Sunday, September 19, 2010

I HATE THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

I am just so weary of having to choose between one party that's psychotic, nihilistic, reactionary, and hate-filled and another party that's this politically incompetent:

President Obama's political advisers, looking for ways to help Democrats and alter the course of the midterm elections in the final weeks, are considering a national advertising campaign that would cast the Republican Party as all but taken over by Tea Party extremists, people involved in the discussion said....

"We need to get out the message that it's now really dangerous to re-empower the Republican Party because the people who have taken over the party are radical," said one Democratic strategist who has spoken with White House advisers but requested anonymity to discuss private strategy talks.


That's not the incompetent part. This is:

But Democrats are divided. The party's House and Senate campaign committees are resistant, not wanting to do anything that smacks of nationalizing the midterm elections.... Endangered Congressional candidates want any available money to go to their localized campaigns.

Right -- because your messaging in local campaigns is going over so well this year. Yeah, right -- you don't want to mess up a really successful strategy like saying "I'm a Democratic incumbent! Vote for me!" with, y'know, actual information about how the other guys are planning to shut down the government, sink the country deeper into debt, and repeal every good, popular government program from the entire twentieth century. Shhh! Don't bring it up!

But that's not the full extent of the stupidity. It turns out that the White House wants to do this not with an eye toward this pivotal election cycle, but with an eye toward 2012:

Democrats on Capitol Hill say that Obama aides ... do not consult with them enough and are more concerned with positioning Mr. Obama for his 2012 reelection race than with re-electing Democrats now.

At the Democratic National Committee, aides already have started work on a database to link the most controversial statements of the Tea Party-backed candidates to possible Republican presidential aspirants.

The database will point out, for example, that Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney are supporting the Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada, Sharron Angle, who once said that victims of rape should make "what was really a lemon situation into lemonade," and [Christine] O'Donnell, who has said that having women in the service academies "cripples the readiness of our defense."

The tactic of linking potential Republican rivals to such statements was already in evidence last week. After Ms. O'Donnell’s victory, a party spokesman told reporters, "The fact that Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin would put their name behind a candidate that believes women who serve our country 'cripple the readiness of our defense' make them unfit to be commander-in-chief."


Does this make any sense at all? Do these people actually think they're going to get mileage two years from now attacking statements that in some cases are now years old and that aren't even from Obama's potential opponents, but from people they've endorsed? That's going to be his message? "Vote for me -- my opponent endorsed someone two years ago who said something offensive in 1996"? Really?

Oh, I give up.

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