Members of the U.S. House of Representatives packed up and left the swampy heat of Washington last week, adjourning for a six-week summer break that both sides see as the critical battle in the war to frame the November election.
Leaders from both parties issued marching orders to their troops in the days before the unusually long recess, including a call by Republican leaders for a unified stance on repealing health care reform if they take back the House this fall.
“It’s got to be repealed and replaced,” said Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo. “The current health care system is far too costly, and it’s inequitable, but it’s a question of what form those changes should take.”
Democrats, for their part, had expected a more bubbling economy by this point in the summer. Now left without it, they are rolling out an aggressive effort to tie Republicans to a Tea Party movement they see as outside the mainstream and to an unpopular former president.
“Republicans stand for nothing new since the Bush administration,” said U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo.
Last summer’s lessons
The angry town halls of August 2009 are still etched in the memories of many lawmakers — an object lesson in how the lazy days of summer can quickly turn into a magnifier of voter displeasure, even the proving grounds of a political movement.
While few expect a repeat, neither side wants to miss an opportunity.
House GOP leaders huddled with their colleagues last week, handing out a strategy packet with Ronald Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower on the cover. It was titled “Tread Boldly: Solutions, Hard Work, and No Regrets.”
Republican leaders are encouraging lawmakers to hold as many town halls and other public meetings as possible, hoping to contrast their party’s openness to ideas with the Democrats’ big — and, they believe, heavy-handed — agenda.
“Democrats are not taking voters’ advice, they are not listening to them, and they are pushing through their own agenda,” said Joanna Burgos, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
“The big theme is that the Democrats forced through things like health care and the stimulus, bills that were very unpopular. We want to show that if Republicans were to win in November, we wouldn’t be pushing through an extreme agenda,” she said.
That’s partly the rationale for iniatives such as YouCut — a GOP website that allows people to vote on what government programs they want to get rid of — as well as America Speaks Out, a Republican listening tour to collect ideas for a governing agenda to be rolled out in the fall.
But extreme is exactly what the Republican agenda will be, at least according to Democrats, who say that since Republicans have failed to specifically outline their governing platform, they are happy to help voters fill in the blanks.
Tea Party impact
Last week, Democratic National Committee chairman Tim Kaine launched a summer messaging campaign that will seek to equate the Republican ruling agenda with the Tea Party movement’s.
Democrats rolled out a new ad that showed key House and Senate Republican leaders against an ominous drumbeat of Tea Party agenda items that include an assault on Medicare and abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency.
“The Republican Party agenda has become the Tea Party agenda, and vice versa,” Kaine told reporters.
When asked to defend that equation, Democrats point to such proposals as those by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee.
Ryan released a budget proposal this past spring that would slash federal deficits but also privatize Medicaid and Medicare. Retirees would get vouchers to buy private insurance, but experts say the value of the vouchers would rise at a rate significantly lower than health care costs.
Still, Republicans aren’t convinced the Democrats’ strategy will be all that effective, given that many voters have either a neutral or a favorable opinion of the Tea Party movement.
A Denver Post/9News poll conducted Tuesday through Thursday found 37 percent of Colorado voters viewed the movement favorably, while 35 percent viewed it unfavorably. Eighteen percent had a neutral opinion. The automated Survey USA poll of nearly 2,000 voters had a margin of error of 2.2 percentage points.
“There is a huge percentage of people who actually agree with what the Tea Party is saying. They agree that they are being taxed too much,” Burgos said.
“People really do think that the Tea Party movement does have the right idea,” she said.
