Obama Aides Weigh Bid to Tie the G.O.P. to the Tea Party

Obama Aides Weigh Bid to Tie the G.O.P. to the Tea Party
By JACKIE CALMES and MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: September 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/us/politics/20dems.html?_r=1&th=&adxnnl=1&emc=th&adxnnlx=1284978746-zf6lRBYUccWXmxDwpEabGw



WASHINGTON — President Obama’s political advisers, looking for ways to help Democrats and alter the course of the midterm elections in the final weeks, are considering a range of ideas, including national advertisements, to cast the Republican Party as all but taken over by Tea Party extremists, people involved in the discussion said.

White House and Congressional Democratic strategists are trying to energize dispirited Democratic voters over the coming six weeks, in hopes of limiting the party’s losses and keeping control of the House and Senate. The strategists see openings to exploit after a string of Tea Party successes split Republicans in a number of states, culminating last week with developments that scrambled Senate races in Delaware and Alaska.

“We need to get out the message that it’s now really dangerous to re-empower the Republican Party,” said one Democratic strategist who has spoken with White House advisers but requested anonymity to discuss private strategy talks.

Democrats are divided. The party’s House and Senate campaign committees are resistant, not wanting to do anything that smacks of nationalizing the midterm elections when high unemployment and the drop in Mr. Obama’s popularity have made the climate so hostile to Democrats. Endangered Congressional candidates want any available money to go to their localized campaigns.

Late Sunday night, White House advisers denied that a national ad campaign was being planned. “There’s been no discussion of such a thing at the White House” or the Democratic National Committee, said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser.

Proponents say a national ad campaign, most likely on cable television, would complement those individual campaigns and give Democrats a chance to redefine the stakes. The Democratic strategist said voters did not now see much threat to them from a Republican takeover of Congress, even though some Tea Party-backed candidates and other Republicans have taken positions that many voters consider extreme, like shutting down the government to get their way, privatizing Social Security and Medicare and ending unemployment insurance.

So far, Mr. Obama has largely limited his campaigning to fundraisers and small events. That will change soon as he plays a bigger role to rally the flagging faithful, officials said.

To mobilize younger voters who supported him in 2008, Mr. Obama will hold four big campaign-style rallies, the first Sept. 28 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, with satellite transmission to campuses in other states. The later rallies will be in Ohio, Philadelphia and Las Vegas. He also will send e-mail and record robocalls to spur voters, and conduct a national “town hall” Webcast in October.

“These events are about activating the Obama grass roots to help organizationally in terms of volunteers” for get-out-the-vote efforts, said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. “We’re not going to get all the 2008 Obama voters out. We may not get most of them. But in close races, it can be decisive.”

Mr. Obama will also step up his efforts to draw contrasts between the parties, in particular by pounding away on his call for extending the expiring Bush-era tax cuts, except for “millionaires and billionaires.” Republicans want the tax cuts extended for people of all income levels, not just incomes below $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for families, as the president has proposed.

Republicans strategists remain confident of the party’s prospects for big gains in November, even as they acknowledge that they are unlikely to win the Senate race in Delaware after the victory in the Republican primary there of Christine O’Donnell, a Tea Party-backed candidate with a long record of controversial statements, over Representative Michael N. Castle, a moderate and popular former two-term governor.

Also last week, Alaska’s Senate race was upended when Senator Lisa Murkowski, who lost the Republican nomination to a Tea Party adherent, Jeff Miller, mounted a write-in candidacy against him, saying, “Alaska is not fair game for outside extremists.”

“While we may have a handful of nominees out of the mainstream, the American people have come to the conclusion this administration and this Congress are out of the mainstream,” said John Weaver, a Republican consultant.

In 1994, Democrats were in power and similarly took hope when Republican primaries yielded candidates deemed too far right for the general election. Yet the wave against Democrats that year was strong enough to carry those newcomers into office and put Republicans in control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

Except for Ms. O’Donnell in Delaware, Republican nominees that Democrats like to showcase as extremists — including in Senate races in Nevada, Colorado, Kentucky and even blue-state Connecticut — are even with their Democratic rivals in polls or ahead.

And even as the White House maps the final campaign push, advisers are distracted by the expected exit of the chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, to run for mayor of Chicago. Mr. Emanuel, who as a member of Congress helped engineer the Democratic takeover of the House in 2006, is among his party’s foremost strategists when it comes to Congressional elections.

Peter M. Rouse, one of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers, has assumed additional responsibilities. But Mr. Rouse, who is intensely private, does not want the high-profile job of chief of staff; instead he is helping Mr. Obama vet names. Leading candidates are said to be Thomas E. Donilon, the deputy national security adviser, and Robert Bauer, the White House counsel.

On top of the personnel distractions at the White House, the strategy discussions with Congressional Democrats come after 21 months of legislative and political battles that have strained relations between the two camps.

Democrats on Capitol Hill say that Obama aides, including Mr. Axelrod, and Jim Messina, the deputy chief of staff, do not consult with them enough and are more concerned with positioning Mr. Obama for his 2012 reelection race than with re-electing Democrats now.

At the Democratic National Committee, aides already have started work on a database to link the most controversial statements of the Tea Party-backed candidates to possible Republican presidential aspirants.

The database will point out, for example, that Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney are supporting the Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada, Sharron Angle, who once said that victims of rape should make “what was really a lemon situation into lemonade,” and Ms. O’Donnell, who has said that having women in the service academies “cripples the readiness of our defense.”

The tactic of linking potential Republican rivals to such statements was already in evidence last week. After Ms. O’Donnell’s victory, a party spokesman told reporters, “The fact that Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin would put their name behind a candidate that believes women who serve our country ‘cripple the readiness of our defense’ make them unfit to be commander-in-chief.”