Below The Fold

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 3:22 PM and is filed under 2010 Election, Congress, Economics, 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.