On Second Thought.....

Make it about Bush.

I've been in the camp of people who believed that it was a mistake to focus on George Bush. After all, he's a lame duck and we never have to run against him again. Instead we should concentrate against the Republican Congress - people like Tom DeLay and Randy Cunningham.

But now I think I might have been mistaken. Bush is so unpopular, so mistrusted by independent voters and increasingly disillusioning to conservatives, that maintaining our fire on Bush might be a good way to go. And boy does it feel good to kick this guy when he's down. My mom would scold me quite severely :)

There are right and wrong ways to do this. There is the obvious strategy of negative ads showing the incumbent congressman in pictures with W, or talking about how wonderful W is. But there should be more to our approach than this. What is required is to make Bush emblematic of entire conservative movement. The right wants to abandon Bush as not a "real conservative." As laughable as this proposition is, if we don't rebut it it will stick.

Our story should be the that the failure of the Bush administration, and the rampant corruption in Congress, are in fact a product of conservative Republican policies faithfully executed. Big-spending, incompetent, socially intolerant, fiscally irresponsible, corrupt - these should be our magic words over the next year. The Republicans are "corrupt conservatives" and "reckless Republicans" and most importantly "George Bush Republicans."

Yeah.