Monday, January 27, 2014

Make Pro-Abortion Extremists Play Defense






By MARJORIE DANNENFELSER


In 2012, Democrats ran a well-coordinated campaign to demonize and distort pro-life candidates as anti-woman misogynists hell-bent on taking away birth control. The Republican response to this line of attack consisted mostly of pivoting away to focus on “jobs” and the “economy.” With rare exceptions, instead of responding, GOP candidates were unwilling to answer the attacks head-on.

In order to win elections in the future, Republicans will have to change tactics and better respond to these scurrilous accusations.

They had a chance to change things in Virginia in 2013. Going into the Virginia governor’s race, pro-life advocates believed it would be a different ballgame with a strong pro-life leader in Ken Cuccinelli as the GOP nominee. During his career, Cuccinelli was known as a candidate unlikely to back down from a fight and unafraid to counterpunch.

On cue, and pulling from the 2012 playbook, Democrats pounded Cuccinelli with millions of dollars worth of “war on women” attack ads. The pounding was so severe that, just a couple of weeks before Election Day, the Cook Political Report found that McAuliffe’s campaign had spent more of its ad budget (26 percent) hitting the Republican on this topic than on any other issue. That is, McAuliffe and his allies ran more than 5,600 TV spots on abortion alone.

But instead of combating these so-called war on women charges, Republicans opted again to try to change the subject. McAuliffe’s echo chamber was complete when the press failed to cut through the paid media assault and relay accurate information about each candidate’s actual positions.




No comments:

Post a Comment