Overview: we find it very odd that ABC is giving a detailed preview of the Democrat / MSM strategy over the next two weeks, and the weak Republican responses. We quote extensively from The Note, since the links go bad pretty quickly, and these jottings might turn out to be interesting for their predictive or foolhardy qualities in a couple of weeks.

The Note on the Democrats/MSM next two weeks, in which the MSM and Democrats have been deeply coordinated:

How the (liberal) Old Media plans to cover the last two weeks of the election:

1. Glowingly profile Speaker-Inevitable Nancy Pelosi, with loving mentions of her grandmotherly steel (see last night’s 60 Minutes), and fail to describe her as “ultra liberal” or “an extreme liberal,” which would mirror the way Gingrich was painted twelve years ago.

2. Look at every attempt by the President to define the race on his terms as deluded and desperate; increasingly quote Republican strategists saying that the President is hurting the party whenever he enters the fray.

3. Refuse to join the daily morning Ken Mehlman-Rush Limbaugh conference calls, despite repeated invitations. LINK

4. Imbue every Democratic candidate for whom Bill Clinton campaigns with a golden halo.

5. Paint groups that run ads or do turnout for Republican candidates as shadowy, extreme, corrupt, and illegitimate; describe their analogues on the left as valiant underdogs, part of a People’s Army (with homage to Rich Lowry).

6. Care more about voter disenfranchisement than voter fraud.

7. Take every Republican quote expressing some trepidation about the outcome and banner it.

8. Drop any pretense of covering good news from Iraq (uhm&.) or good news about the economy, including some upcoming positive macro numbers (Quick, Note readers: name the current Secretary of the Treasury.). LINK

9. Amplify Obama-mania as a metaphor for the Democratic Party being the party of excitement and the future.

10. Fail to follow Bob Novak’s analysis of the difference between Democratic and Republican oppo plants. LINK

11. Lock in the CW (which, shockingly, could be wrong) that the winner of two out three Senate races in Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri will control the Senate.

12. Carefully document what appears to strategists in both parties to be the case — while a few incumbent Republicans are clawing their way back into contention (including and especially, perhaps, Tom Reynolds), the number of endangered Republican-held seats is growing, not shrinking.

As in: “In a measure of the party’s growing optimism, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee plans to announce Tuesday that it will begin airing advertisements in 11 new districts, including eight the party had not considered competitive until recently, party sources say,”

And here’s the woeful, whitebread GOP, from the same source:

In three straight national elections and scores of legislative and public relations battles, the Bush-Rove-Mehlman political machine has rarely lost to the Democrats in over six years. Now, on the brink of what many believe will be a midterm election in which Democrats will win big, the Republican Party finds itself in a position to which it is unaccustomed. How is the Grand Old Party handling all this? By either cause or effect (or, perhaps, both), Republicans are acting like Democrats. To wit:

1. They are suffering from the classic “nothing is sticking” lack of confidence, so they are switching messages nearly as fast as they can come up with them, guaranteeing that, well, nothing will stick: “Pelosi is liberal,” “Rangel is liberal,” “they will raise your taxes,” “they are unethical,” “they will let the terrorists win,” “CNN shows snipers,” “Democrats won’t give you energy independence,” etc. If it’s Thursday, it must be “Harry Reid Is Unethical Day!”

2. They are playing the intra-party blame game: the White House is blaming the Hill; congressional staffers are blaming the party’s 2008 presidential candidates; the campaign committees are blaming the campaigns; the campaign strategists are blaming the White House and the candidates; the candidates are blaming everybody (but themselves).

3. They are overreacting to good poll news — and to bad poll news.

4. They are making spending decisions with the certainty with which most Americans pick lottery numbers.

5. Their lobbyists and Gang of 500 members are not only resigned to losing, but thinking it might be better for the country and the party if they did.

6. They have forgotten what it is like to be in the minority.

7. They have forgotten that using exact language matters.

8. They keep WAITING to win two news cycles in a row, by providence, rather than executing a plan to do just that.

9. They are filling the papers with blind and on-the-record quotes predicting defeat and doing pre-game post mortems.

10. They don’t know what they stand for, but promise a focused search for it.

11. They feel they would rather be the other team than themselves as far as strategic positioning is concerned.

12. They are watching helplessly as the other side hides many of its real positions with steely discipline.

13. They are seeing the opposition live more than they are by the dictum “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours let’s talk about” regarding groups such as rural voters, religious voters, and fiscal conservatives.

13. They are forgetting the famous Franklin axiom: We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

Perhaps we’ll be able to draw some lessons from these points in a couple of weeks — one way or the other.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.