Posted on 06/06/2008 12:00:18 PM PDT by StilettoRaksha
Halloween has come early this year: Republicans have forgotten how to run without scare tactics.
This year it’s Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s turn as the Democratic goblin, with House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as the witch on a broomstick. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is the vampire slayer and ghostbuster who will save us from the creatures of the night.
These fear tactics didn’t work in the three special House elections this year, and they’re not going to work in November.
Are we supposed to be scared of Democrats as big spenders? The Bush administration and congressional Republicans topped Democratic spending on every front. Even excluding the “War on Terror,” Republicans have busted the budget.
The Democrats are going to raise our taxes? No doubt they will, but, because of the Republicans’ massive deficits, our children and grandchildren are going to be crushed by tax hikes or hyperinflation.
The Democrats are corrupt miscreants? Compared to the Bridge to Nowhere-planning, bribe-taking, page-trolling Republicans?
How about, as Bob Dole once put it, the threat of sending our youth off to “Democrat Wars”?
Never mind.
As it becomes more and more clear that the Republicans have nothing to run on, the campaign will get nastier and more personal, centered on Obama. As the real Halloween approaches, it will get worse and then continue until Election Day.
Fortunately for Obama, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has been hitting him with the Republican playbook for the past month or two, as she got more and more desperate. It didn’t work for her, and I don’t think it will work for Republicans.
To be sure, Obama has to define himself in positive tones before the Republicans succeed in defining him as a secret Muslim agent who’s going to sell us to terrorists. But he has by far the best campaign organization I’ve seen this year, and if, with much of the media in his pocket, they can’t get his message out, they deserve to lose.
Negative campaigning is not the culprit. The job in any campaign, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, is to stress your positives and just as strongly stress your opponent’s negatives. We’ve had negative campaigning in America since Colonial days, and it works. That’s why it doesn’t go away despite the sermons from the “good government” crowd.
No, the culprit is not negative campaigning, but rather, campaigning without ideas that are arguably better than your opponent’s, and relying instead on bogeyman portrayals.
McCain has been the victim of bogeyman campaigning himself, and I know him to be an honorable man who doesn’t want to win that way. The problem is that McCain doesn’t have a coherent set of ideas with which he can simultaneously fire up the conservative base and attract independents. He’s a part-time liberal in conservative clothing. Conservatives aren’t fooled by that, and liberals aren’t going to vote for a part-time liberal when they have a very persuasive full-time liberal to vote for.
Republicans on the Hill have no message of what they are for, what their principles are or how they would govern. They can’t even agree to oppose big-government spending through earmarks.
“The lesser of two evils” is not a governing philosophy. Yet Republicans repeatedly try to seduce conservatives with it. That strategy didn’t work in 1948, 1960, 1974, 1976, 1992 or 2006 — and it won’t work in 2008.
Obama isn’t a goblin, nor Pelosi a witch, but the Republican majority of the ‘90s and 2000s is Humpty Dumpty, prostrate and shattered.
Someday, the GOP will rid itself of the leaders who brought the party to this point. Or maybe it won’t, and a new movement or a new party will rise up as the principal opposition to the liberal Democrats.
Until then, anti-Obama-ism will inexorably sweep across the land like those zombies in “Night of the Living Dead.” Now that’s scary.
An author and former magazine publisher, Viguerie is a longtime activist and fundraiser known for pioneering work in direct-to-citizens communications. He runs the website conservativehq.com .
Succinct and spot on.
Exactly!
If Republicans act like Democrats, why do we need two parties?
There’s supposed to be bipartianship. There’s supposed to be fights on the Floors of Congress!
They’ve jumped on the Progressive wagon and are no longe
Pro Trade, anti tax and spend, and anti regulation.
This election is living proof that the smoke filled room produced better elections than choosing among the candidates who could raise the most money.
This starts argument but money is not free speech. If a good candidate can't raise enough 'free speech' his message goes unheard. The people who provide the money own the mike. Money chooses the candidate and that's why both parties are corrupt.
And you won't, from anyone who's realistic about McCain's history.
It's one thing to promise to appoint conservative judges, but it's quite another to get a confirmation through a Democrat-controlled Senate. Given McCain's track record for compromise (the Gang of 14 comes to mind), and his avowed promise "to get things done" -- which one can logically presume to include, failing the first attempts, nominating judges with more liberal "bipartisan" credentials -- the promise loses validity.
They should be afraid. Do you think we’ve forgotten that Muslims are trying to kill us? Do you think we’re going to do nothing and let one slip in the White House.
Below are a few lines from Obama’s books “ in his own words:
From Dreams of My Father: “I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.”
From Dreams of My Father: “I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mothers race.”
From Dreams of My Father: “There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.”
From Dreams of My Father: “It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.”
From Dreams of My Father: “I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa , that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.”
From Audacity of Hope: “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”
Nope. The Republicans did nothing when they had control of congress and the presidency except spend huge amounts of taxpayers money. Republicans have shown they are corrupt and cannot be trusted by the electorate.
McCain has shown that he is liberal even for a Democrat. How can any citizen who is not liberal have any confidence in him after his continual backstabbing of anyone or anything that is conservative?
The problems are bipartisan as they have largely been created by Republicans and Democrats. Who could have confidence in either one of them solving the problems they created?
Promise to lower price of gas--yeah, right! I see their success every time I fill up my car at double what it was BP (before Pelosi).
And although the Repubs have spent like dems, we ain't seen nuthin yet.
ON THE DEM AGENDA; TO BE ACCOMPLISHED WITH THE WILLING HELP OF NUMEROUS REPUBS:
1. The return of Amnesty.
2. Permanent cutting of Bush tax cuts.
3. Bill after bill on Global Warming until one passes (The recent report from UK cited need for 50+ TRILLION worldwide)
4.Continued refusal to drill ANWR and offshore because we NEED alternatives. Meantime, China and Cuba encroach on FL waters with their sideways drilling. We pay and pay, like Europe has done for years. We gradually cut way down on driving (which is the REAL objective of our would be rulers)
5. Pushing and repushing for 78 billion or so for world war on poverty (just a start) for the blasted UN leaches to suck up and would not do anything for poverty.
But hey! We will have a war hero or a minority pres.--or possibly another from the great Clinton (dy)nasty. I haven't counted her out.
Might want to take a trip to a 3d world country and look around--see what life here is going to be with Dems and/or McCain..
vaudine
Much of it is true, but it would be a mistake to allow Obama to campaign as if he were a serious democrat presidential candidate and in any way fit to lead this country.
Oh Dam! There goes the Soc Sec LOCKBOX funds...../sarc..LOL...
Crybaby.
Baloney.
“Viguerie nails it. The fear talk won’t stick, but they’ll do it anyway. Obama will select a respected moderate as a running mate, and perhaps announce a few cabinet appointees in advance maybe including a Republican or two. It won’t matter if they’re RINOs. He will continue to be articulate, and appear reasonable during the debates. All will completely undercut the fear pandering.”
Yep.
Very few men of valor on The Hill anymore. Obama is the point man of the problem. His “Verizon” crew following at his heels hasn’t heard him yet!
PC is CP-USA, no matter how you look at it.
The querulous Richard Viguerie, for example, an influential but notably unhappy camper in those halcyon days, began hectoring the Reagan presidency almost from the beginning, complaining to the Associated Press in January 1981 that with his cabinet appointments Reagan had given conservatives “the back of his hand.” A July 1981 op-ed by Viguerie in the Washington Post, entitled “For Reagan and the New Right, the Honeymoon Is Over,” was thoughtfully timed less than four months after the President had nearly been killed by an assassin’s bullet. By December 1987, Viguerie was declaring that Reagan had actually “changed sides” and was “now allied with his former adversaries, the liberals, the Democrats, and the Soviets.” A year later, in the final months of his presidency, when it was clear to all that Reagan had fundamentally changed the terms of debate in American politics, Viguerie announced that, thanks to his tenure in office, “the conservative movement is directionless.” -- Is Conservatism Finished?
You know this so-called conservative has never been for me. Back in ‘76 he [Viguerie] and a few of his ilk had me to a secret meeting in which they pushed for me running on a third party ticket. I told them I was going to run as a Republican and that what they proposed just didn’t make sense. That did it for me–I became the enemy. -- Ronald Reagan on Richard Viguerie
Richard Viguerie is an ass. As usual. With Republican “friends” such as Viguerie, who needs enemies?
“Republicans nothing to run on?” He might consider national security, the removal of two of the most dangerous regimes on Earth - with the resulting opportunity for markedly increased world peace.
Where do I sign up??
When? As far as I can tell this Administration doesn't feel the need to explain a thing to the citizens.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.