Republican strategists are playing a strange game in using Democrats Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, and John Conyers, the Judiciary Committee ranking Democrat, to scare the wits out of voters.
The GOP logic is that voters from Vermont to California will back Republican candidates for Congress because they fear Pelosi as speaker of the House and Conyers running the Judiciary Committee starting next January.
A major hurdle to that scheme is that few voters have ever heard of Pelosi or Conyers. I'd venture the figure is in the 1 to 3 percent category outside their home districts in California and Michigan. More may know them after Karl Rove and his allies attempt to demonize them, but will it work even then?
The Republicans have another problem. Most voters today know the president's name, and they are not happy with current events. Recent polls suggest that President Bush's popularity is dangerously low, with a little over five months to the election.
Republicans should also be aware that Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois is hardly a dynamic figure. Democrats can remind the voters that Hastert reached the office only through the good graces of Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, who carries a lot of baggage with him now.
As for Conyers, he is certainly a liberal by every measure. However, before Republicans turn their guns on him, they should look at their own Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin. The Washington Post referred to him recently as cantankerous, a mild adjective according to some opponents.
Sensenbrenner is the poster child for the anti-immigration bill in Congress. He wants the 11 to 12 million illegal immigrants in the nation treated as felons. And he's been foaming at the mouth at the White House and the Senate for what he says is a program of pure amnesty for these immigrants–mostly Latinos.
Democrats should remind those Latino voters in border and other states that if the immigration reform bill loses, Sensenbrenner bears much of the blame.
One unnamed Republican lawmaker referred recently to Pelosi as the GOP's "secret weapon" in the campaign, meaning the election will turn on voter anger over her possibly leading the House. If that member is relying on that theory, his party may be heading for minority status.
To be sure, the politics of anger may work this fall, but that wrath is aimed right now at Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld.
John W. Mashek covered politics in Washington for four decades with U.S. News & World Report, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Boston Globe. His primary beats were Congress, the White House, and national politics. He covered every presidential election from 1960 to 1996. He was a panelist in three televised presidential debates in 1984, 1988, and 1992.
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