Democrats on Wednesday celebrated a closer-than-expected loss in a special House of Representatives race in Ohio and called it a warning sign for Republicans entering the 2006 congressional elections.
That was the introduction to a report they titled, "Democrats celebrate narrow U.S. House loss in Ohio". Later the report makes this statement:
Hackett's criticism of the Iraq war and tough attacks on Bush energized the contest to replace Rob Portman, who resigned to become U.S. trade representative after regularly rolling up 70 percent of the vote in the district.
Attacks Bush? Check out the Hackett campaign ad [here is a link to the video]. After they show a clip of President Bush talking about serving in the military, Hackett says, "I agree with that". After stating he went to Iraq, Hackett then says "We are going to help these people." And now Reuters is saying Hackett was critical of the Iraq war. Wow!!
Here is more from Rush Limbaugh:
Now, if you go back to yesterday's program, you'll recall, ladies and gentlemen, that a made a big deal out of this man, Hackett, and his ad, his fraudulent ad in which he tried to portray himself as a Bush buddy and a hawk on the Iraq war. His ad never mentions that he's a lib, never mentions that he's a Democrat, never mentions that he called the president an SOB, never mentions that he referred to the president as the most dangerous man in the world, and never references his support for tax increases -- and so yesterday if you'll recall the Democrats were all abuzz about this, bzz bzz bzz, all excited. They couldn't wait, because they knew this guy -- they just knew he was going to win, and they were calling this a bellwether election. This is a huge Republican district, Ohio's #2 is, and so they said, "If this guy wins, it means it's over for Bush. It means the country is fed up with all these Bush policies," and of course that was just flat-out wrong because this guy wasn't running as a Democrat; he was not running as a Howard Dean. If this guy had run as a Democrat he would have run as an anti-war kook. He would have said in his ads that Bush is the "most dangerous man" in America; he would have called Bush an "SOB" in his ads, all these things but he didn't. You couldn't tell from watching his ad, and we had I can't tell you how many thousands of hits we had yesterday on the ad at RushLimbaugh.com. You couldn't tell from people watching this ad whether he was a Republican or Democrat.
He sounds just like a Republican, and so I made a point yesterday to tell all the people in the Democratic Party and the media, "If you think this is a bellwether, you are missing the point. You're not running an honest campaign. You're not even being honest with yourselves," but I knew, didn't matter whether he won or lost; they're going to spin this as a win because that's what they do.
Even Todd Epp agrees with Rush Limbaugh on this one. This was no victory for the Democrats.
Another note...remember the Tom Daschle ad hugging President Bush? All to mislead voters into thinking that Daschle was pro-Bush. That didn't work then and Hackett's attempt didn't work now.
