GOP Fears Compounding Negative Image
By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 10, 1999; Page A14
Republican strategists are worried that the public's negative view of their party goes far beyond the negative reaction to the GOP's role in impeachment.
Impeachment, they say, is part of a growing record of miscalculation dating to 1995 that reinforced the image of a party defiant of -- if not claiming to be superior to -- the public will, deeply opposed to President Clinton, driven by a minority of intensely partisan interest groups and ideologues.
The end of the impeachment inquiry will not mean a new dawn for the GOP; instead, in this view, the Republican Party faces a long, difficult struggle to restore the credibility it initially built up in the 1980s, and then again in the 1994 election, only to be steadily squandered since then.
"We have been the British army: the best troops and the worst generals," a GOP media specialist said. "We pick fights and run away, we pick the wrong fights and then run away. We should at least make the enemy take some casualties before we retreat, but we don't even do that."
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