Last Gasp Strategery

by digby

I’ve been hearing on television for a while now that the Democrats are on the run. Joe Scarborough said a bit back that Bush was “a phoenix rising.” I assumed it was wishful thinking to buck up the base, considering that everything the administration does turns to compost, but apparently, this is an actual strategy.

BC from Cliff Schecter’s blog reports:

Three weeks ago, Republican pollster David Winston wrote in his weekly column in Roll Call (subscription required)

“The honeymoon is officially over. Like a pair of newlyweds back from a week on a warm Caribbean beach, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) suddenly have run head-on into the cold, harsh reality of wartime politics. They may have a majority, but the party’s marriage of anti-war liberals and centrists seems shaky and sorely lacking in cohesion as Congressional Democrats struggle to find an Iraq War policy on which
they can agree.Shrewdly, the Democrats kicked off their newly won control with their “100 Hours” agenda, kind of a “Contract with America”-lite, designed to score some quick public relations points with voters without the heavy lifting. Now, the first phase of their takeover is all but over, and the new majority’s track record clearly has failed to impress the public.In two media polls taken in early March by CBS News/New York Times and NBC/Wall Street Journal, Congressional job approval remained at a low ebb with a 31 percent approval rating and 53 percent disapproval. It’s worth noting that the Democrats’ low marks don’t differ from Republicans’ job approval of only a year ago when voters in these same polls gave Congress approval/disapproval ratings of 32 percent/54 percent and 33 percent/53 percent, respectively, just eight months before sending the GOP majority packing.

When I first read that passage, I thought Winston was an incredible idiot for making that statement. The Democrats had barely been running the House and Senate for two months, and he was already suggesting the American people had judged them. Of course, he was wrong.

A new AP Poll shows that Congressional approval is on the rise, and much better than the Republicans from last year.

Read the whole thing.

I think perhaps the biggest problem for Republicans right now is that they have forgotten how to live in reality. Years of pretense and believing their own BS has left them very weak and disoriented. That is not to say they won’t regroup. They just need a rest after all the pillaging and warmongering. They’ll get a grip before too long. But it’s an interesting case study in what happens to a movement that is almost exclusively reliant on hype and marketing when its “product” has been thoroughly discredited and rejected. It’s not pretty.

.