Over at Outside the Beltway, Dodd is unhappy with the mushy brand of campaigning he’s seen so far from the Republican leadership:
Assuming (as I do) that the GOP will take at least the House, and possibly the Senate, the party must run on specific proposals in order to garner the leverage necessary to roll back the last few years of Democratic excesses. If they stick to their current (apparent) game plan and just run on not being Democrats, they will have neither a mandate to repeal Obamacare, et al, nor the will.
Unfortunately, despite a series of “Establishment” Republicans being sent packing by the base, all the signs so far indicate that McConnell and Co. just want to get their power back, not to actually do anything with it. Boehner’s been better, but the resistance to campaigning on a theme of, say, Paul Ryan’s Roadmap is unmistakable. The party need not endorse the specifics of Ryan’s plan in every particular to set forth a plan of action along those lines.
Well, yes, except for one thing: if they did that, they’d lose. The public doesn’t want to hear about spending cuts except in the most general, stemwinding terms, and a concrete plan of action “along those lines” would be massively unpopular with the electorate. McConnell and Boehner know this perfectly well. So instead they serve up mush.