The government is up and running full tilt again.\u00a0 It can borrow as much as it wishes until next February.\u00a0 But before moving on entirely, I wanted to share three notes on three men whose roles tell us something about what happened and what\u2019s next:<\/p>\n
Ted Cruz:
\n<\/b>Senator Cruz addressed the\u00a0American Spectator<\/i>\u00a0annual dinner last night.\u00a0 The magazine\u2019s big yearly fundraiser, the gala draws conservatives, in particular conservative writers, from throughout the country.\u00a0\u00a0The<\/i>\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/i>\u00a0editorial board regularly buys a table.\u00a0 So does the White House Writers Group.<\/p>\n
Mr. Cruz spoke directly to the charge that he and House Republicans had no strategy or endgame in the Obamacare-budget showdown.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We had a four-step strategy, he told the crowd.<\/p>\n
Step 1: Mobilize the country. \u00a0He and others spent the summer traveling the nation, speaking on Obamacare.\u00a0 By the end of their tour, two million voters had signed an online petition calling for the program\u2019s repeal.<\/p>\n
Step 2: House Acts:\u00a0 Come September, the House GOP was primed to pass a budget that defunded the Affordable Care Act (which, as you know, is Obamacare\u2019s official title) while keeping the government going.\u00a0 They did so.<\/p>\n
Step 3: Senate Republicans unite:\u00a0 With the country mobilized and GOP House having acted, the idea was that the Senate GOP would united behind their House colleagues and present a solid Republican wall of opposition to letting the medical insurance legislation go into effect.\u00a0 It was understood that the administration and Senate majority leader Harry Reid would stonewall the House budget and that a government shutdown would follow.<\/p>\n
Step 4: Split the Democrats:\u00a0 The stage would then be set to start picking off Democrats from states where opposition to the Obama administration\u2019s takeover of the healthcare sector is most unpopular.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Cruz blames his Senate\u00a0GOP colleagues for not delivering on Step 3, which made it impossible to win over gettable Democrats.<\/p>\n
I sat there thinking, well, yes, he is right.\u00a0 He did have a strategy.\u00a0 But the problem wasn\u2019t Step 3.\u00a0 It was thinking that a small bunch of senators flying around the United States, giving a speech here and there \u2013 which is what the summer tour amounted to \u2013 counts as \u201cmobilizing\u201d the country.\u00a0 I alluded to this in last week\u2019s column.<\/p>\n
Where were the TV, radio and print ads?\u00a0 Where was the summertime blitz of talk radio?\u00a0 Where was the coordination with conservative bloggers \u2014 and the reaching out to friendly editorial pages?\u00a0 Where was the broad social media campaign?<\/p>\n
Two million signatures?\u00a0 That\u2019s 1.5% of the number who showed up at the polls last year.\u00a0 Lady Gaga has 88 million views on her current online video.<\/p>\n
Cruz is a brilliant, articulate and principled man.\u00a0 But at the dinner he displayed a communications cluelessness that has been all too much a feature of the Tea Party and general congressional GOP over the last few months.<\/p>\n
Mitch McConnell:
\n<\/b>As I watched Cruz, I found myself reflecting that the Senate minority leader has been getting a raw deal from the GOP Right of late.\u00a0 In 2009, he succeeded in uniting Senate Republicans 100 percent against Obamacare, and \u2013 with the exceptions of Snowe, Collins and Brown \u2013 did so on Dodd-Frank, too.\u00a0 The party would have minimal credibility today in opposing these displays of left liberal hubris without that McConnell success, which powerfully communicated GOP dedication to principle.\u00a0 In Senate annals, his achievements as minority leader have been \u2013 and continue to be \u2014 extraordinary, perhaps unparalleled, both in chalking up against-the-odds wins and, as he did at the end of the shutdown, in cutting the best deals a weak hand allowed.<\/p>\nKen Cucchinelli:
\n<\/b>If, as expected, Terry McAuliffe wins the governorship of Virginia next month, national Democrats are poised to claim the outcome as a victory for Obamacare.\u00a0 It will, of course, actually be a victory for the sleaziest campaigning imaginable, possible only because of the spending advantage that McAuliffe, a former king of Clinton fundraisers, enjoys.\u00a0 But it will be the first good news for the pro-Obamacare crowd since the much heralded website failed and the program\u2019s launch turned into a fiasco.\u00a0 Cucchinelli wants to keep Virginia out of Obamacare, meaning the state will still be solvent at the end of his tenure.<\/p>\nMcAuliffe is bent on going along with Obamacare and expanding Medicaid, which, as governors who have looked carefully have determined, is the road to state bankruptcy.\u00a0 Nothing could provide a stronger shock to congressional Democrats that they had better find a way to find to undo the ACA before it undoes them than a surprise Cucchinelli victory.<\/p>\n
An independent group of conservatives has been raising money to go on TV against McAuliffe.\u00a0 When tested, the first of their ads was so effective at moving voters to Cucchinelli that Rush Limbaugh featured it on his show and urged listeners to help out.\u00a0 A former Reagan White House speechwriter (not me) is helping with the copy. They tell me that they are buying airtime as fast as the dollars come in.<\/p>\n
To see the spot that they are currently raising money to run, go here:\u00a0www.fightfortomorrow.com<\/a>\u00a0<http:\/\/www.fightfortomorrow.com><\/a>\u00a0.\u00a0 If Cucchinelli pulls it out, this independent communications effort will deserve a big chunk of the credit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The government is up and running full tilt again.\u00a0 It can borrow as much as it wishes until next February.\u00a0 But before moving on entirely, I wanted to share three notes on three men whose roles tell us something about what happened and what\u2019s next: Ted Cruz: Senator Cruz addressed the\u00a0American Spectator\u00a0annual dinner last night.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[52,114,193,12,192,64,104,43],"class_list":["post-1676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication-strategy","tag-campaign","tag-cruz","tag-cucchinelli","tag-hugh-hewitt","tag-mcconnell","tag-obamacare","tag-speech","tag-tea-party"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1676"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1678,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676\/revisions\/1678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}