Their response to the Obama Administration ?
Stop it, or we’re going to call you names:
A member of the Republican National Committee told me Tuesday that when the RNC meets in an extraordinary special session next week, it will approve a resolution rebranding Democrats as the “Democrat Socialist Party.”
When I asked if such a resolution would force RNC Chairman Michael Steele to use that label when talking about Democrats in all his speeches and press releases, the RNC member replied: “Who cares?”
Which pretty much sums up the attitude some members of the RNC have toward their chairman these days.
Steele wrote a memo last month opposing the resolution. Steele said that while he believes Democrats “are indeed marching America toward European-style socialism,” he also said in a (rare) flash of insight that officially referring to them as the Democrat Socialist Party “will accomplish little than to give the media and our opponents the opportunity to mischaracterize Republicans.”
Two other resolutions — to urge Republican lawmakers to reject earmarks and to commend them for opposing “bailouts and reckless spending bills” — are also on the agenda, but language that would have denounced Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican turned Democrat, and Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins for voting for President Obama’s stimulus package has been dropped.
This isn’t entirely new on the part of the GOP, of course. They tried to tag Obama with the “socialist” tag during the final weeks of the campaign and, while there were some signs in late October that the race had in fact tightened, by Election Day it was patently clear that the public was not buying into the Republican Party’s attempt to turn Obama into an American Hugo Chavez.
Moreover, the Republican criticism of Obama’s economic policies was hypocritical considering that it was George W. Bush and Henry Paulson, with the active assistance of John McCain and Sarah Palin, who sent America down the road to serfdom back in September.
Yet, despite the fact that the “socialist” strategy didn’t work in November and ignored the reality that it was Republicans who were handing over more and more of the economy to government control, the GOP somehow thinks that calling Democrats by a new name is going to be the magic bullet that will will bring their party back.
As Steven Taylor, there are certainly more productive things they could be doing:
Here’s an alternative idea, wacky though it may be: instead of passing resolutions about what to call one’s opposition, how about coming up with actual, workable policy proposals?
Just a thought.
The problem is that this strategy would actually require them to think rather than rant.
