Republicans Running on Empty
Jules Witcover

As the fall congressional campaign gets off to an early start, it's becoming increasingly clear that the Republican strategy will be putting most of the party's eggs in one anti-Obama basket.

Although the GOP is reportedly still crafting a new "Contract With America" fashioned after the wish list that former Speaker Newt Gingrich used to win Republican control of the House in 1994, the party's chief strategists are continuing to run basically on what, and who, they're against.

Gingrich, who in January proposed a new version of the contract, has since started up a group called American Solutions that looks suspiciously like a vehicle for a Gingrich for President campaign in 2010. This is so despite his inglorious resignation as speaker after he was bested by President Bill Clinton in a showdown over the closing of many government facilities in late 1995.

Meanwhile, the GOP looks like a ship without a captain at the wheel, with disagreements over what such a new contract should include and what Republicans surveyed think should be in it. Gingrich himself wrote in the conservative Newsmax Magazine back in January: "Part of the power of a contract strategy is that it forces Republicans to quit being an opposition party and enables them to become an alternative party."

Instead, under the congressional minority leadership of Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. John Boehner, the GOP continues to recite the litany of the Party of No to just about every major and most minor Obama legislative proposals. Having failed to block historic health care and financial industry reform laws despite having enough senators to impose filibuster, it ignores that Gingrich warning.

The Democrats, meanwhile, are finally getting more help from Obama, whose speeches at rallies and fund-raisers are going beyond blaming his GOP predecessor, reminding voters of the Republican policy of congressional obstruction in efforts to dig the economy "out of the ditch" he inherited.

The Democratic National Committee, pitching in, is running on its website the charge that the tea party movement, whose excesses have prompted some GOP leaders to warn against too close an association, "is now an institutionalized part of the Republican Party" and "one and the same."

The DNC site lists the supposed amalgam's agenda as pure Party of No -- for repeal of health care, Wall Street reform, Medicare, the Departments of Education and Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency and direct election of senators, and for extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich and big oil. A National Republican Senate Committee spokesman not surprisingly dismissed the DNC blast as "desperate" -- and it does have a kitchen-sink inclusiveness about it.

Still, most of the public-opinion polls and nose-counting projections continue to forecast enough Democratic losses of Senate and House seats in November to put Obama's own agenda in jeopardy in the second two years of his term. And while he and his economic spokesmen continue to argue that his stimulus package has halted the recession and is slowly lifting the country into recovery, the stagnant unemployment rate near 10 percent suggests otherwise.

Even if Obama is right, the practical political question is whether there remains enough time between now and November for his cautious optimism to be borne out. Large corporations continue to sit on fat profits and prefer to rely on the higher productivity squeezed out of fewer workers, rather than resume hiring on a sufficient scale to generate a real sense of national recovery.

The Republican leaders are betting on that not happening to a degree that will materially change the jobless picture in the next three months. Meanwhile, the message coming from them, and particularly from the tea party movement, whether or not it really has become "an institutional part" of the Grand Old Party, will be anti-Obama, as they say, 24-7.

As the incumbent president, he cannot expect otherwise and must defend his record at a time of diminishing public support and an impatient electorate. His best hopes beyond a rapid economic brightening may be memories of Bush's last dismal years and the failure so far of the naysayers to offer a convincing package of alternatives.

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The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

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