Gearing up for battle at RNC

The new Republican National Committee chairman has a warning for Democrats: Attack President Bush, and Ed Gillespie's going to hit you — hard.

The 41-year-old Gillespie — a media maestro and Republican strategist skilled in the art of political counterpunching and message-crafting — was elected to the RNC top spot last week. In a recent interview, he says the 2004 election is going to be the political equivalent of the shootout at the OK Corral, and he's gearing up for battle.

For example: What does he think about the Democratic assault on Mr. Bush's handling of postwar Iraq?

Anyone else would dodge that question, fearing that it would sound like the party's point man was impugning the patriotism of Mr. Bush's enemies and potential opponents in the election. But not Mr. Gillespie:

"I would not go so far as to say they are wishing for defeat, but I think they are taking some satisfaction in the misfortunes of others," he says.

By "others," he is referring to "progress in Iraq," a term general enough to encompass U.S. troops stationed there, the Iraqi people and the life-and-death situations these groups find themselves in.

Translation: Mr. Bush's Democratic critics are delighted when it may appear that chaos is overrunning postwar Iraq and that Ba'athist guerrillas are running rampant.

"You know 'fear and loathing' was once a catchy title for a book," Mr. Gillespie says, "but it's a lousy way to play politics."

The Democrats "have crossed the line" of acceptable political discourse on Iraq by trying to score political points on the war's aftermath when the lives of American soldiers are still on the line, he says.

Mr. Gillespie calls Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, a hypocrite and an opportunist for his criticism of Mr. Bush's policies on Iraq and the war on terrorism. He accuses the Democrats of "playing naked politics" with Iraq to pander to its large anti-war base. He charges that Mr. Kerry and the other Democratic presidential contenders are "tripping all over themselves" to get to the left of Howard Dean.

"Their politics may appeal to their anti-war base, but their lack of policy won't make our country more secure," Mr. Gillespie wrote in one of the dozens of statements he has e-mailed to hundreds of reporters, editorial writers and news bureaus.

Mr. Gillespie's ammunition comes from a busy research team that has catalogued every vote, every statement, every offhand remark, every action that Republicans are aware that the Democratic candidates have made. It is loaded into the RNC's computers and is ready to fire when needed.

When Mr. Kerry attacked Mr. Bush's handling of homeland security in a recent speech, saying that the United States "cannot afford to leave the front lines of home security without the resources they need," Mr. Gillespie shot back with a counterstatement that showed the senator had a long record of voting to cut funds for antiterrorism intelligence.

"This is a candidate who voted to cut $2.6 billion in intelligence funds as a member of the Intelligence Committee, including $80 million for the FBI," he says. "And now he wants the American people to think he's a champion of homeland preparedness? Come on, give me a break," he says.

Ed Gillespie Becomes RNC Chairman and Outlines Positive GOP Agenda

July 25, 2003

Thank you all very much. Thank you David. Thank you Ferrell. And thank you, Anne—not only for your remarks, but also for all your help over the past two months.

I want to add my appreciation and thanks to my friend and predecessor, Governor Marc Racicot for his hard work and his help in getting me settled at the RNC.

Governor – you led our party with grace and statesmanship and were a major reason for our success last year. You kept our organization focused where it should be—on the grassroots—and made sure the hard-earned money of our donors went into electing Republicans to office. I promise you, I will work very hard to try and meet the high standard you have set as chairman.

I also want to add my thanks to my buddy Jack Oliver for the job he did. Jack, you will be missed, but we won’t miss a step thanks to Maria Cino filling your role.

It is an honor to stand before you all today. I am humbled by your faith in me, and by the President’s faith in me. And I commit to you today what I committed to the President:

I will not let you down.

This may be a new job for me, but the RNC is not a new place for me. Six-and-a-half years ago, I worked with many of you as a staffer for former chairman—and future governor—Haley Barbour. Twelve years before that, I worked in the basement as a phoner—sitting in a little cubicle, calling people and asking them for money for the RNC.

Now, 18 years later, I’m up on the 4th floor, sitting in a big office, calling people and asking them for money for the RNC.

Of course, raising money is a means to an end, and that end continues to be our focus on the nuts and bolts of politics: grassroots organizing, voter registration and turnout, and message management. And we will lead the Democrats in all of these categories, just as we lead them in sound ideas and good policies.

This is a critical moment in history for the Republican Party. I know people always say that, but this really is.

We are now seen as the party of results, entrusted to govern at every level. Only ten years ago, we were the minority in the House and Senate, and we stood outside the White House’s wrought iron gates. But just last year, we defied historical precedent by building on our House majority and recapturing a majority in the Senate, thanks mainly to the strong leader now in the Oval Office, President George W. Bush.

You know what that is?

That’s a pretty good start.

Because despite the success we have enjoyed over this past decade, our work is not completed. Indeed, in many ways, our work is just beginning.

Because Republicans don’t run for elective offices for the sake of holding elective offices. We don’t get elected to be something; we get elected to do something. And my fellow committee members, we have much more to do.

For this is not just a critical moment in the history of our party, it is a critical moment in the history of our nation.

The United States, the heroic members of our Armed Forces, and much of the free world continues to wage a war against terror. We are now constantly vigilant against a cowardly and stealthy enemy who seeks to strike our allies and us where we live and where we work. We must root them out of their shadowy training camps across the world, and we must strengthen our homeland security in the U.S.

Here at home, too many families are having difficulty making ends meet. Too many workers are looking for jobs. Too many children are not getting the education they deserve.

Fortunately, we have a President who cares deeply about his countrymen, and has great goals for our nation. President Bush wants to make sure that our nation is free from the threat of terrorism. He wants to create jobs, rejuvenate retirement and college funds, and make sure that people can keep more of their hard-earned money. He wants to increase access to affordable health care and improve our public schools.

He is joined in these goals by a growing majority of Americans who want to help make this nation better and stronger. And he is joined by an ever-growing number of Republican elected officials.

Americans support these Republican candidates because they know these Republican candidates will support them, that they’ll roll up their sleeves to address our nation’s challenges.

We’re developing ideas. We’re implementing solutions. And in the best American political tradition, we would welcome being challenged in the contest of ideas by a loyal opposition with an alternative agenda of its own. Unfortunately, that seems almost too much to ask these days.

The Democratic party of John F. Kennedy, who extolled Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” tell us not what they would do for their country. The once-proud party of Franklin Roosevelt, who famously told us “we have nothing to fear but fear itself,” now seems to have nothing to offer but fear itself.

In place of solutions they serve up raw emotion, and that emotion is anger.

They’re angry that they aren’t the majority party in the House or Senate. They’re angry that they don’t control a majority of the governorships. And they’re angry most of all that they don’t control the White House.

As a result, they offer Americans a steady diet of protest and pessimism. They’re still protesting the 2000 election. Some of their loudest voices protested removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. They protested a jobs and growth package. They protest qualified judicial nominees.

And the Democrat National Committee has even begun e-mailing party activists urging them to protest the President of the United States when he comes to their town—including helpful suggestions for catchy signs they can hold over their heads.

This is what they consider political discourse.

If you get the impression the other party has come to the conclusion that what’s worst for the American people is what’s best for them, it’s only because that’s their explicit strategy. One top Democratic strategist told the Washington Post, “There’s a large part of the Democratic Party that wants to wait for the unemployment rate to deliver them the next election… It’s easier for them to do that than to go out there and put together support around some program.”

And so they oppose the elimination of double taxation. They oppose litigation reforms. They oppose policies to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and they oppose efforts to reduce wasteful Washington spending.

As the Republican Congress passed historic legislation to modernize our Medicare system and provide seniors with a much needed prescription drug benefit, a former Gore campaign official said his party was...

“torn between trying to make a difference on an issue they care about and not losing the political benefit the issue has provided.”

Well, when it comes to providing a prescription drug benefit for America’s seniors, the days of playing politics are over. And Democrats chose to run on the problem rather than fix it one too many times.

I’m proud to say that this important step in improving the quality of life for our senior citizens is being taken by a Republican Congress and a Republican president!

The Democrat Party can no longer define itself by what it is for, only by what they’re against. The new Chief Operating Officer of the DNC said earlier this month: “Our challenge is to make the DNC a more …efficient institution that is maniacally focused on beating George Bush and taking back the White House…”

“Maniacally focused on beating George Bush.”

That’s it. That’s the sum of their message. The essence of their agenda. The entirety of their vision.

While President Bush works to rid our homeland of terrorist threats, to rid our schools of hopelessness, rid our economy of unemployment, rid our air and water of pollutants, rid our government of obstacles to faith based approaches to helping those in need, rid the African continent of AIDS, And rid the world of terrorism, Democrats work only to rid the White House of President Bush.

The contest for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination sometimes seems to be a contest to see who can be the most pessimistic, who can protest the most angrily, and who can take their party further back in time. The Democratic presidential hopefuls are so obsessed with politics, they disregard policy, even changing their own positions on as critical an issue as Iraq to appeal to their anti-war base.

Senators Kerry, Graham, Lieberman and Edwards all clearly understood the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and are on the record citing the need for regime change.

As early as February 1998, Sen. Kerry, as a member of the Intelligence Committee, said, “Saddam Hussein has already used these weapons and has made it clear that he has the intent to continue to try, by virtue of his duplicity and secrecy, to continue to do so.”

In June of 2002, Sen. Graham said “What we're concerned about with Iraq is its intention and capabilities to develop weapons of mass destruction, and the merger of that capability with terrorist groups, that is the ultimate nightmare scenario.”

Their overheated rhetoric toward the president, bandying about words like “lying,” “madman” and, yes, “impeachment,” is designed to distract from the central fact that their policies would not make us safer in the world, and President’s Bush’s do.

The world changed after September 11, and President Bush has responded accordingly. As British Prime Minister Tony Blair said so eloquently Thursday:

“Can we be sure that terrorism and weapons of mass destruction will join together? Let us say one thing: If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at it’s least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive.

But if our critics are wrong, if we are right, as I believe with every fiber of instinct and conviction I have that we are, and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in the face of this menace when we should have given leadership. That is something history will not forgive.”

By the way, British Intelligence stands by their assessment that the Iraqis sought to purchase uranium from Niger. That’s a fact today, and it was a fact when the President said it 7 months ago.

The Democrats are increasingly coalescing behind this position: When presented with universally agreed upon evidence that a brutal dictator with a history of using WMD against his own people and an avowed hatred of the United States is developing a program of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, our policy is to simply hope for the best.

That is a naïve proposition. We can fight the war against terror in Baghdad and Kabul, or Boston and Kansas City. If we don’t deal with terrorism, we will deal with its aftermath. The President is right. They are wrong. And this is a debate they cannot win!

Americans want a president who is forward-looking. They want calm leadership, not heated rhetoric. They want bipartisan accomplishments, not bitter partisanship. And they want a steady hand, not flailing arms.

To achieve our positive agenda, we need more Republicans in office. And to get more Republicans in office, we need more Republicans in voting booths. And we have a plan to do that.

We will expand on the successful 72-hour program.

And we will increase voter registration. I am unveiling today the Chairman’s Cup – a new award that will be presented to the state party that best meets its voter registration goals for the year.

It will be presented to the winning state’s chairman and committee members on stage at the Republican Convention here in New York a little over a year from now.

There will be only one Chairman’s Cup, and it will be housed each year at the state party headquarters that boasts the best voter registration program. I challenge the state party chairs to go out and fight for this cup.

We need to sign up new voters and voters who are switching parties. And we must continue to be an inclusive party that increases our share of African-American, Asian American and Latino voters.

I was watching one of the Democrats’ cattle calls on C-SPAN not too long ago—talk about work--and Carol Mosely Braun said something really insightful. Actually, she was quoting her grandmother, who liked to say, “Whether your family came here on the Mayflower or on a slave ship, we’re all in the same boat now.”

I really liked that sentiment, because whether your family did come here on the Mayflower or a slave ship, or whether they floated here on a Vietnamese junk, washed ashore on a raft from Cuba or landed at Ellis Island on a famine ship from Ireland – we’re all in the same boat now.

One of my priorities as chairman will be to reach out even more to legal immigrants and first- and second-generation Americans.

People who come legally to this country with nothing but the clothes on their back and labor in the most menial ways to get a new start should feel at home in our party. As a rule, they are hard working, freedom loving and patriotic Americans.

This is not something I learned from a book. It’s something I learned from my father, who came to this country on a boat from Ireland with nothing but the clothes on his back, was processed through Ellis Island—eight miles from where I stand now. He worked as a janitor, Nazi bullets ripped through both his legs in the course of earning a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, a Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster and a Silver Star for his adopted country. He started his own business, and made his children the first generation of Gillespies to ever attend college.

I asked him to come here today, but he had no idea I would introduce him to you. But it is my honor to do so—Ladies and Gentlemen: John Patrick “Jack” Gillespie.

I’m proud to be the son of an immigrant and a small business owner. My mother and father had a little grocery store, the J & C Market—Jack and Conny, Mom and Pop. Like my brothers and sisters, I would get off the bus there after school and spend afternoons stocking the shelves and sweeping the floors and doing my homework behind the counter.

But I learned more than just my schoolwork there. My parents taught me that the customer’s always right, Honor the competition, don’t be afraid of hard work and treat people who pay with food stamps the same as people who pay with cash.

I think those lessons will serve me well in the job you’ve entrusted me with today. I’ll keep an eye on the voters—our customers.

I’ll plan for a vigorous contest by the other party.

I’ll work hard.

And I’ll convey our President’s compassionate conservative message with heartfelt enthusiasm.

I am excited to work with you. Together, we will unite America behind great leaders and important goals.

Together, we will elect more Republicans to city halls, state capitols and Congress.

And together, we will make sure that George W. Bush wins a second term as President of the United States.

Thank you.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Before Gillespie...I knew W would be reelected. With Gillespie...I now believe W will be reelected BIG!

My ONLY FEAR is that Karl Rove will temper his message to coddle the moderate RINOs!

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.