Copyright 2002 The Columbus Dispatch The Columbus
Dispatch
August 4, 2002 Sunday, Home Final
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SECTION: EDITORIAL & COMMENT; Pg. 05B
LENGTH: 587 words
HEADLINE: LOOMING ELECTION SPARKS PARTY RHETORIC
BYLINE: Jonathan Riskind, Dispatch Washington Bureau Chief
BODY: It's a ritual in Washington to
arm lawmakers with partisan "talking points" as they head out of town on a
congressional break.
With midterm elections just three
months away, the rhetoric was ratcheted up when the Senate took off last week
for its August recess, a week after the House's departure.
The message meisters are trying extra hard to brew up effective
diatribes in their desperation to strike the right chord with voters who will
decide whether Republicans hold their narrow House majority and Democrats retain
their slim hold on the Senate.
Here's a preview of
what you will be hearing over the next few weeks from the politicians and
partisan surrogates who flock to the cable TV shows, Sunday network talk shows
and Rotary luncheons.
Republicans will demonize the
Democrat-controlled Senate and its majority leader, Tom Daschle of South
Dakota.
The overall message to be offered up by the
GOP, primarily by the Senate Republican Conference: "Republicans have
successfully advanced the president's agenda for the nation on the economy,
education, prescription drug costs, and homeland and national defense."
House Republicans, the litany goes, have passed a bevy of
important bills, from the measure creating the Department of Homeland Security,
to prescription-drug coverage for seniors, to a reauthorization of the 1996
welfare law.
The Senate has kept those and other bills
bottled up, Republicans charge, and Daschle is to blame for the logjam.
"Those who want a prescription-drug benefit should insist
that Sen. Daschle let the Finance Committee write a consensus bill so the Senate
can still pass a prescription drug benefit by the end of the year," said Sen.
George V. Voinovich, R-Ohio.
Lest anyone worry about a
lack of message coordination, here's what Rep. John A. Boehner, R-West Chester,
had to say last week in blasting Daschle for holding up a House-approved pension
plan overhaul bill: "Senate Democrats are leaving town until after Labor Day --
and leaving American workers vulnerable."
Don't worry;
the Democrats do just fine when it comes to spinning in chorus. They say the GOP
remains highly vulnerable on the issue of corporate accountability, arguing that
worried Republicans caved in and agreed to a mostly Democratic proposal that
Bush signed into law last week.
The Democratic mantra
will focus on trying to tie the GOP to corporate greed and the slumping economy,
blaming Republicans for not signing off on a generous enough prescription-drug
coverage benefit. Democrats also believe they can do well by accusing the GOP of
gutting environmental-protection regulations.
"On
almost every issue, the political terrain has tilted toward the Democrats,"
asserted a memo issued last week by Democratic strategists James Carville,
Stanley Greenberg and Robert Shrum. "The Republicans lack credibility on the
salient voting issues even as they try to build defenses."
House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt certainly was on message
before the House recessed at the end of July.
"Democrats are doing a good job on the issues that people care about --
economic growth, solving the corporate accountability (problem), doing something
about Medicare prescription drugs that is real and not fake,
trying to protect the environment," Gephardt told reporters. "I think we got the
right issues there, and I think we can win six seats."
It's going to be a long and repetitive autumn.
Jonathan Riskind is chief of The Dispatch Washington bureau.
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