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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (278232)	7/20/2002 4:17:50 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

<<...David Garth, the political consultant who coined the Specter and Gola slogan more than three decades ago, has worked for both Democrats and Republicans. Garth believes the corporate scandals reached a "tipping point" in recent weeks, and he senses that the Republicans are "in trouble as far as the issues are concerned."...>> The Democrats Find a Theme By E. J. Dionne Jr. Washington Post Columnist Friday, July 19, 2002 "We need these guys to watch those guys." This slogan, one of the cleverest political tag lines to come out of modern media consulting, was coined for Republicans. But the outcome of November's congressional elections depends in large part on whether Democrats can exploit the sentiment behind it this year. Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania has fond memories of the slogan because it worked so well for him. In the late 1960s, Specter and another reform-minded Republican, Tom Gola (one of the state's greatest basketball heroes), were facing off against Philadelphia's Democratic machine. Specter was running for district attorney, Gola for comptroller. In an overwhelmingly Democratic city, the voters needed a very strong reason to break with their traditional loyalties. They had one, as Specter recalled in an interview this week. "We had a city administration," he said, "that was highly suspect if not demonstrably corrupt." In 2002, it's the Democrats' turn to cast themselves as the people's watchdogs at the national level -- not against a corrupt machine but against the more generalized threat of corporate wrongdoing and one-party government. Until the corporate wave hit, Democrats were floundering in their search for a national message, and were divided over strategy. Some Democrats were pushing the idea of their party as a check on Republican overreaching. Others insisted on a broader and more forward-looking program. Many wrote off the entire debate as pointless. Republicans, in the meantime, hoped to use President Bush's popularity and the nation's solidarity in the war on terrorism to beat back the midterm blues. Shrewdly, Republicans keep coming up with their own modest versions of popular Democratic proposals -- a prescription drug benefit under Medicare, for example -- while backtracking from their more adventurous ideas, notably the partial privatization of Social Security. Democratic activist Robert Borosage calls the Republican strategy "political cross-dressing." The term reflects real worries that Republicans might blur any distinctions that could work in the Democrats' favor. Guided by Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, House Republicans followed just such a strategy in the 2000 elections and combined it with careful targeting of close contests in the campaign's closing days. They kept control of the House. The explosion of the financial scandals has changed the political mood and resolved some of the internal Democratic bickering. The idea that Democrats could check Republican power now looks less like a strategy of cautious moderation than a broader appeal against corporate wrongdoing, Social Security privatization and the dangers of across-the-board Republican control in Washington. An insistence that Democrats are needed to keep an eye on "those guys" -- whether defined as Republicans or the corporate world's abusers -- appeals to the party's base, which could be mobilized by the concept's newly populist overtones. But it also could reach swing voters who may now see advantage in keeping at least one house of Congress in the hands of the opposition. David Garth, the political consultant who coined the Specter and Gola slogan more than three decades ago, has worked for both Democrats and Republicans. Garth believes the corporate scandals reached a "tipping point" in recent weeks, and he senses that the Republicans are "in trouble as far as the issues are concerned." Republicans are acting as if they sense exactly the same thing. The party's leaders in the House have sent different signals on different days as to how quickly they will come to agreement with the Democratic Senate on a corporate reform bill. The scrambling -- along with efforts to hang the entire corporate mess on Bill Clinton -- reflects Republican fears that the political terrain, once modestly favorable to the GOP, is rapidly shifting the other way. The good news for Republicans is that all this has happened in July, not September. Between now and November, Republican chances could be enhanced by a recovery in the stock market or by a new wave of sympathy for Bush following the anniversary of Sept. 11. But as Republicans demonstrated in their 1994 sweep, the tone of an election is often set in the summer. And one Democratic strategist noted that for the first time since the early 1950s, House Democrats, at least, "can run against Washington." From 1956 to 1994, Democrats had to defend their control of the House. In the past three elections they had to defend a Democratic president. They are now free to attack, and they will. As for Specter, he's a loyal Republican who would hate to see his "these guys, those guys" slogan used by the Democrats. "They're the wrong guys," he said with a chuckle. © 2002 The Washington Post Company washingtonpost.com