Following his party’s worst election performance in 30 years, House Republican campaign chairman Tom Cole makes clear that he intends to retake many of the seats swept up in the Democratic wave in November, and he’s willing to effect the changes needed to do so.
With the benefit of hindsight and the optimism of someone in the valley of a political ebb and flow, Cole (R-Okla.) dismisses the strategies that failed his predecessors at the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and expects a different kind of election in 2008.
In an hour-long interview with The Hill, Cole didn’t say Republicans would retake the House in 22 months, but it’s evident he would be among the last to project surprise if it happened.
He repeats a pair of facts — that Republicans have their largest minority in the last half-century and that Democrats now hold 61 districts that President Bush carried twice — with the frequency of someone who has been delivering the same argument to donors helping to retire the committee’s $15 million debt.
His pitch is basically this: All variables equal, Republicans have the edge, and they will take the majority again.
"Believe me, if we could carry every congressional district that the Republican [presidential] nominee carries ... I would take it right now, sight unseen, end of the game," Cole said. "And I would bet you we would have the majority."
Cole said the Republican strategy of localizing the election and, at the same time, trying to peg Democrats in conservative districts with the "San Francisco values" of now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was unsuccessful in 2006 and indicated it wouldn’t work in 2008 either.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) was mentioned with Pelosi in some of the "San Francisco values" campaign ads and, as a polarizing figure, would seem ripe for a similar tactic if she wins her party’s presidential nomination.
Asked about the Pelosi strategy, Cole laughed.
"Sure worked, didn’t it?" he said. "We were trying everything. ‘All politics is local, except if Pelosi wins it’ll be terrible.’ ... We were just in a fix."
The "all politics is local" mantra, coined by former House Speaker Tip O’Neill and cited frequently by outgoing NRCC Chairman Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), is clearly out the door along with Reynolds. Cole shies from maxims, but he also emphasizes that there are "435 Americas" and says that national issues interact with local factors in many different ways.
Cole envisions 2008 being more of an issues-based election — one not dominated by a few select issues as 2006 was by ethics and the Iraq war, but a return to the core principles of the two parties. That’s a battle he thinks he can win, because while Democrats have 61 Bush districts, Republicans have only seven Kerry districts.
In fact, Cole ventured that Iraq wouldn’t be nearly as big an issue in 2008. This represents a sea change for the party, which in each of the last two cycles touted the war effort and brought resolutions forcing Democratic critics to go on the record.
With President Bush’s 21,000-troop surge now on the way, whether it succeeds or fails, the number of troops will likely be "substantially reduced" next year, Cole said.
"We are at the phase where the issue is going to come to a head, and we’ll see what happens," he said. "But I’m not sure it will dominate the political landscape."
Amid all his planning for the future, though, Cole has a very important issue to deal with right now. The committee’s current debt paralyzes other considerations until it’s retired.
"The first year of this stuff is not brain surgery; it’s raising money and recruiting candidates," said former NRCC Chairman Tom Davis (R-Va.), whom Cole hired to chair the NRCC’s executive committee last week.
Cole reports more than $2 million in commitments so far and hopes to take care of the debt by late spring or early summer. Rep. Phil English (R-Pa.), whom Cole beat out to lead the committee, has been tapped to head the debt-reduction effort.
English said the conference has responded with near-unanimity to the needs of the campaign committee, and he credits Cole with creating that unity.
"So far, he’s assembled a cracker-jack team of consultants who I think have the capacity to really revitalize the NRCC," English said. "I am extremely encouraged by the reaction I’m getting asking members to reach into their pockets one more time to reduce the debt."
Cole said members have, for the first time, prior knowledge of how much the committee is going to ask them to give and when it would like to have it, rather than constantly hitting members up for cash.
Among other changes, Cole said he and his top staffers will reevaluate the programs the NRCC has used and that they "are going to a do a lot of changing."
Though light on specifics at this point, Cole did say he would like to expand the Strategic Taskforce for Organizing and Mobilizing People program, or STOMP, which transplants Republican supporters from noncompetitive districts into more competitive, neighboring districts.
He also repeatedly emphasizes that the NRCC will no longer help members who aren’t helping themselves. He said Republicans would have won two seats in redistricted Georgia if the party hadn’t funded these "political welfare candidates." He wouldn’t name names.
Cole said it now is apparent that the field of competitive races is much wider than Republicans previously thought. While Reynolds, to the bitter end, stuck by his assertion that there are about three dozen genuinely competitive races, Cole places the number at about double that amount, and as high as 85.
He mostly declined to talk about specific targets, but did mention repeatedly Kansas’s 2nd district as a particularly painful loss and made it clear that the roughly half-dozen seats where Republican corruption led to defeat, including former Rep. Bob Ney’s Ohio district and former Rep. Mark Foley’s Florida district, will top the list.
He expressed confidence in all the incumbents who survived such a tough election and maintained that things will get better for House Republicans before they get worse.
"You get about one of these a generation," Cole said of the Democrats’ 2006 win. "We got ours in ’94; they just got theirs. I don’t think any of us are due for another one of those very soon. But if so, it’s our turn next."
I hope VanHollen can compete with this guy. It sounds like this guy is an aggressive NRCC chairman and really thinks that he can get back a majority. Im concerned.