Kevin Hall writing at The Iowa Republican led his regular Sunday feature, Kevin’s Korner, with this rip on Braley’s abortion ads intended to paint pro-life Joni Ernst as an extremist. We wrote in inviting that Kevin Hall’s comment about Braley’s ultra pro-abortion beliefs be made into an attack ad. Our comments posted on TIR follow. Look for ardent opposition to our view that “banking” votes – is a concept that does not stand scrutiny as an efficient focus of political activity for Republicans.
Bruce Braley wants Iowans to believe the Joni Ernst holds an “extreme” position on life. What is Ernst’s position? She believes life begins at conception and life is precious. Yep, sounds extreme to me …
Meanwhile, where does Bruce Braley stand on abortion? He is adamantly pro-abortion. Braley opposes any restrictions on abortion … Minors having abortions without parental notification? Bruce Braley supports. Partial birth abortion? Bruce Braley supports … Killing in the name of “choice”. That’s Bruce Braley’s mantra.
Kevin’s effective rip on Braley’s extremist positions could be turned into fine spots by the Ernst campaign. Do you think we will see anything like them? The Ernst related campaign has been pretty pathetic so far, she mostly riding on discontent with Democrats and being as uncontroversial as possible or overdoing a veterans vote she probably already has by a 25% margin. The election is not going to be won by hectoring hard and soft Republicans to vote absentee but with aggressive -effective messaging inoculating and building momentum to vote against Dems and protecting the culture. Some will say fine do both. Fine, where is the both?
The Governor should have applied hundreds of thousands of dollars earlier in the summer to ads that benefit Republican principles in general and going after Democrats in general helping to prop up straight ticket voting. There would be no conflict in doing so. In other words spend the money in a way that benefits all Republicans after helping starve the Party in his beef with the previous administration because they made some noise on matters that are part of the platform.
Instead what I am informed of is a “ground game” that is devoid of motivational material. The “strategy” — go around without literature to get Republicans to request an absentee ballot hectoring them with the threat that this is how they will avoid getting all those get out the vote phone calls from the Party. It is an absurd childish dodge of the truth that the number of phone calls will not be noticeably reduced. They will get scads of calls for fundraising and the various issue groups and candidates. Some body will get a gold star for increasing absentee voting probably based as much on hard Republicans. The soft Republicans will split their vote at a higher rate than soft Democrats. No motivation – very mixed results.
In the mean time the vaunted Scott County Republican operation still to this day does not have a list of all the Republican candidates on its Web site. http://scottcountyrepublicans….
R Mall
