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| Dems' message: All about the gaffes |
| 2010-07-05 |
| The dust-up this week between President Barack Obama and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), ostensibly about Wall Street regulation, revealed more about the two parties' midterm campaign strategies than anything else. With polls showing voters deeply concerned about the economy and government spending and souring on Democrats, Obama and his party are seizing on gaffe after GOP gaffe, intent on making the election anything but a referendum on the majority. That means an obsessive, hour-by-hour focus on a micro-message--grasping every opportunity to shift attention away from their unpopular or tepidly-supported policies and toward anything that smacks of Republican extremism. For Republicans, the strategy is the opposite--a macro-approach in which they brush off the excesses of individual candidates or isolated blunders by reiterating a big-picture mantra that Americans are sick of the spending and job losses that haven't taken place on the majority party's watch. The Boehner flap provided a case in point. In an interview last week with a Pittsburgh newspaper, the House minority leader said that Democrats' Wall Street reform legislation amounted to "killing an ant with a nuclear weapon." Not long afterwards, the DNC, which takes its orders from senior White House officials, jumped on the appearance that Boehner had minimized the financial meltdown by sending a furious barrage of blast emails and launching a web video. And Obama himself elevated Boehner's remark by quoting it at an economic event in Racine, Wisconsin. "He compared the financial crisis to an ant," Obama said, with a chuckle of incredulity. Democrats secured their objective: capturing a few news cycles and perhaps even accumulating some fall television ad fodder for portraying Republicans as out of touch. Boehner's reply: jobs and spending. "Attacking Republicans is a lot easier than explaining to the citizens of Racine, who face 14 percent unemployment, why one in every 10 Americans in our workforce is unemployed nearly 18 months after the president's trillion-dollar 'stimulus' spending bill was enacted," Boehner said. |
| Posted by:Fred |