GOP will play the Pelosi card in 2010 congressional races

Higdon, a Republican from Kentucky, won a state Senate seat in December in a largely Democratic district with an unlikely strategy: He nationalized his race, warning of one-party rule by featuring Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s pictures in his television advertisements and campaign literature. Higdon, who was outspent by a 4-to-1 ratio, is glad she’s so unpopular.

“It worked for me. … And I’m really happy that I had a good team that recognized that,” he said. “Because that’s not something I would have dreamed up.”

Expect the GOP to replicate the strategy in political races around the country this year.

“The strategists will try to make her the lightning rod who represents all that is wrong in Washington,” said Jeffrey McCall, a media studies professor at DePauw University in Indiana.

Pelosi, who has a job approval rating of 39 percent in her home state of California, is taking hits from all sides these days.

Newspaper cartoonists and comedy writers routinely take jabs at her, and many Democratic women are still smarting from the speaker’s refusal to endorse Hillary Clinton during the presidential primaries in 2008, which they interpreted as support for Barack Obama. (Pelosi said she had to remain officially neutral because of her role as chair of the Democratic convention.)

“The thrill is gone. … The speaker didn’t turn out to be the elected official that many of us hoped,” said Mary Ellen Balchunis, a political science professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia. “Instead, many of us see her as another politician.”

Republicans, Balchunis said, are “trying to make her the Hillary.”

In California, Republicans are trying to damage four Democrats that they believe are particularly vulnerable this fall by linking them to Pelosi.

Last month, National Republican Congressional Committee communications director Ken Spain said that Reps. Jerry McNerney, Loretta Sanchez, Dennis Cardoza and Jim Costa have each served “as a consummate lap dog for Nancy Pelosi.”

The NRCC accused McNerney, who unseated seven-term Rep. Richard Pombo in the 2006 election in the mainly conservative district that stretches from Lodi to Gilroy, of “taking his final marching orders” from Pelosi, and said Cardoza was “an ideal example of a Pelosi puppet.”

Pelosi, 69, a 12th-term representative from San Francisco, declined to comment, with her spokesman referring questions to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the DCCC, said Republicans used an anti-Pelosi message in the last election cycle and in special elections in Mississippi and Alabama, without success.

“We’ve been there, and they’ve done that and failed,” he said.

In addition, Van Hollen said, Democratic incumbents don’t always walk in lockstep with Pelosi’s positions, and they’re “doing a good job carving out an identity for themselves.”

“That message that they’re just rubber stamps for the speaker doesn’t fly,” he said.

The National Republican Congressional Committee stepped up its attacks on Pelosi last week by unveiling a fake letter from the speaker to “naïve” Republicans.

“Democrats are in control now, and we are making everything better,” it read. “Want to know how? We are creating a dependence on the government and we are succeeding – just look at how great things are one year after Democrats passed the ultra-successful stimulus bill. Now nearly one in 10 people don’t have a job.”

It concludes: “The time has come to retire the real Nancy Pelosi and take back America.”

McCall said the attacks against Pelosi are similar to the Democratic efforts in 2006 and 2008 to tie Republican candidates to then-President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney.

“It’s a rough-and-tumble world out there, and if it works, it works,” he said. He said polls consistently show Pelosi as the most recognizable leader of Congress, and it’s easy to portray her in a negative light.

“She comes across as the prototypical San Francisco liberal Democrat who is easily wrapped in the trappings of big spender, big government, pork, entitlements, that sort of thing,” McCall said. “And one thing to keep in mind: She represents those labels pretty well, based on her political positions. But going beyond that, it’s not necessarily who or what she is, it’s how she can be portrayed.”

A Higdon ad against his opponent, Democrat Jodie Haydon, ends with an unflattering photo of Pelosi seemingly looming over Haydon’s shoulder, stating: “Government control. No real solutions.”

While it might appear to be a good strategy to target Pelosi, running a negative campaign could actually backfire against the Republicans, said Ivan Kenneally, assistant professor of political science at Rochester Institute of Technology in Henrietta, N.Y.

“What they’ve figured out is that while she has remarkable appeal in her district and is essentially untouchable, she is not very popular beyond her district and doesn’t have a lot of mass appeal,” he said. “But any time you run a negative campaign it can backfire. That’s always the case.”

Kenneally said Pelosi has “impregnable self-confidence” that can rub people the wrong way, and he predicted that Democrats would let her “quietly roam around the periphery” during the 2010 campaign season, as they did in 2006 and 2008.

“They’ve gone out of their way to make sure that she’s less visible during the heart of the campaign season, and she’s always been incredibly compliant,” he said. “She understands the limitations of her appeal.”

Adam Hanft, CEO of the branding and marketing firm Hanft Projects, said the strategy isn’t in danger of creating a backlash as much as it is of having a neutral effect because attacks against Pelosi fall into the “been there, done that” category.

“If anything, she’s probably too easy of a target,” he said. “It’s just that it’s not new news anymore, and politics needs a new story,” he said. “You’re not going to convince anybody who isn’t convinced already by attacking Nancy Pelosi.”

He said there could come a point where beating up on a woman could backfire with the public, but he said Pelosi would benefit by making a few self-deprecating remarks.

“She’s relatively humorless, and Americans like humor,” he said. “(Ronald) Reagan’s humor brought in a lot of people who might not agree with him politically. He was the master of charm. She could help her cause by lightening up.

“She’d be less of a whipping girl, and I think she’d be a little less easy for the Republicans to take on with such a gladiatorial spirit.”

Kentucky Republican state Sen. Damon Thayer, who assisted Higdon in his winning campaign, said “the nationalization of the elections is imminent this fall” because of Pelosi’s declining standing.

“It’s pretty clear here in Kentucky that the policies of the Obama administration and the Democratic leaders like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are very unpopular,” he said. “And I think Democrats everywhere are going to have to suffer the albatross of the policies pushed by the national Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi. I think it’s shaping up to be a very good year for Republicans.”

Higdon, of Lebanon, Ky., said he won his special election mainly because he had such a hardworking team behind him. But he said Pelosi had very high name recognition, most of it negative, and was “the logical person to tie with my opponent” in his advertising.

“We had a good message,” Higdon said. “It worked for me, and I think that’s going to be something that other people will look at. We surprised a lot of people because the person who spent the most money didn’t win the race, and that doesn’t happen every day.”
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