Biggest Tax Cut Evah
by Brien Jackson
I have to say, this is pretty clever:
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), chaired by Congressman Chris Van Hollen, announced the DCCC is launching the third phase of the Putting Families First campaign on Tuesday targeting Republicans who opposed President Obama’s economic recovery bill, the largest component of which is middle class tax cuts to 95 percent of Americans.
During this phase of the campaign, the DCCC is taking the message of middle class tax cuts and economic recovery directly to Republican Members by mounting a major grassroots campaign that includes phone calls, e-mails, and text messages directly to targeted Republicans’ constituents.
The point is to directly target vulnerable GOP members, letting their constituents know about all the tax cut money their Republican representative just voted against. Now I won’t say that DDay’s criticism isn’t without merit, but it does seem to rather miss the point. Obviously the idea isn’t to convince people that tax cuts are awesome (I doubt people need much convincing to that), nor to “compete with the GOP” on tax cuts. Instead, the idea is to lay bare the fact that Congressional Republicans are flaming hypocrites, that they’re opposing the bill just to oppose it, and to destroy any residual credibility they may have in the few remaining marginal districts they hold. Chris Van Hollen, head of the DCCC, makes that pretty clear in fact:
“House Republicans can’t have it both ways – they can’t claim to be in favor of tax cuts and then vote against the largest tax cut in American history. Americans will hold House Republicans accountable for ‘just saying no’ to the largest tax cut in American history and saving and creating three to four million jobs.
In other words, on the one hand the Republicans say we need lots of tax cuts, but at the end of the day, they vote against lots of tax cuts. It might set up some potential problems down the road, but you can’t fight that battle before this one is over, and the less credibility Republicans have then, the easier it will be for Democrats on a host of fronts. So I like this move very much, and I’ll like it even more the more I hear “middle class” in front of tax cuts.
I jump on hypocrisy as much as the next guy. It also would have been plenty easy to write a script about your local GOP Congressman “voting against fixing your bridge and your roads and against 6,000 jobs for your district” or something like that. There are two Santa Clauses that the GOP promises – endless tax cuts and endless services. You can discredit them on one or the other. If you build up tax cuts as a universal good, you’re in risky territory. If you build up investment in America as good, you’re winning the larger argument, and playing a long game and a short game at the same time. Plus you’re proving to people that they’re actually getting something from government for their taxes, which is what feeds tax cut mania to begin with – people feel that the money is disappearing with no benefit to them.
Well I don’t know that I’d really agree that the rump portion of the GOP left in Congress promises endless services or not, but in either event I think it’s also important to remember where these calls are being targeted. We’re talking about districts that elected a Republican in 2008, so they’re at least marginally right leaning already, meaning they’re probably pretty solidly in the “tax cuts are awesome” category to begin with. You *could* try to sell them on spending and investment, but that’s kind of a bank shot and not really the sort of thing you can do in a snappy robocall. Pointing out the rank hypocrisy and pure obstructionism of Congressional Republicans, on the other hand, might work. Of course, it might not work, and the district that voted for a Republican in 2008 could vote for him again in 2010, but in either event I don’t think these robocalls are really going to affect deep seeded views about fiscal policy in the general public.