The Politico has an interesting article up detailing the result of discussions at a big RNC donor retreat over the weekend. Here's how TPM's Eric Kleefeld summarizes their strategy for taking on Obama, should he win the nomination, this fall:
Among their points against him, according to a plan laid out at an RNC retreat:
• He is not ready to be commander in chief.• Taking a page from the Hillary Clinton campaign, he had a "pattern of voting 'present'" in the Illinois legislature.
• The Republicans "can be confident in a campaign about issues," seemingly in contrast to his mere rhetoric.
• He is inexperienced.
With the exception of point three, all of these are lines of attack that Clinton has already tried. If Obama goes on to defeat her for the nomination, it will mean that these attacks failed to convince a majority of the voters in the Democratic primaries. Now I realize that party primaries and the general election are different things, but still...if these attacks don't stop Obama in the spring, I can't help but wonder why they think they will stop him in the fall.
More on the event from Politico:
The RNC event also broached taking control of traditionally Democratic issues such as health care, with even Rove stressing a need for Republicans to start addressing the matter. Congressman Calvert described health care as "one of the seminal issues" of the upcoming election and asked, "Are we going to move towards socialized medicine or away from it? Because we can't move towards the middle."
Good luck with that one, guys. It's not going to work.
Last but not least, the article offers a great anecdote that demonstrates just how caught in the past the Republican Party truly is. As Zakaria says, watching these guys give speeches is like watching the reruns of a bad 70's sitcom.
Berg, the "Tonight Show" segment producer, delivered an informal talk about the pride and pitfalls of being a conservative working in Hollywood. Peppering his speech with references to Michael Moore, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and other Tinseltown lefties, he argued against the liberal mindset that he believes dominates the industry.
"We [conservatives] believe capitalism isn't a dirty word," he said. "If you've seen Daniel Day Lewis' portrayal of a greedy, sinister oilman in 'There Will Be Blood,' it's just another example of the Hollywood left's contempt for capitalism."People have called Hollywood conservatives 'the new gays,' but I don't think that's necessarily the case," Berg contended. "The gays have been accepted in Hollywood for years. They've long been out of the closet. In fact, they're fixing up the closet, decorating it, and it looks nice, actually."
Berg centered his talk around the "unintended consequences" of the recent Writers Guild of America strike against networks and studios, which ended last week. Berg placed blame on the WGA's "radical" negotiators, with writers earning six-figure salaries casting themselves as "poor, exploited, downtrodden" workers, "acting like it's 1957" and they were UAW members trying to get back on the assembly line building Corvettes.
"When the writers went on strike Nov. 5, they entrusted their futures to a leadership that essentially believes Karl Marx is still relevant," he said. "This was a revolution against The Man."
Berg discussed the return of "The Tonight Show" without its writers in early January, when the only guests consenting to cross the WGA picket lines were NBC News anchors, goofy animal acts and Republican presidential candidates, including McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.
"The WGA cut a side deal with David Letterman but not with our show," he recalled. "We had to go back to work as the No. 4 network with no writers and no stars. Actors would not cross the line. I didn't read this anywhere, but they were threatened with blackballing if they crossed the line to do our shows" -- ironic, he says, since he believes Hollywood is "obsessed" with the 1950s blacklisting era of Joseph McCarthy. "The true threat of McCarthyism," he says, "is coming from the left."
It's like it never stopped being the 1970s for these guys.
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