This action and the decision by the White House to no longer accept requests for information from democrats in Congress and the decision by the republicans in the Senate to force a 30 hour democratic filibuster of one of the blocked judicial nominees are coordinated. It is part of an ongoing republican strategy that the democratic party should be prevented from defining itself in the minds of the voters. Rather the RNC should define the democratic party. In fact, the republican party spends far more money and man hours defining the democratic party than the democratic party does.
From a recent memo by RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie:
As the Democrat Party gets smaller, it becomes more liberal, elitist and angry. And as it becomes more liberal, elitist and angry, it gets smaller.
http://www.idgop.org/news.asp?PID=354Everything the republican party says and does leading up to the election will attempt to reinforce this message.
We seem to be approaching the culmination of a far reaching strategy developed and implemented over a long period of time. The first element of this strategy was to recruit and train, with nationally solicited funds, republican candidates for local elections with the idea that these candidates would later run for the state legislature and then Congress. This began more than 20 years ago and was the original purpose of GOPAC.
But GOPAC evolved from just a recruitment and training organization to a propaganda machine. The purpose of the propaganda was to make sure that the republican party defined the democratic party in the minds of as many voters as possible. That became a second element of the republican strategy. In the last 10 years or so democratic candidates and the democratic party have allowed that to occur.
Since Newt Gingrich took over GOPAC, the republican strategy has included trying to marginalize the democratic party by painting it as extremist in its liberalism. This is why a republican candidate for any office higher than dogcatcher is trained to use the famous GOPAC words when referring to a democratic opponent or the democratic party. It is also why the republican party spends millions of dollars every year and employs hundreds of people solely to make the democratic party appear too liberal for most independent voters.
Another element to the republican strategy was to focus on redistricting. The RNC spent tens of millions of dollars on state legislature elections in the late 1990's and especially the 2000 election. According to Jim Nicholson back in 1999, the then RNC Chairman, the reason this was done was so that republicans would control more of the redistricting done after the 2000 census. Although the obvious goal of redistricting was to create more republican districts, another element of this strategy came to light just after the recent Texas redistricting.
The Texas redistricting continued implementing the republican strategy of defining the democratic party as too liberal. In effect it combined the redistricting strategy with the definition strategy. The redistricting did not seek to eliminate liberal democrats in the Texas Congressional delegation. Rather it sought to eliminate the more conservative to moderate white democrats and guarantee the re-election of only the most liberal minority democrats. This is part of a strategy described by Tom DeLay to make the democratic party the party of blacks, feminists, homosexuals, and extremist liberal groups like ELF. It has been said that DeLay's goal is that there will not be a white democrat left in Texas. This redistricting strategy will be followed in other states whenever the republicans get the opportunity, even if that does not occur until after the 2010 census.
Karl Rove has talked many times of his goal of making the republican party the dominant party for the next several generations on the national, state and local levels.
The republican strategy to become the dominant party has been well thought out and developed, and well implemented on a national scale. It has been depressingly effective in my opinion. It irritates me that the democratic party apparently has no strategy to counter it.
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