GOP adopts anti-Pelosi campaign strategy
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — If all politics are local, don’t tell that to Jimmy Higdon.
Higdon, a Republican from Kentucky, won a state Senate seat in December in a largely Democratic district with an unlikely strategy: He nationalized his race, warning of one-party rule by featuring Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s pictures in his television advertisements and campaign literature. Higdon, who was outspent by a 4-to-1 margin in the race, is happy that she’s so unpopular.
“It worked for me. ... And I’m really happy that I had a good team that recognized that,” he said. “Because that’s not something I would have dreamed up.”
Expect the Republican Party to replicate the strategy in races around the country this year.
“The strategists will try to make her the lightning rod who represents all that is wrong in Washington,” said Jeffrey McCall, a media studies professor at DePauw University in Indiana.
Pelosi, who has a job-approval rating of 39 percent in her home state of California, is taking hits from all sides these days.
Newspaper cartoonists and comedy writers routinely take jabs at her, and many Democratic women are still smarting from the speaker’s decision to support Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary.
Pelosi, 69, a 12-term representative from San Francisco, declined to comment. Her spokesman referred questions to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the chairman of the DCCC, said Republicans used an anti-Pelosi message in a lot of Southern congressional districts in 2008 and in special elections in Mississippi and Alabama, without success.
“We’ve been there, and they’ve done that and failed,” he said.
McCall said the attacks on Pelosi were similar to the Democratic efforts in 2006 and 2008 to tie Republican candidates to President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney.
“It’s a rough-and-tumble world out there, and if it works, it works,” McCall said. He said that polls consistently found that Pelosi was the most-recognizable leader of Congress, and it was easy to portray her in a negative light.
“She comes across as the prototypical San Francisco liberal Democrat who is easily wrapped in the trappings of big spender, big government, pork, entitlements, that sort of thing,” McCall said. “And one thing to keep in mind: She represents those labels pretty well, based on her political positions. But going beyond that, it’s not necessarily who or what she is, it’s how she can be portrayed.”
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