GOP Gets Muddy

What do you do when your party has been in control and your looking at 30% approval ratings with a general election on the horizon? Do you stand fast on your principles and beliefs, trusting that the people who have elected and reelected you again and again will do so one more time? Or do you panic, run as far as you can from the President & his failures, and spend your staff's time and supporters' funds in trying to find dirt on your opponents?

The first way takes time, energy and trust in the people who elected you to remember why they elected you and hope they didn't notice if you violated that trust.

The second time takes money and some true believers rummaging through local newspaper offices and gossip houses.

Surely it's a question that each candidate has to answer for his or her self. And surely your national leaders will guide you to trust in your electorate. Oh, wait, unless your national leaders have noticed that the public has figured out they've been royally screwed over by the folks they voted for and are not in much of a trusting mood right now. So what do the leaders of the GPO do?

"When you run in an adverse political environment, you try to localize and personalize the race as much as you can." according to Republican Rep. from Oklahoma, Tom Cole. Yup, exactly. You go down and dirty and start swinging the mud. It's called "we don't have any new ideas or original thoughts and need to distract you with bright, shiny, objects." Cole wants to head up the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC), and sent out a memo that recommended vulnerable incumbents spend $20K on a research package to find damaging material on their challengers and "define your opponent immediately and unrelentingly" using that material (since defining a challenger on merits of the political debate aren't turning out so well for Republicans these days).

So how desperate IS the NRCC to avoid a debate on political issues in local campaigns? Desperate enough to plan on spending "more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget on what officials described as negative ads," according to the Washington Post.

Voters better get their rain gear ready, according to John Geer, author of In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns, thinks that 2006 will be "probably a more negative campaign than any in recent memory." Unfortunately, I think people have been saying that about each election for decades now, and they always seem to be right.

Don't let these would be puppeteers distract you from looking at their records. They have votes and they have stances. Hold them accountable for their actions. These people were supposed to be representing you, but ended up representing themselves and the money that feeds them.