First it was Hillary Clinton….
Then Nancy Pelosi….
Not it’s back to tried and tested ‘Liberal’ tag against Democrats by Republicans….
“Republicans unveiled an ad campaign this week that seemed to turn back the clock a few decades — by trying to turn the word ‘liberal’ into the kind of insult it was 25 years ago,” the Washington Post reports.
“This is a slight variation on what has been a steadily consistent theme from CLF: a steady attack on Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as the potential next House speaker should Democrats win back the majority.”
“But the earlier ads focused almost exclusively on Pelosi, assuming the viewer already knew what she stood for and why they disliked her. In this week’s trio of ads, however, Pelosi is a bit character, appearing on screen for just four or five seconds in the 90 seconds of airtime.”
I guess I missed the time when Republicans Didn’t use the “L” word against Democrats.
When was that exactly?
In the last 18 months they seem to have forgot it in their euphoria ….
‘Blue Wave ‘ jitters brings it back….
Maybe in your world.
I have seen the term used often by Right Wing politicos, heard it uttered on television by well known Republicans ,and read it several times a week in Letters to the Editor by Republicans in local newspapers.
Hell CG has used it here in his posts.
Youmust live a sheltered life or,as you would say, an “alternate reality.”
As I’ve related before (and perhaps too often), the cookie-cutter attack on, or ridicule of, liberals doesn’t work where the word has never been an insult to begin with.
In the 1996 general elections, Arthur Finklestein and Pat Toomey’s Club for Growth made essentially identical commercials against five Democratic and DFL Senate candidates, including Jack Reed in Rhode Island and Paul Wellstone in Minnesota. The commercials listed various positions or votes of the Democrats in an incredulous, slightly mocking, voice-over ending with the tag-line, “Now, that’s liberal !” (chortle-chortle understood). At least in Jack Reed’s case, this was accompanied by the popping out of a jack-in-the-box with Reed’s face (get it?)
Trouble (for the sponsors) was that Minnesota and Rhode Island were two places where “liberal” just wasn’t a dirty word, and ordinary, non-intellectual working voters had no hesitation in calling themselves liberals. Wellstone won by 9 points (50.3% to incumbent Republican Rudy Boschwitz’s 40.3%) and Reed by 28 (63% – 28% to succeed retiring Dem. Sen. Claiborne Pell).
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,_1996
In Rhode Island, the Republican candidate, Gen. Treas. Nancy Mayer, a popular liberal pro-choice former Democrat, expressed her own frustration at the ads, which were not helping her, and said she wished that the out-of-state groups sponsoring them would stop.
Ok
Jack
But as the piece explains and I cocur…
This is a NEW effort to hang the word out as a slang….
MY Point….