Scare Tactics: Osama Bin Pelosi

Lynch: GOP Believes Threat Of Nancy Pelosi As Speaker Will Scare Voters

(CBS)  Dotty Lynch is CBSNews.com's Political Points columnist. E-mail your questions and comments to Political Points.

---

Five years after 9/11, President Bush went on television to deliver a "non-political" speech on terrorism. As the memorial services and the heartbroken relatives of the victims filled the airwaves, it would have been a great accomplishment if the president could bring some unity to the nation.

But since the 2002 elections, Republicans have politicized the war on terrorism and made it their strong card in political campaigns. They were able to put the Democrats on the defensive on national security in 2002 and they trumpeted the terrorism issue early and often in 2004. Their convention in New York City began with a tribute to the victims of 9/11 and showcased President Bush as the "man in the arena" who led the country after the attacks. On Election Day, Bush clearly bested John Kerry with swing voters (remember those ever-popular "security moms"?) who believed in his ability to deal with international terrorism.

In the past few weeks, the president has been ratcheting up the terrorism rhetoric once again. His decision to reposition Iraq as a part of the war on terrorism has been an attempt to move public opinion on Iraq, as well as to try to change the subject from the worsening situation in Iraq to the scary world of terrorism.

These are serious issues and using tragedy to bolster your poll ratings is a tricky business, but it is something that has worked pretty well for the president over the past few elections.

On a somewhat lighter note, there is another scary image out there this year. The new scare tactic, meant mainly to frighten the Republican base, is the specter of Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi becoming Speaker of the House if the Democrats take over.

Republicans are running an ad in a very competitive district in Indiana asking if the Democratic candidate will vote for Nancy Pelosi for speaker if the Democrats take back the House.

Over visuals of Pelosi, soldiers, families and the Mexican border, the ad says:

Control of Congress is at stake in the coming election.

Will Brad Ellsworth vote for liberal Democrat Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House? Ellsworth has taken money from her PAC.

Pelosi and other Democrats want to raise your taxes, cut and run in Iraq and give amnesty to illegal immigrants.

On Saturday the White House sent out a column by the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot leading with the question:

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE – Speaker Nancy Pelosi?

"That's not going to happen," snaps the president of the United States, leaning across his desk in his airborne office. He had been saying that he hoped to revisit Social Security reform next year, when he "will be able to drain the politics out of the issue," and I rudely interrupted by noting the polls predicting Ms. Pelosi's ascension.

And on "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Vice President Cheney summed up his take on the midterm elections by commenting gratuitously, "I don't think Nancy Pelosi will be speaker."

Republican political strategists believe that a liberal Democratic woman from San Francisco will scare the pants off their base and coax them to forget their unhappiness with the Bush administration and the Republican Congress.

There is also a certain sarcasm to the Pelosi "threat." Democratic operatives (mostly male Democratic operatives in my experience) roll their eyes at the idea of "Speaker Pelosi." One such fellow told me last week, "If Pelosi is speaker, Hillary will never be president."

Take that! You'd think that the fact that she has cleared the field of any opposition says something about her leadership skills, but there is a sense that somehow this 66-year-old woman is not man enough for the job.

Once the sadness and muted partisanship of September 11 passes, the country is in for a nasty and aggressive political campaign for control of Congress. Right now Osama, Saddam and Pelosi seem to be in a tight race for the scariest face of the 2006 election.