Happy Birthday, Mr. President.
On his 49th birthday Wednesday, President Obama received a promised "gift" from his friends at the Republican National Committee, in the form of a new Web site.
Web surfers who sign onto the new page will be presented with more than a dozen cards to choose from, including ones featuring Harlem Rep. Charles Rangel, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
"Congrats on your big day!" reads the e-card from the indicted former governor. "In honor of your birthday, I decided not to testify."
Rangel's card says: "For your birthday, I will go quietly," a reference to the congressman's efforts to fight ethics charges.
(Obama vs. the Congressional Black Caucus?)
But perhaps the best one is the card with Vice President Biden's face on it: "For your birthday, you won't hear a f@#&ing peep out of me."
The RNC went the extra mile to mark Obama's big day, offering to send the birthday cards to as many friends as the Web surfers want, free of charge. (Of course, no one would be surprised if the party held onto those e-mail addresses, and maybe hit them up for a little extra cash this fall.)
The birthday card site is a response to Democratic efforts to make political hay out of the president's 49th birthday by organizing parties around the country and blasting e-mails to the famed Obama e-mail list.
Blaming Bush
In his fundraising speech in Atlanta on Monday, Obama made the political argument that is the foundation of the Democratic message this fall, but with a twist.
Like before, he said the election this fall is a choice, between going forward (with his policies) or going backward (to those of the Republicans). But then he added a line that he hasn't used much since the campaign.
"They don't have a single idea that's different from George Bush's ideas -- not one," he said, invoking the former president directly by name and linking the GOP of today to his unpopular predecessor.
That message tracks closely with, though is probably not a result of, a recent poll making the rounds on Capitol Hill in the past several days. Paid for by the liberal-leaning Third Way think tank and conducted by Democratic pollster Pete Brodnitz of the Benenson Strategy Group, the poll had some interesting findings.
Chief among them was this startling nugget: that only 25 percent of the Americans surveyed thought that the current Republican leadership wanted to return to the economic policies of the Bush administration.
No comments:
Post a Comment