| Mail flashbacks: Endorsing for terror
03/31/10, 15:36 5 Comment
We've seen a couple of Democratic mail pieces; now it is time to consider the other side.
Opposition research against non-incumbents can be a tough sell, as they don't have any votes to link to contributions/actions/statements. So attacks on these candidates can be half-assed. Taking money from bad people, for example, is sketchy but it doesn't really mean anything absent something to make it relevant. To compensate for this the campaign will demagogue around a contribution or endorsement in an attempt to force a non-issue into an issue. For whatever reason, Republicans seem to favor these sorts of attacks, as shown by the infamous Godless Ad against now-Sen. Kay Hagan in 2008 and our current mail scan:
The downside to this approach, of course, is that mail suffers in quality the wordier it is. The NRCC has several jobs to do with this piece: they need to establish that Peace PAC endorsed Diane Farrell, that Peace PAC is bad, and therefore Farrell is bad. The result is a mail piece that spends a lot of time establishing that the Taliban is bad. It also has no citations, presumably because that would risk revealing that their attack is really that Farrell hangs out with goofy hippies.
The overuse of sarcasm is another occasional feature of Republican mail. For a piece shrieking about the Taliban its graphics are oddly soothing. It is especially strange in this piece, from a 2006 congressional election in Connecticut, as that was a banner year for the NRCC slapping Osama bin Laden on all sorts of ads. |
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