Republican Committees in Panicky Retreat

The vaunted McCain campaign “re-boot” is now in its second day, and at this point it’s looking like they’re just hitting ctrl-alt-delete over and over again as white smoke pours out the back of the computer… and their malaise seems to be dragging down the Congressional ballot too. Perhaps that comes as no surprise to us in the lefty blogosphere, but now mainstream purveyors of the conventional wisdom are starting to move this story to the forefront, such as Politico, with not one but two stories on this front today.

For starters, the NRSC is getting a financial bailout of its own: from the RNC. (Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul.) The RNC is prepared to tap its $5 million line of credit, not to save McCain but to head off the possibility of a 60-seat Democratic caucus in the Senate with huge ad buys of their own.

And with the House and Senate Republican campaign committees being drastically outspent by their Democratic counterparts, and outside groups such as Freedom’s Watch offering far less help than was once anticipated, Republicans are turning to the national party committee as a lender of last resort.

A decision is imminent because television time must be reserved and paid for upfront, and available slots are dwindling.

This won’t be a direct allocation of funds to the NRSC, since the NRSC and RNC are prohibited by law from coordinating independent expenditures (such as where to run ads or their content). But the RNC can easily deduce from previous NRSC buys and public polling where their advertising help is needed. This money isn’t coming out of funds that were previously designated for McCain, but it’s telling that for the home stretch they’d rather tap their emergency stash for Senate triage, rather than bolstering McCan’t’s fading chances. (As an indication how far we’ve come, I idly speculated on this very possibility back in June, and got laughed out of the building.)

Politico also delves into the corresponding mess at the NRCC, where highly touted recruits like Darren White (NM-01) and Erik Paulsen (MN-03) are apparently being left to fend for themselves in the coming weeks as the NRCC’s meager holdings are divvied up among endangered veterans.

I did a bit of a double-take when seeing the example they gave:

GOP Reps. John B. Shadegg of Arizona, Lee Terry of Nebraska, Henry Brown Jr. of South Carolina and Dan Lungren of California are all fighting for their political lives, a reversal of fortunes that has caught even the most astute campaign observers by surprise.

The GOP is publicly confessing to being worried about the challenges posed by Linda Ketner (SC-01) and Bill Durston (CA-03)? Either this is the most monumental of all head-fakes, or they’re looking up at a tsunami that even we at SSP are underestimating. Other names cited in the article as causes for concern include Lee Terry, Mark Souder (both victims of recent huge DCCC expenditures), Dana Rohrabacher, David Dreier, and Brian Bilbray, all of whom would be well behind a GOP firewall any other year.