What nearly all Virginians acknowledge however, is the fact that Warner's pledge was effectively negated by the dishonest accounting of his Republican predecessor. Before leaving office, the administration of Republican Governor Jim Gilmore badly misrepresented the condition of Virginia's finances. When the truth was discovered, the bi-partisan tax reform of 2004 was necessary to repair the damage Gilmore had done.
In going negative so early, the Republicans have repeated one of their mistakes from 2006. Like the ill-fated "A-Team," the current crop of Republican bloggers have opened a Pandora's box: all of their potential candidates have very large, and very fragile, glass jaws.
Jim Gilmore, as mentioned above, bungled badly as Governor, nearly wrecking the commonwealth's finances. He also served a distinctly lackluster year as chairman of the RNC. Pat Buchanan is even worse. Buchanan has never been shy about shooting off his mouth and there are dozens of embarrassing quotes on file. Buchanan has praised Hitler and talked Reagan into making remarks that seemed to excuse the German Waffen S.S. for their role in the mass extermination of the European Jews. Buchanan is one of two living American politicians--along with David Duke--to whom Godwin's Law does not really apply. You can criticize Buchanan and make reference to Hitler without triggering the argument forfeiting mechanism of Godwin's Law.
But Representative Tom Davis III is uniquely and terribly vulnerable to an extremely wide variety of potential negative attacks. This is because of Tom Davis' unique role in our nation's recent history: from 1998 to the end of 2006, Tom Davis was the chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform. Prior to Davis' tenure as chairman, the committee's name had been "The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform." When Davis took charge of the committee in 1998, he took the unusual step of removing the word "Oversight" from the committee's name.
The deletion was deeply symbolic, as Davis' committee almost completely abandoned its duty to exert responsible oversight just as the administration of George W. Bush--arguably the least competent and most corrupt in our nation's history--took office. It is this fact that makes Davis so uniquely vulnerable: George W. Bush is electoral poison and Davis cannot escape his connection with Bush. If George W. Bush was the "Decider," then Tom Davis III was the "Enabler."
Which brings me to the subject of this post: how to write an attack ad on Tom Davis.
The most basic kind of attack ad directed at Davis will be based on a straightforward proposition: The Bush administration made some kind of mistake and the damage could have been limited if Tom Davis' committee had simply taken the most basic kind of oversight action. Everyone knows at least a dozen of these; there are in fact hundreds. Here's a really quick example:
The Washington Post revived a story in 2007 from Salon magazine published in 2004 about conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that deteriorated rapidly when the operations were transferred to the private contractor IAP. Davis, who accepted progressively higher campaign contributions from IAP during the course of the transfer, admitted as Committee Chair he knew in 2004 about the hospital's conditions, but scheduled no hearings. Committee members told Congressional Quarterly they did not want to "embarrass" the Army by publicizing the matter.[1]So, basically Tom Davis allowed wounded American servicemen and women to suffer terribly for about two years and did nothing to put a stop to it even though that was his job and he could have done it with a few phone calls. Now that's pretty bad, and we're definitely going to hold Davis responsible for it, whether he runs for the Senate, for re-election to his House seat, or for dogcatcher. I don't think Davis is fit for any of those jobs.
But a potentially even more effective way to communicate how bad Tom Davis was is to link two stories together. You see, sometimes you can't tell how big something is unless you set it alongside something else; sometimes you need context.
Consider the following report that came out today:
Hungry attendees at Justice Department conferences have been enjoying millions of dollars in meatballs and other goodies courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, according to an inspector general's report released Friday.Now think: this excess occurred during 2005 and 2006, which were the same years that Tom Davis allowed the conditions at Walter Reed to persist. It's bad enough to think that our brave soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen and women were allowed to suffer needlessly for two years just so Tom Davis could pocket a few campaign donations. But when you contrast their suffering with the images of Alberto Gonzales and his cronies living it up, eating and drinking luxuriously all at the taxpayer's expense . . . well it seems even worse somehow, doesn't it?The Justice Department paid more than $13,000 for cookies at conferences, says a report released Friday.
The report cited $5 meatballs and cans of soft drinks each costing $4.55 among reasons 10 conferences during 2005 and 2006 cost nearly $7 million.
One four-day conference of 1,500 people in Los Angeles cost the Justice Department $394,000 in August 2005.[2]
So always look for the context, does it create an interesting contrast? When it comes to the Republicans in Congress, and Tom Davis in particular, it almost always will. Because there are literally hundreds of instances where the Republicans wasted money (like when they bought gourmet dinners for Justice Department officials and still allowed them to pocket their per diem allowance) while at the same time they were withholding funds they should have spent (like when they charged the wounded soldiers for their food while they were recovering at Walter Reed).