Buyer Beware of Labels

 (Continued from home page)

    Now, he is blaming the “liberal media” for these woes. Yawn.
    Even with all this in just the first week of the fall campaign, Mr. Conway can’t count on Dr. Paul to continue angering voters and thus crash his own candidacy. Mr. Conway, the Democratic nominee and Kentucky’s attorney general, needs to get a Democratic message out there; he needs to remind voters that the old labels won’t stick so easily to the Democratic Party. The old labels won’t stick to the GOP, either.
    Too many voters, especially those who lean to the right, are allowing the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck to define the Democrats’ positions. In the last several years, indeed, through the George W. Bush administration, Democrats have not effectively defended their work and their philosophy, and they have not exposed Republican double-standards.
    Take the national debt and spending. A Rasmussen poll* released two weeks ago found that Americans “overwhelmingly” view the federal deficit as a major problem (81 percent) – and more of them blame President Bush and the GOP for this problem than they do President Obama and the Democrats. The margin isn’t huge – 6 percent – but it’s not tiny, either.  Forty-nine percent of the respondents said Mr. Bush and the Republicans were “more responsible for the size of the current federal budget deficit,” while 43 percent said President Obama and the Democrats are more to blame. Predictably, these alliances generally fall along party lines, but for survey respondents not affiliated with either party, 53 percent said Mr. Bush and Republicans are to blame for the deficit and increased spending, while 36 percent blamed it on President Obama and Democrats.
    The poll also found that 56 percent of Americans said the Bush administration “increased government spending too much.”
    Democrats need to incorporate the divide between GOP rhetoric and action into a national message. Job creation was up last month for the first time in a few years. General Motors is repaying its loan to the government, and it appears taxpayers may even profit from the exchange. The party of Kennedy cannot allow the right to continue to define it.

Laura Cullen Glasscock, editor and publisher
The Kentucky Gazette

glasscock@kentuckygazette.com

    * The survey of 1,000 adults was conducted May 15-16 by Pulse Opinion Research for Rasmussen Reports. The margin of error was +/- 3 percentage points.