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 .
That much is true. Obama wouldn’t be an issue if there were a conservative running against him.
The GOP has NO program. They have returned to the time of me-too Rockefeller Republicanism. That’s why they will lose.
Incumbents running for re-election this year are screwed.
A “perfect storm” of $5. gas and heating oil, higher food prices and unemployment will be peaking just in time for November.
People are, and will be, angry - very angry.
Richard Viguerie is spot-on with this article.
This is a breath of fresh air!
Finding reasons to vote for Republicans instead of against Democrats would be a help. We have nothing to offer but fear itself is drawing dead.
Viguerie speaks truth here...and the Stupid Party won’t listen.
Simple, conservative ideas, articulated well, WILL WIN. They always do. The Republicans have forgotten that, and this is what we have as a result.
}:-)4
People are, and will be, angry - very angry.
Probably the reason this Democrat Congress has the lowest approval rating in history, 11 percent.
Gas prices have risen more than $2 a gallon since the Democrats took control of congress.
By mid to late 2009, the economy is going to tank and we’ll be on the cusp of the next great depression (according to economist Harry Dent, who predicted the boom of the 90s, and subsequent bust of the early 2000s.)
If this is correct, maybe it’s better that the Dems take over. They’ll get the blame.
Check out his blog: http://www.ultimatejohnmccain.com/blog_post
“A “perfect storm” of $5. gas and heating oil, higher food prices and unemployment will be peaking just in time for November.
People are, and will be, angry - very angry.”
And Obama will promise to fix it all and people will swoon....
All dwarfed by the Dem corruption, including the Ohio AG, the gay Gov of NJ putting his gay lover in charge of Homeland Security, Jefferson hiding bribes in his freezer, etc. The problem here is the GOP refuses to go on the offensive on these issues.
... 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.
—
I know , let’s tinker with the primary process again and just chalk this up to an anomaly.
We couldn’t have two worst choices if ten times as many people were allowed to vote in primaries without cross-over voting and all the rest of the games that have been played, all with the adoring eyes of a media that can’t report straight news.
Face it, both parties are corrupt beyond repair. A new party needs to be formed, “The Conservative Party”. I nominate Dr. Thomas Sowell to be its spiritual adviser.
Yep. They’re toast.
The Democrats are the majority now. Look what the gave us. Not sure we can take much of these liberals.
I second that nomination.
I wonder if it is possible to lay this basket of failure on the Democrat's doorstep. While McCain opposed the drilling in ANWAR, the Democrats have opposed nuclear, prohibited nearly all domestic drilling, and increased regulations in the energy industry that reduced the bottom line needed for exploration and alternative energy research.
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