2006 ELECTIONS

2006 Election
The 2006 midterm elections, if you believe the popular, mainstream media was a repudiation of President George W. Bush and the Republican Party. I believe that in a lot of respects this is absolutely true. The Democratic Party ran its campaign on one issue, “They were not George Bush and any Republican running for office was George W. Bush reincarnated.” They ran on no issue or plan. They did not offer any plan for the direction they would take the country. Every DNC, DNCC, DNSC ad that I saw was based upon the same thing – George W. Bush. This post is not going to really deal with the Democrats however. It is going to deal with the incompetitence of the Republicans who ran certain campaigns.
Prior to the election, I thought for the most part the American public would not accept nor reward a campaign run on no issues. I thought that the Republicans would deservedly so lose seats in both the house and Senate, but retain a slight seat or two majority. I thought that the RNC 72 hour get out the vote program, which was so successful in 2002 and 2004, would once again save the Republicans. It would add 1-2 percentage points to enough close races to maintain a slim majority. Boy was I wrong. I should have looked closer at the personalities in a lot of the close races. My current boss went out and did “official” and campaign events with almost every Republican candidate in the target races. Many of these “endangered” Republicans are now soon to be former Republican office holders. Since I am a federal government employee, I was only able to work on the “official” events. I was amazed at how unprepared some Hill staffs are. If you are the district director for a Congressman or woman, you would think that the first two groups that you would know and continually reach out to would be the local business community and the local religious community. This is called working with the base. Anyone with half a brain understands this. Yet many of the district directors, chief of staffs, and others working in Congressional or Senate offices had no idea which businesses were important, which venues or organizations were important to reach out to. When you don’t know the folks that you need to get elected/re-elected, you deserve to and should lose. Let me give you one example. A sitting Republican from a Northeastern state had asked my boss to come visit for an official event in his district. The local district director could not come up with a business in the district that had added jobs or that had exported any of its products within the past year (and no the state was not Michigan which is one of just two states that have seen a decrease in jobs over the past few years). When the criteria are that broad and you still can not come up with an answer, you know that you are in trouble (the Congressman _______ the 2006 election _- _).
The other interesting fact after the election was that a lot of the Republicans tried to blame President Bush for their losing power. It was the President that caused Tom Delay’s problems in Texas, Duke Cunningham’s guilty plea, Bob Ney’s guilty plea, the Jack Abramhoff scandal, the Foley scandal. All of these problems were caused by Congress’s belief that the rules and laws did not apply to them. As the Democrats said, the “Culture of Corruption” was being run by the Republicans and their leadership in both the House and Senate. The Republicans became the same as the Democrats in the early 90’s. The leadership and the rank and file members thought that the rules did not apply to them. This is one of the issues that I have not yet begun to understand with respect to both the House and Senate. They write laws that don’t apply to them and then they don’t understand why people in their districts think that they are the problem. If you look at some of the national poll numbers prior to the election, the approval rating of both the house and senate was a lot lower than that of the President. Yet, House and Senate members are under the belief that it was the President who cost them the election, not their own incompetence. I saw an article recently that had Senator Arlen Specter blaming the President for why he is no longer the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee. While Senator Specter was not up for re-election this year, the State of Pennsylvania’s other Senator, Rick Santorum lost badly. Santorum had the same problem that Virginia’s Senator George Allen also had. They overlooked their re-election campaign while trying to set up a 2008 Presidential campaign. Hopefully, they now understand that before you can run for President, you better win your re-election campaign. Hopefully, both of these two soon to be former Senators will fade away so that none of us will ever have to see or deal with them again.
A friend of mine who used to run congressional campaigns was amazed when I told him the story of a Cabinet Secretary trying to come visit a local district to help a sitting member whose staff was so ridiculous that they could not think of anything to do. While this was not the Congressman’s campaign, it still goes to show that too many Congressman or Senators had become complacent and oblivious to the situation that they are facing. You would have thought that the RNC would have trained a majority of the campaign managers so that problems such as this would not happen. While a lot of Congressman have local friends and supporters running their campaigns and probably can’t afford to have professionals run their campaigns, this situation needs to be corrected. Maybe the RNC should have a stronger voice in setting up the general election campaigns of local Republicans. It seems that all too often this year, the local campaigns made mistakes that a proven professional would not have made. Would this change have stopped the Democratic tide? Maybe, but I would bet that if the RNC had a more direct role in a lot of the local races, many of them might not have been lost.