Framing the contest

Jed Babbin has an interesting piece up on The American Spectator today about the attitude that Republicans need if they are going to keep control of the House and Senate this year.

. . . Republicans have to convince voters that Democrats like Nancy Pelosi can't be trusted with national power. Every Senate ballot is not only for Jim Talent, Mike DeWine or George Allen, but to prevent Pat Leahy from controlling the Senate Judiciary Committee. Every voter has to understand that we will have seen the last conservative judge confirmed if the Dems take the Senate. Every vote for a Democratic Senate candidate is a vote against conservative judges, ballistic missile defense, the NSA terrorist surveillance program and for unlimited access to abortions.

There are several other national messages the Republicans have to use, and haven't had the courage to embrace. First among them is the politically activist media. The nation's biggest media outlets -- CBS, ABC, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post -- have gone past bias to political activism, becoming in effect 527 groups -- soft-money contributors for the Democrats. They are producing Dem campaign commercials and ads rather than news stories. If the Republicans don't take on the media, they are passing up an enormous opportunity to turn voters out in November. And if they don't, the steady stream of October surprises, many produced in collaboration with Democratic operatives, will continue and affect the November results significantly.

In his conclusion he makes an excellent point:

After the mess Congress has made, it's altogether reasonable for
people to conclude that the Republicans deserve to lose. But we don't deserve what will happen if they do. Republican candidates need to act fast and think faster. If their campaign leadership -- Sen. Dole and Cong. Reynolds -- aren't willing or able to take the campaign on a far more aggressive and directed path, they (not Denny Hastert) should be thrown overboard. As Casey Stengel might have said, "Can't anybody here play this game?"

Did you get that? Republicans may well deserve to lose, but the nation does not deserve what will happen if their opponents win. The GOP may not deserve to be reelected, but our troops in the field do not deserve to have the party of "cut, run, surrender and appease" controlling their budget. Republicans have been disappointing, but the nations unborn children, one million of whom are slaughtered every year in abortion mills, do not deserve to have the party of NARAL and partial-birth abortion controlling the Senate committee which approves of Supreme Court nominations.

Republicans may not deserve reelection, but the USA does not deserve Democrats!