Republicans Recite Dem Attack Lines — With Little Hope Of Success

Mitt Romney
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For all the brainpower the parties put into prepping their talking points, you’d think an election as significant as this one would yield the most finely crafted political spin. Instead, on the key issues of the season, Republicans are picking up Democratic attack lines and hurling them back where they came from, word for word.

Democrats warn of GOP war against women. Mitt Romney, and the rest of the GOP, say the real aggressors in that war are President Obama and the Democrats. Democrats insist that Republicans want to end Medicare as we know it. Camp Romney says President Obama’s health care law will end Medicare as we know it. Democrats say House GOP budget fails the fundamental test of fairness. House GOP budget guru Paul Ryan fires back, “The President’s budget is not just a failure of math, but it also fails the fundamental test of fairness.”

All that’s missing are press releases that scream, “I know you are but what am I?!” Call it the Pee Wee Herman election.

The question is whether these dust-kicking efforts successfully confuse the public about where the candidates stand on the issues, or whether they are merely an implicit admission that on the issues that have thus far dominated the cycle, Democrats have an enduring edge, and Republicans are scared.

“There’s a theory in political science that candidates should only talk about the issues that benefit them,” says John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University. “Democrats tend to have a natural advantage on Medicare, among others. They ‘own’ these issues, in other words. Because of this, it may not work for the GOP to ‘trespass’ on these issues. They’re not playing to their strengths.”

That’s basically how the White House sees it.

At a background briefing for reporters on Monday, senior administration officials said that Republicans will have a hell of a time gaining an advantage on any of these issues — in large part because Democrats have a built-in advantage on them with voters.

Voters’ general impression of parties matters — and so on Medicare and women’s rights, Republicans are going to have a very hard time regaining lost ground. Running right at Democrats on those issues may simply suggest lack of better options.

For instance: A half-week GOP media blitz portraying Democrats as hostile to stay-at home moms failed to eat very far into Obama’s double-digit advantage over Romney among women, according to a CNN poll.

By contrast, the aides acknowledged that Republicans have a difficult-to-confront advantage over Democrats with the public on the question of federal spending. And polls suggests Obama’s adoption of the GOP’s “all of the above” energy rhetoric has yielded mixed results.

“Their best hope would be somehow to reframe these issues so that their particular message is more persuasive than the Democratic message,” Sides said. “But I tend to think that’s an uphill battle. Messages that resonate with voters’ existing opinions will be more persuasive than messages that attempt to change those opinions. Ultimately, then, I’m not sure that this sort of GOP response will muddy the waters so much as commit them to play on the Democrats’ turf.”

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