Repuke Strategy for 2006/2008....Barney Fife Makeover

[AnnInLa]

via Firedoglake, Howard Fineman reports in Newsweek:


I saw the rushes the other day when the Republican National Committee released the text of a radio ad and Bush held a hastily called press conference. The revamped story line is WATITH (the “war against terrorists inside the homeland”) and it will feature Bush not as Top Gun, but as Top Gumshoe: a mix of Eliot Ness, J. Edgar Hoover and Agent Jack Bauer.

And Bush/Bauer’s enemies will be different: not just the terrorists themselves, but also wussie lovers of legalistic niceties that get in the way of investigations and MSM news organizations that focus obsessively on explosions and mayhem in Iraq, even as they print or broadcast classified information and ask nasty, argumentative questions at hastily called press conferences.

It takes some chutzpah to do this rewrite, given the latest run of stories about the pre-9/11 terrorism signals that were missed by the new Bush administration. But the White House’s strategic bet—and it’s a pretty good one—is that Bush has a better chance of playing Tough Cop than any prominent figure in the Democratic Party, in or out of Congress.

All of this is supposed to reassure Republican congressional candidates who are worried about the concrete blocks now fastened to their ankles in the form of the president’s job-approval and national right-direction/wrong-track numbers.

http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/03/23/barney-fife-tries-an-extreme-makeover/#more-1532