GOP Messaging: Mission Fail

Posted by Jane Hamsher, Firedoglake at 9:02 AM on April 2, 2009.

Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute writes about their new poll, which indicates that there is no appetite for the Republican message these days:

Consider this: Four out of five voters think politicians in Washington, D.C., should limit the pay of executives at companies that get federal bailout money. Three in 10 voters embrace the historically un-American notion that government should control the pay for executives of firms that don’t get any cash from Uncle Sam — the kind of trust in government over the private sector that only a few years ago would have seemed laughable. The sentiment may be unprecedented, but so too is the federal assistance to private industries to keep them in business.

Republicans twisted themselves into pretzels yesterday opposing compensation limits to bank executives, despite the fact that 81% of Americans support it. You could see their relief when Melissa Bean and the New Democrat Coalition offered up an amendment to gut the bill -- 165 of them flocked to the floor to join with 63 corporatist Democrats to pass it.

Says Brown:

The poll numbers suggest that Republican leaders might want to reassess their strategy of arguing that President Barack Obama is trying to do many things at the same time, and that his plans are just too expensive for a country already carrying historically high debt levels.

Unfortunately for the GOP, the data do not provide any leads for how they might want to make inroads with the American people, who aren’t buying the Republican line. By a two-to-one margin, Americans trust Mr. Obama more than congressional Republicans to get the nation out of its financial fix, and that’s even though they oppose his bailouts of banks and auto companies.

I listened to the incoherent rantings of the GOP honchos yesterday when they presented their joke budget, and it's clear they haven't got a message except "spending: bad." They have spent so long trying to pretend that what they're doing has nothing to do with what they say they're doing they don't know how to recover.

As far as I can tell, they're just trying to push their standard themes and hoping the economy fails so they can say "see, we told you" -- as if the ideas they can't seem to sew into a cohesive plan will somehow be validated because things get worse. It isn't much, but all they have to cling to is the hope that Obama gets blamed for anything bad that happens in the world so they can get a chance to play offense again. And that is the totality of their game plan.

(h/t Digby)

Jane Hamsher is the founder of FireDogLake. Her work has also appeared on the Huffington Post, Alternet and The American Prospect.