The Excuses Have Begun
Spinning Election Night will be as important to the Dems as the actual results: With Election Day still a week away, Democrats are previewing what promises to be a main line of argument if Republicans make strong gains in Congress: Conservatives bought their way to power with a flood of spending by outside groups. These post-mortems, made before the patient is actually dead, have slipped into public statements from top Democrats in recent days. And the argument is being made even more strongly in not-for-attribution comments to reporters from party operatives: A tough-but-manageable political climate turned much more lethal with the infusion of tens of millions of dollars from anonymous donors funding ads for right-leaning independent groups. The denunciations of outside money by President Barack Obama and others began as a tool to rally the Democratic base before the Nov. 2 election. But in recent days it has morphed gradually into something else: A main talking point to explain—and fend off the recriminations over—what many Washington Democrats assume will be a brutal election night. Voters aren’t going to care about the money issue. They didn’t care when Obama spent $700 million, much of it in untraceable money, to win in 2008. And they don’t seem to care when unions spend tens of millions promoting Democrats every cycle.
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on October 26, 2010. Filed under