Pathetic blast from the past

Republicans unveiled an ad campaign this week that seemed to turn back the clock a few decades — by trying to turn the word “liberal” into the kind of insult it was 25 years ago.

It’s the sort of campaign that would warm the heart of the late Arthur Finkelstein, the famous political media consultant whose clients from the late 1970s into the 2000s would relentlessly pound the Democratic candidate with the phrase “liberal” usually mixed in with some nickname. In 1992, for Republican Al D’Amato’s Senate reelection, his opponent faced 10-second ads calling him “hopelessly liberal.” And then in 1994, Mario Cuomo (D) was pummeled with ads that regularly ended with the sign off calling the three-term governor “too liberal, too long.”

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC dedicated to electing Republicans to the House, is echoing that theme in a set of ads released this week in its bid to retain the eight-year GOP majority. The ads hammer home, again and again, the idea that the Democratic nominee is a liberal. “How liberal is Katie Porter?” the narrator asks at the outset of a 30-second spot against the Democratic nominee in California’s 45th Congressional District, challenging GOP Rep. Mimi Walters.

“Liberal Katie Hill doesn’t think you pay enough taxes,” the narrator saysfrom the outset of spot against the nominee challenging Rep. Steve Knight (R) in California’s 25th District.

“Liberal politician Anthony Brindisi is a tax-and-spend rubber-stamp,” he says in an ad running against the Democratic state assemblyman challenging Rep. Claudia Tenney in New York’s 22nd Congressional District.

A similar set of ads were unveiled last week, including one that blasts “failed liberal politician Paul Davis” — in all caps on the screen — in his bid to win a GOP-held seat in eastern Kansas.

This is a slight variation on what has been a steadily consistent theme from CLF: a steady attack on Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as the potential next House speaker should Democrats win back the majority.

But the earlier ads focused almost exclusively on Pelosi, assuming the viewer already knew what she stood for and why they disliked her. In this week’s trio of ads, however, Pelosi is a bit character, appearing on screen for just four or five seconds in the 90 seconds of airtime.

Instead, CLF is now trying to hammer home that the opposition’s political ideology is the most dangerous thing about their background. It’s an effort to try to move beyond being negative just about Pelosi and to connect the reasons center-right voters despise her on actual policy grounds.

“The word ‘liberal’ is deeply unpopular and represents everything people dislike about the Democratic agenda. Nancy Pelosi and her San Francisco values are the embodiment of what people don’t like about the word ‘liberal,’ raising taxes, open borders and yelling about impeachment,” Corry Bliss, CLF executive director, said Tuesday.

This makes Bliss, a native New Yorker, a modern disciple of Finkelstein, who grew up in Brooklyn and rose to fame with the support of D’Amato and the late senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.).
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The question is also whether the Finkelstein approach has mileage this century. His pugilistic style worked effectively throughout the Reagan-Bush years, as he piled up victories and candidates across the globe. (Finkelstein served as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s consultant in the mid-1990s.)

By 1996, the “liberal” routine had begun to run its course. “I don't know a Senate race in the country where the Republican message isn't charging liberal, liberal, liberal,” Mandy Grunwald, a leading Democratic consultant, told The Washington Post then.

His clients lost at least five Senate races that cycle. “The trick is getting old,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said at the time.

The theme faded from most GOP campaigns by early last decade, partly because it had lost its bite and partly because liberalism was growing more popular. In 1992, at the height of D’Amato’s “hopelessly liberal” attack ads, voters identifying themselves as conservative outnumbered liberals by more than 2 to 1, according to the Gallup poll.

That edge has slowly but surely declined the past 25 years. By January of this year, 35 percent of voters identified as conservative and 26 percent as liberal, the first time that margin registered in the single digits, according to Gallup.

In recent years, however, the GOP’s campaigns have taken on a one-trick-pony approach of a different sort, focusing so heavily on linking the candidate to Pelosi that sometimes ads in special elections the past year have lost potency.

So now CLF is using “liberal” as an overarching way to connect Pelosi to the policies that middle-of-the-road voters in swing districts are not likely to support. Porter was linked to “the radical resistance” in the CLF ad for supporting the abolishing of ICE, while Hill was accused of supporting “radical environmental regulations” and Brindisi supported “liberal spending.”

All three ads focused more on state politics and figures — the gas tax issue in California and former state legislative leader Sheldon Silver (D) in New York — as they did on Pelosi or national issues. Intentional or not, the ads all ended with the kind of taglines reminiscent of Finkelstein’s work that hammered home the ideological theme.

“Liberal Katie Porter,” the narrator says in one. “Higher taxes, open borders.”