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Single gaffe can derail a message |
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By Mike Soraghan
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Posted: 10/23/07 07:34 PM [ET] |
Last week’s vote on overriding President Bush’s children’s health insurance veto should have been a brief respite from a pretty tough week for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
After being forced to back away from votes on Armenian genocide and intelligence surveillance law, she could watch Republicans stick with an unpopular president on an unpopular position.
But when Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) fired off a comment about troops being sent to Iraq “to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement,” Pelosi saw her message machine hop the rails.
It’s a situation that’s played itself out with surprising regularity — usually on YouTube — since Democrats took over earlier this year.
There was House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey’s (D-Wis.) dressing-down of a Marine Corps mom about war funding, shouting in a Rayburn Building hallway about “idiot liberals.” Obey later apologized.
Then Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) threatened the spending earmarks of a member who questioned the millions Murtha was sending to a drug intelligence center in his district. Murtha later apologized.
Then Republicans succeeded in getting floor votes on whether Democratic lawmakers would publicly condemn an ad by the liberal group MoveOn.org calling Gen. David Petraeus “General Betray Us.”
Republicans gleefully posted these moments on YouTube and each was relentlessly flogged by the Republican leadership through websites, e-mails and media appearances.
For example, when Republican Conference Chairman Adam Putnam (R-Fla.) lined up on CNN with House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) on healthcare, Putnam changed the topic to whether Clyburn should apologize for Stark.
“The Republican leadership has been very clever,” said John Feehery, a regular contributor to The Hill’s Pundits Blog who was a communications aide to Republican leaders while they were in power. “They’ve drawn Nancy Pelosi into these debates by demanding that she apologize.”
Republicans have had their moments, too. Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) attracted widespread criticism for suggesting that Murtha was a coward during a 2005 floor debate on the Iraq war. And earlier that year, then-Rep. John Hostettler (R-Ind.) called Democrats anti-Christian. Both comments were “taken down,” or stripped from the record.
This year, right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh found himself backpedaling after calling veterans “phony soldiers” for criticizing the Iraq war. Limbaugh said his comments were misconstrued and that Democrats were playing political games.
By contrast, House Democrats haven’t scheduled votes on resolutions condemning Limbaugh’s remarks.
“I would like to see us try to restrain ourselves in condemning through resolutions all of that with which we disagree,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said at the time, though he also said, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”
Some liberals agree that Republicans have traditionally done a better job of exploiting such missteps than Democrats. Republicans have a top-down oriented culture that allows them to strike fast, said Eric Burns of the liberal group Media Matters, while the Democrats’ consensus culture slows things down.
“Conservatives wrote the book on how to exploit these moments for political gain,” said Burns, whose group specializes in discrediting conservative propaganda. “Democrats just don’t believe that’s what Congress should be used for. There’s a principle behind it.”
Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami explains the differences between the parties differently.
“Republicans don’t let facts get in the way of their message,” Elshami said. “But as hard as they try, the fact remains that they are in the minority because they didn’t listen to the American people, while the new-direction Congress has passed into law major bills that will improve the lives of everyday Americans.”
In the instance of the Stark comment, Burns said, “The fact that [Republicans] weren’t able to keep it going for four or five days indicates it wasn’t really working out for them.”
Pelosi herself appears to have put the issue to rest with a late Friday statement calling Stark’s statements “inappropriate” and a distraction from the healthcare debate.
Pelosi’s comment was milder than a statement Hoyer issued around the same time Friday in response to a question from CNN, saying he was “hopeful that [Stark] will express his regrets to the president and to our men and women in uniform.”
To Republicans, that illustrated the delicate balance Pelosi had to find between tamping down the problem while not infuriating the liberal netroots, who had widely praised Stark for his red-meat comments.
“She has a real challenge,” said Feehery. “She has to decide how mad she’ll make the liberal left.”
And asking the volatile Stark to apologize can be dangerous in itself. Stark once apologized for mocking then-Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) as a family-values Republican with illegitimate children. But his statement made clear he was sorry only that he misstated the number.
Stark has not responded to Pelosi’s statement, nor did his spokesman return calls seeking comment. But in a statement issued Thursday in response to the Republican criticism, he showed no signs of backing down.
Instead, he called opponents of children’s healthcare “chickenhawks,” a term often applied to avid supporters of the war who avoided military service. And he said it was Boehner who should apologize for opposing the children’s healthcare bill. |
