[wentscat]

GO CHENEY YOURSELF" DEMOCRATIC ANGER COUNTER STRATEGY
Add that to the corruption, theft,

election fraud, an there is a case to be made outside of K Street.

Dems Mad as hell and won't take it

anymore.

Seem the direct protest strategy is getting to the Fascists

Imitating Cheney is just the ticket _

they hate themselves



BY BETH FOUHY
Associated Press
February 8,

2006
http://www.nysun.com/article/27261


NEW YORK (AP) -- The

Republican national chairman created a
furor this week when he suggested Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton is too

"angry" to win the White House in 2008. And
to hear Republicans tell it, Clinton is just one of many
Democrats

with an anger management problem.

Former Vice President Al Gore is angry. So is Senate
Minority Leader Harry

Reid. The party is held hostage by the
"angry left."

In recent months, GOP operatives and officeholders have

cast
the Democrats as the anger party, long on emotion and short
on ideas. Analysts say the strategy has been

effective,
trivializing Democrats' differences with the GOP as
temperamental rather than substantive.

"Angry

people are not nice people. They are people to stay
away from. They explode now and then," said George Lakoff,

a
linguistics professor at the University of California at
Berkeley. His book "Don't Think of an Elephant" has

become
something of a Bible for Democrats trying to improve their
communication with voters.

Political history

is dotted with failed presidential
candidates perceived by the voters as too angry -- think of
Howard Dean's

famous scream in 2004, or Bob Dole admonishing
George H.W. Bush in 1988 to "stop lying about my record."
Both

parties' most revered figures in recent years, Ronald
Reagan and Bill Clinton, projected optimism and hope.

The

latest example of the anger strategy came Sunday, when
Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman said

on
ABC that Clinton "seems to have a lot of anger." He cited
comments she made in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day

in
which she likened the Republican-led House to a "plantation"
and called the Bush administration "one of the

worst" in
history.

"I don't think the American people, if you look
historically, elect angry candidates,"

Mehlman said.

Democrats defended Clinton.

"Democrats want a leader who shares their frustration --
even anger

-- about Republican failures," Democratic
strategist Dan Newman said. "Anger at terrorists is
expected, outrage

about corruption is a plus."

Some Democrats, in fact, complained that Clinton doesn't get
angry enough. Some

also denounced Mehlman as mean-spirited,
and smelled more than a whiff of sexism in his remarks.

"It's the

stereotype of the crone -- angry, nasty, but
powerful," Lakoff said.

RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt dismissed

the charge of
sexism, saying the anger strategy was fully justified when
Democrats launch personal attacks. She

cited Dean's
description of Republicans as "brain dead" last year, and
Reid's calling President Bush a

"loser."

"Whether she's a man or a woman is completely irrelevant. If
some Democrats want to fall back on the

gender card, that's
their prerogative," Schmitt said.

Other examples of the anger strategy abound. Last

summer,
with chief White House political adviser Karl Rove under
investigation in the CIA leak case, Sen. John

Cornyn,
R-Texas, denounced Democrats' criticism of Rove as "more of
the same kind of anger and lashing out that

has become the
substitute for bipartisan action and progress."

Last month, after Gore criticized the president

for
approving warrantless eavesdropping on terror suspects,
Schmitt retorted: "While the president works to

protect
Americans from terrorists, Democrats deliver no solutions of
their own, only diatribes laden with

inaccuracies and anger."

Bush himself touched on the anger theme in his recent State
of the Union Address,

saying: "Our differences cannot be
allowed to harden into anger."

For her part, Clinton -- calmly -- dismissed

Mehlman's
remarks as a diversion from serious issues and the
Republicans' "many failures and

shortcomings."

But even she has employed the anger strategy. Six years ago,
as a Senate candidate in New York,

Clinton questioned the
temperament of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was
expected to be her Republican

opponent.

Giuliani "gets angry very often," Clinton said. "I don't see
the point in getting angry all the time

and expending all
the energy when we could be figuring out a better way to
take care of people."

--
Dan

Clore