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GOP On Damage Control Over Fundraising Doc
The 72-page PowerPoint presentation reveals the blunt appeal to emotion that both parties use to motivate donors and prefer to keep private. But its release online and consequent cable chatter became an unwelcome distraction for Republicans, because the strategy it outlined fit squarely with Democrats’ portrait of the GOP as the party of “no.”
“You don’t defend it,” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele said Thursday in an interview on Fox News. “It was unfortunate. Those were images that were uploaded off the Internet. They’ve been out in the public domain for a while. A staffer was putting together a presentation for a small group of nine or 10 folks and thought they would intersperse their presentation with humorous shots. They’re inappropriate.”
Sen. John Thune (S.D.), a member of the Republican leadership, said: “There is no place for this. Obviously when you’re fundraising . . . you want to make direct and succinct points, but using these sorts of tactics is certainly not something that any of us ought to condone.”
Said Tom Rath, a former RNC member from Concord, N.H.: “We’re not going to win the election by drawing those kinds of comparisons. We’re going to win the elections because we have one view of government and how the economy ought to work and American security.”
Some Republicans declared the largely mundane slideshow to be much ado about nothing. Several also derided the document as the work of an amateur and said that Steele bears responsibility for the controversy even if he didn’t approve the use of the content.
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www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/05/politics/washingtonpost/main6270043.shtml
