Phil’s victory strategy

19 September 2006 |permalink | email article

The New York Times reported W. has emerged as the marquee name in dozens of this fall’s congressional elections – ironically as a prop for Democratic, not Republican, candidates. 

A review of dozens of television campaign commercials in the Northeast, Midwest, Rocky Mountains and the Southwest finds the president starring in Democratic ads in which Republicans are damned by the number of times they have backed the president in Congress.

Curiously, there is no mention of the same clever advertising strategy being used in California by Phil Angelides, the Democratic nominee for governor, who’s trying to overcome the lead of Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Angelides 10 days ago launched major ad blitz statewide reminding Californians of the critical role Schwarzenegger played in helping W. carry Ohio’s 20 electoral votes in 2004 to win the presidency. A shift of only 1% by Buckeye voters to Democratic nominee John Kerry would have made him president.

Four days before the election, Schwarzenegger appeared with the president at a campaign rally in Columbus where the former Mr. Olympia showed up to attend an annual bodybuilding show. The rally was televised statewide and some of the footage appears in the Angelides ad.

Schwarzenegger stands at the podium, finger in the air, and four times leads the chant: “Reelect George W. Bush” as a smirking president looks on. A narrator says: “130,000 troops remain in Iraq . . .gasoline prices are up . . . Arnold Schwarzenegger’s for George W. Bush. Is he for you?”

George Skelton, the Los Angeles Times’ veteran Capitol columnist, opined that Angelides “has only two accessible paths to reach the governor’s office, both of them steep”

One is reminding voters of Schwarzenegger’s inconsistencies in rhetoric and behavior. The other, which I believe is the uncharismatic Angelides’ best hope, is tying the governor so close to W., based on the Ohio ad, that voters “get the message”

In effect, Angelides must turn the election into a national race and energize his base vote in heavily Democratic Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay area where support for him has been tepid.

A key Democratic source told me the spot has traction and would not rule out similar ads on the same theme “to make Arnold sweat.”

It’s not lost on political railbirds that Kerry, who beat W. by 10 points in California two years ago, rallied for Angelides in Los Angeles yesterday. The president today is even more unpopular.

The problem for both gubernatorial candidates, as one major poll suggests, is voter indifference and the possibility that California may be headed for the lowest general election turnout in history.

 

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