If the Democratic National Committee’s strategy for victory is to muffle its own party’s achievements and focus more on slamming Republicans, it seems to be doing a good job on its website.
The DNC’s homepage has numerous attack ads against presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, far more than news touting President Obama’s accomplishments in office.
A review of the DNC’s homepage shows a majority of ads mocking Romney from “Romney’s Guide To International Diplomacy” following his comments that London might not be ready for the Olympics with the Twitter hashtag “RomneyShambles,” to attack ads highlighting “Mitt Romney’s $ecret $tash” of money in Swiss bank accounts and his tenure at Bain Capital.
But a visitor will have to dig through the site to find Obama’s signature accomplishments.
July 11 is the last post on the homepage to mention the president’s signature health care law, but in that instance, it’s a blog post about why Republicans shouldn’t have voted to repeal “Obamacare” for the 33rd time. Before that, users have to go back to last month to find the DNC page proclaiming a health care victory following the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the law as constitutional.
Obama made history by becoming the first sitting president to endorse same-sex marriage, but to find it on the DNC homepage, one has to go through over 100 posts back to May when he first made the statement.
Instead of having Obama’s accomplishments readily available on the homepage, visitors need to scroll over to the “People” and “Issue” tabs to find his successes in office. CBSDC reached out to the DNC for comment.
Mathews Pierson, director of politics at CBS Local Media, said negative attack ads work better than presenting someone’s success.
“Everyone complains about negative campaigning, but we keep doing it for one really simple reason: it works,” Pierson told CBSDC. “The same voter who tells you he doesn’t want to see anymore of it will then tell you something bad about Mitt Romney that he certainly didn’t learn doing his own research. “
Pierson explained that constantly using attack ads on the DNC’s front page will help to “rev up activists.”
“Driving Romney’s negatives is working to engage activists and generate press coverage to keep pressing until it doesn’t,” Pierson said. “Also, while most of the public is tuned-out and hitting the beach, if every time they tune in they hear the negative Romney narrative it can solidify their opinion of him before they truly start paying attention to the race this fall.”
A recent Rasmussen Reports poll shows that Romney holds a 49 to 44 percent lead over Obama.
