You know you suck as a president when your own party's National Committee is telling your candidates to not only ignore you, but
throw you under the bus.
Republican national leaders want Minnesota voters in the state's U.S. Senate race to focus on the candidates, Republican Mark Kennedy and Democrat Amy Klobuchar, not on President Bush.
They want voters in the 6th Congressional District to concentrate on Republican Michele Bachmann and Democrat Patty Wetterling, not on the Republican-led Congress.
The Republican National Committee opened its two-day annual summer meeting Thursday at the Sheraton Bloomington Hotel, hoping to outline a national strategy that will enable its candidates to swim against a tide of popular opinion flowing against Bush and the Republicans in Congress.
The theme of the meeting -- the RNC's first in Minnesota -- is "Defining the difference," and that means debating the Democrats on the issues and not defending Bush and the Republican Congress on the policies they have instituted in the past six years.
"This is going to be an election about choice, not a referendum on the president," said RNC spokeswoman Ann Marie Hauser. "The president is not on the ballot."
Of course Republicans want to divert attention away from Bush and the Congress, said state Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party spokeswoman Jess McIntosh. "It's very inconvenient for them that their figureheads are the most unpopular people in the country."
Bush's job-approval ratings in national polls taken in July ranged from 36 percent to 40 percent, which suggests he could be a drag on the ticket.
Congressional Republicans fare no better. In six national polls in which voters were asked to choose between a generic Democrat or Republican for Congress, Democrats were ahead by 8 to 16 percentage points.
Based on those and other polls, political handicapper Charlie Cook, publisher of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, this week predicted the political climate will be "extremely hostile" to Republican candidates in the fall.
"No amount of help from Karl Rove and the RNC playbook is going to help the Republicans strategize their way out of their cataclysmic failures of the past six years," McIntosh said.
Of course, this is Minnesota which is not the most fertile Bush territory (But then again, what was all that talk about MN shifting purple). However, take this scenario and play it out in California, Maryland, Pennsylvania and a lot of other states, and what you get is a party in full retreat. My advice to our candidates is keep up the pressure, and link your opponents to the Chimp-In-Chief!