not an ideologue. And with Rove and the party’s other grand strategists having abandoned the field — five of the six members of the Republican Congressional leadership in 2006 have now retired — Cole is now turning to practical answers, to process, and deferring to the politically moderate geography of the battleground areas. “I still think most Americans want their government to be smaller, not bigger, and their taxes to be lower, not higher,” Cole says. “And I still think most Democrats in office think that America is not a force for good in the world, and I think most voters have a different perspective.”A kinder, gentler way of saying the Dems hate America and love Osama whatsisname, of course (what a creep).
And here’s some true revisionist history (and delusional thinking) from Cole on SCHIP…
…I think they could have got S-Chip [the State Children’s Health Insurance Program] done too. But they had the same problem with George Bush we had with Bill Clinton. They hated him too much to get it done.Once a Repug…
Two moments in the story that were actually funny: the first describes how Cole and the Repugs wooed Indiana prosecutor Curtis Hill only to be shot down by Hill because he didn’t think his prospective Dem opponent Joe Donnelly was vulnerable (Cole wanted to depict Donnelly as “a tool of Nancy Pelosi” and he though that would be enough to compete, but Hill in his good sense wasn’t buying it).
The second tells us what Cole thinks of The Club for Growth (I’ll give the chairman points for honesty here if nothing else)…
Without the money, the party’s power has begun to wane, and with it the usual ability to control the process. Early in the fall, the Club for Growth, the hyperaggressive low-tax lobbying group, chose to run ads attacking Bob Latta, a Republican state senator who was running for Congress in a special election in Ohio, on behalf of another Republican who was contesting the nomination, Steve Buehrer, whom the Club considered more conservative. Cole was damned if he could figure out the ideological difference between the two. “Bob Latta is a straight arrow,” he told me. “Nice guy, conventional Republican. And they go dump a bunch of money into another guy who you can’t tell the difference! Bob Latta’s not going to raise taxes. He’s with them on dividends. He’s a free trader.”Also…
The Club for Growth’s ads had attacked Latta and connected him to the corrupt and convicted former Republican governor of Ohio, Bob Taft. Though Latta survived the primary, his Democratic competitor in the special election began to run ads mimicking the Club’s line of attack. “The problem I have with the club is I think they’re stupid,” Cole said. “I think they’re politically inept. They spend more money beating Republicans than Democrats.” He shook his head. “I mean — Bob Latta! Give me a break!”
In Ada, Okla., at a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce, Cole gave a localized version of his national partisan pitch, that the Democrats were out of touch with the country on tax-and-spend issues, when a man raised his hand and asked how he could be expected to believe that line, given the excesses of the Republicans. Cole launched into a disquisition on why the contributions of earmarks to the federal deficit was overhyped but eventually conceded that the man, who turned out to be the publisher of an Oklahoma travel guide, had a “good point.” When I talked to him afterward, the publisher, Bob Rubin, said he was “not very impressed. They are not accepting responsibility.”And the real capper for the Repugs as described in the story was the victory of Dem Bill Foster versus Repug Jim Oberweis in the special election for former speaker Dennis Hastert’s seat, with Cole telling a reporter that “he wasn’t sure if he would stay in his position for another term, as had been the habit of his predecessors" (as noted here, Cole has already thought of quitting; the little power play in question by Boehner is noted in the story).
So much for Karl Rove’s “permanent Republican majority.” Will the last one out the door please turn off the lights?
No comments:
Post a Comment