House Republicans have now spent roughly $ 450,000 on television ads blasting eight of their Democratic colleagues for supporting a raid on the Social Security trust fund. The ads appear to have been successful at beginning to make the Republicans, for the first time ever, the party that defends Social Security. The evidence? Democrats are going berserk.
At a meeting Tuesday night, Oct. 19, between the president and congressional leaders, Clinton complained about the ads to Denny Hastert and Dick Armey. And House Democrats aired the ads at one of their caucus meetings, so those members who hadn't yet been targeted could figure out a response. North Dakota Democrats have even started running ads to defend Earl Pomeroy, one of those whose support for Social Security is being challenged.
The best evidence of all that Democrats are worried came on the morning of Oct. 21, when Tom Daschle and Richard Gephardt had a joint press conference in which they each gave an opening statement moaning about the ads. Gephardt in particular was so hysterical over what he thought was unfair demagoguing that it seems to have affected his memory. He had never seen such ads, said the House's minority leader, "when the election's over a year away, to affect the legislative outcome on the floor of the House. We're in a new world here, folks." Yet when a reporter asked Gephardt how he squared his statement with the shellacking the White House handed to Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich over Medicare in 1995, the minority leader suddenly had less to say. Indeed, asked about the ads aired during the government shutdown, Gephardt could only say, "I don't remember that."
Hastert has been the driving force behind the ads, and has leaned on Tom Davis, the House GOP campaign chairman, to keep airing them even after Davis's staff expressed concern about the amount of money being expended. Some wondered whether Davis was fully committed to the ads, but he put that to rest with his response to Dennis Moore of Kansas, one of the targeted Democrats, who personally complained to him. He told him Republicans would run ads in his district only for as long as Democrats ran ads in the district of Todd Tiahrt, a House Republican from Kansas, in 1995-96. Those ads ran for nine months.