They must be popping open the champagne at the RNC’s fund raising office today because Vice President Joe Biden has now given them the perfect quote to stick in fundraising letters and in ads for campaign 2010. ABC News reports:
Vice President Joe Biden said today that if Democrats were to lose 35 House seats they currently hold in traditionally Republican districts, it would mean doomsday for President Obama’s agenda.
Biden said Republicans are pinning their political strategy on flipping these seats.
“If they take them back, this the end of the road for what Barack and I are trying to do,” the vice president said at a fundraiser for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) today in Greenville, Delaware.The GOP needs 40 seats to take back the house. And since the GOP was virtually written off right after the election, times have changed: several serious political experts have said there is a chance the Demmies will suffer big losses or even lose the House. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently said that 2010 will be an extremely tough election for Democrats.
There are 49 seats currently held by Democrats in districts that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) won in last year’s presidential election.
Biden said these House seats are Republicans “one shot” at breaking the Obama administration’s agenda. But if Democrats can hold on to those seats, “the dam is going to break,” he said, and a new era of bipartisanship will begin.
“All the hidden Republicans that don’t have the courage to vote the way they want to vote because of pressure from the party … it will break the dam and you will see bipartisanship,” Biden said.
Republicans welcomed the vice president’s assessment of the 2010 landscape.
“What didn’t seem possible just a few months ago, appears to be the topic of conversation even within the upper echelons of the Obama White House,” said Ken Spain, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “It is interesting to hear Vice President Biden admit that the administration’s effort to double down on a partisan agenda of government takeovers could possibly mean the ‘end of the road’ for their political viability.”Biden’s remarks fit in perfectly with how Republican party strategists would like to frame the upcoming elections and with how talk radio political hosts will want to frame it. The difference is: they now have confirmation that this will be a kind of Custers’ Last Stand to halt Obama-Biden plans.
More than ever 2010 seems like it’ll come down to which party can get its base out and win over independents. If Democrats continue to show dissension and disappointment, look for Republicans to make big gains — with a little help from a quote that now helps them frame the election their way. Of course, Biden’s quote can also be used by Democrats, but if Democrats face divisions due to disappointed liberals, then the argument that “it’s important to protect what we have and our agenda” will not be as forceful as the GOP’s “even Joe Biden says we can stop the Obama agenda if we can win back the House.”
Once again Biden’s comments are correct. But they are likely prove to be political foot-in-mouth since they undescore how the GOP is far from downsized or dead, as some experts have said. If it can pick off vulnerable Demcorats and either win back or get a big chunk back of the House, many analysts will want to hide or delete what they wrote the day after the Nov. 2008 national elections.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.
