Democrats call it a coincidence, but in races across the country, a lot of political ads seem to be drawing on very similar themes.
By BILL ADAIR and WES ALLISON
Published September 30, 2006
WASHINGTON — The TV ads attacking Republican Rep. Clay Shaw in South Florida sound a lot like the ads attacking Sen. Mike DeWine in Ohio.
Which sound a lot like the ads against Republican Reps. Rob Simmons in Connecticut and Heather Wilson in New Mexico. And Sen. Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania. And Rep. Thelma Drake in Virginia.
For the first time in years, Democrats have adopted a cohesive, national message in their bid to retake Congress, portraying Republican incumbents as “rubber stamps’’ for an unpopular president and unrepentant pawns of big oil and the drug industry.
It’s a striking departure from 2002 and 2004, when Democrats ran on a hodgepodge of local and national issues while Republicans spoke with one voice about terrorism, national security and “traditional values.”
While partly the result of an environment favorable toward Democrats, with Bush’s popularity in the doldrums and Americans increasingly worried about the Iraq war, it is also a product of better coordination by Democratic leaders, allowing their candidates to stick to a few simple themes and avoid their tendency to get lost in the rhetorical thicket.
In short, the Democrats have become more Republican.
“You’re seeing uncharacteristic discipline in the Democrats,’’ said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “They have figured out that they need to nationalize the election.”
A St. Petersburg Times review of more than 70 ads from U.S. House and Senate races around the country found that Democratic challengers rarely strayed from four main themes:
The incumbent is a puppet of Bush; the Republican Congress has coddled “Big Oil’’ and other industries with tax breaks and giveaways; that the President’s vow to ''stay the course’’ in Iraq is unwise; and that despite many healthy economic indicators, many Americans are not feeling flush.
Democratic ad-maker Karl Struble said the discontent with Republicans is so strong that Democrats don’t need to explain their own agenda in much detail.
“You do not have to come up with an alternative for each Republican policy failure,” he said. A candidate simply has to be “a believable alternative.”
About the only significant exceptions to the four main themes have come when the Democrats wanted to, well, talk like Republicans, particularly in the South and Midwest.
In Indiana, ads for Democrat Baron Hill emphasize “Hoosier values” that make him sound like a conservative Republican: “Faith ... being thankful for the blessings we receive and that marriage between a man and a woman is sacred.”
Heath Shuler, a former NFL quarterback running as a Democrat in western North Carolina, talks up his ''mountain values’’ that include opposing abortion and gun control.
And with the deficit having ballooned under Bush and the Republican Congress, ads for Democratic challengers in Minnesota, Arizona and Florida are hitting what used to be a Republican theme: federal frugality.
“A fiscal conservative — she’ll cut the waste, cut the spending, and cut the deficit,’’ says a new TV spot for Christine Jennings, a Democrat running against Vern Buchanan for a Sarasota U.S. House seat.
By contrast, ads by many Republican incumbents show them on the defensive, distancing themselves from the president and attacking the credibility or qualifications of their opponents.
In South Florida, where 13-term Rep. Clay Shaw is in a tight race with state Sen. Ron Klein, a Democrat, a Shaw ad points out that he opposed Bush’s plan to create private accounts for Social Security.
The spot never mentions he’s a Republican.
“I represent the state of Florida,” Shaw says in the ad, “not a political party.”
In Washington, Sen. Jon Kyl is chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, which sets the party’s agenda in the Senate. But in ads running back home in Arizona, he portrays himself as a rogue who opposed the energy bill, which included $3.6-billion in subsidies for gas, oil and energy producers. Those subsidies have become a prime target for Democrats.
“I voted against the president’s energy bill,’’ Kyl tells the camera. “It was the top priority of the oil industry, but a bad deal for taxpayers.’’ Jamieson finds the GOP ads telling.
“When a Republican has to argue independence from Bush, you know the Republican is on the defense,” she said. Republicans insist that’s not the case. They say that localizing the elections and hammering at the credentials of Democratic challengers is their best strategy.
“We’ve pointed out throughout the year that many of the candidates that Democrats are fielding are B-list candidates who simply aren’t ready for prime time,” said Alex Burgos, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Democrats are facing their best chance in a dozen years to win control of at least one house of Congress. They need 15 seats to take the House and six to win the Senate.
Republicans say they’re aware of the Democratic strategy, but say it lacks local appeal.
“The charges they are trying to make nationwide are not nearly as effective as pointing out local candidates and their positions on local issues,” Burgos said.
Some Democratic strategists insist there’s no grand plan behind their focused messages. They say it’s simply the result of individual campaigns reaching the same conclusion about how to beat Republicans.
But other Democratic leaders say their party, which is notoriously fragmented, has learned to better coordinate key messages.
Take the phrase “rubber stamp.” It shows up in many candidates’ TV and radio spots. It’s reinforced by the party’s “Rubber Stamp” Web site and daily statements from party leaders decrying the “Rubber Stamp Republican Congress.”
Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000, said the coordination is a stark change for her party.
“In 2000, we would be in meetings with the House and Senate Democratic leadership to tell them what we were planning,” she said. “But they wanted to go their own way.”
