Thursday, October 23, 2008

House Republicans Bow to Political Reality.

The Washington Post are reporting this morning that the Republicans are waking up to the harsh reality confronting them and are starting to cut off advertising funding to incumbents who they believe cannot win.

That's a sign of just how bad things really are.

Since Monday, the NRCC has dropped advertising all together in Florida's 24th district, Minnesota's 6th district and Colorado's 4th district. All three seats are held by Republican incumbents who have badly damaged their own political prospects.

Faced with an unbelievably bad political environment and a HUGE fundraising disparity, House Republicans appear to have cut their ties with these three -- the leading edge of what could be a series of de-funding decisions of incumbents by House and Senate strategists.

It could be pointed out that the Democrats have also cut advertising in places like Colorado, but that's because they are confident of winning, not because they are essentially refusing to throw good money after bad, which is where the Republicans currently find themselves.

Glenn Greenwald did a very good piece yesterday on the fact that the Republicans appear to be changing their tactics recently with Hayes, Palin and Bachmann all withdrawing or apologising for comments which implied that the Democrats were somehow less patriotic than their Republican counterparts.

He suggests that they are all doing so because, since McCain launched his negative attacks against Obama, it is McCain's popularity which has been dropping like a stone and not Obama's. He posits many reasons for this, from the economic downturn to people's general worry that the country is off course, but I think one of the main reasons that McCain's negativity is failing to hit home is that Obama warned us it was coming and clearly defined it's use as desperation on McCain's part.

This allowed Obama to literally laugh in McCain's face when he tried these tactics in the debate.

It's a highly effective way to counter these Republican smears. Usually, Democrats become outraged and try to defend accusations which are silly on their face, but Obama seems to have come up with a much more effective way of dealing with them. Treat them as the pathetic distractions that they are and continue to talk about policy.

The news that the Republicans are starting to pull back TV ads from certain states is a sign of Obama's huge financial advantage here, but it's also an indication that this election is going one way and the Republicans are starting to realise this.

Here Chuck Todd and Brian Williams discuss interviewing McCain and Palin and they make it very clear that there is an air of gloom surrounding the campaign.



"They know that they are losing." That says it all. They have gone negative and it has failed to have the desired effect and they have nothing else up their sleeves.

Click title for full article.

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