Republicans
are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war
chest over the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House
and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP
officials said.

The National Republican Congressional Committee,
which this year dispatched a half-dozen operatives to comb through tax,
court and other records looking for damaging information on Democratic
candidates, plans to spend more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus
advertising budget on what officials described as negative ads.

The
hope is that a vigorous effort to “define” opponents, in the parlance
of GOP operatives, can help Republicans shift the midterm debate away
from Iraq and limit losses this fall. The first round of attacks
includes an ad that labeled a Democratic candidate in Wisconsin “Dr.
Millionaire” and noted that he has sued 80 patients.

“Opposition
research is power,” said Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (N.Y.), the NRCC
chairman. “Opposition research is the key to defining untested
opponents.”

The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, has
enlisted veteran party strategist Terry Nelson to run a campaign that
will coordinate with Senate Republicans on ads that similarly will rely
on the best of the worst that researchers have dug up on Democrats. The
first ad run by the new RNC effort criticizes Ohio Rep. Sherrod Brown
(D) for voting against proposals designed to toughen border protection
and deport illegal immigrants.

Because challengers tend to be
little-known compared with incumbents, they are more vulnerable to
having their public image framed by the opposition through attacks and
unflattering personal revelations.

And with polls showing the
Republicans' House and Senate majorities in jeopardy, party strategists
said they have concluded that their best chance to prevent big
Democratic gains is a television and direct-mail blitz over the next
eight weeks aimed at raising enough questions about Democratic
candidates that voters decide they are unacceptable choices.

“When
you run in an adverse political environment, you try to localize and
personalize the race as much as you can,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said.

In
a memo released last week, Cole, who is running to succeed Reynolds at
the NRCC, expanded on that strategy. The memo recommended that
vulnerable incumbents spend $20,000 on a research “package” to find
damaging material about challengers and urged that they “define your
opponent immediately and unrelentingly.”

GOP officials said
internal polling shows Republicans could limit losses to six to 10
House seats and two or three Senate seats if the strategy — combined
with the party's significant financial advantage and battled-tested
turnout operation — proves successful. Democrats need to pick up 15
seats to win control of the House and six to regain power in the Senate.

Against
some less experienced and little-known opponents, said Matt Keelen, a
Republican lobbyist heavily involved in House campaigns, “It will take
one or two punches to fold them up like a cheap suit.”

Republicans
plan to attack Democratic candidates over their voting records,
business dealings, and legal tussles, the GOP officials said.

John
Geer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University and the author of
a book on negative advertising, said Republicans and Democrats alike
lack positive issues on which to run because of divisions over the war
and economic policy. This will be a “very negative campaign and
probably a more negative campaign than any in recent memory,” Geer said.

As
Republicans try to localize races, Democrats' hopes for the most part
hinge on being able to nationalize the election and turn it into a
referendum on the Iraq war, President Bush, and the performance of the
Republican Congress — all faring poorly in polls this year.

Bush
will try to make terrorism the issue nationally, casting the election
as a choice between two distinct approaches for protecting the nation
from attack. Beyond that, however, most Republicans want to distance
their elections from the national context.

That strategy is born
of necessity. Republicans are alarmed by the large number of House and
Senate incumbents who are trailing or tied in their internal polling.
Many are attracting the support of less than 45 percent of likely
voters — a danger zone for any incumbent 60 days before an election.
The political rule of thumb is that incumbents rarely draw a majority
of voters who make up their minds in the days shortly before Election
Day.

History shows how the combination of opposition research
and negative advertising can work. In 2000, Republicans unleashed a
furious attack on the spending practices of Democratic House candidate
Linda Chapin, including her purchase of an $18,500 bronze frog as a
legislator in Florida. Chapin, then the favorite to win an open Florida
House seat, lost to Republican Ric Keller. That same election cycle,
Republicans dug up a tape of state Rep. Eleanor Jordan (D-Ky.) asking
to speed up a vote so she could attend a fundraiser, an image that
destroyed her chances of knocking off Rep. Anne M. Northup (R).

This
year, the challenge is tougher, as national polling shows voters
dissatisfied with the party in power and ready for a change.

“When
all [Republicans] do is launch potshots, they look like they're trying
to cover up the fact that they have no solutions” said Phil Singer,
communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign
Committee.

As in past elections, the bulk of negative
advertising this year probably will be delivered by party committees —
a strategy that allows the candidates to distance themselves from the
trash-talking messages that turn off some voters.

Wisconsin's
8th District offers an example. Earlier this summer, the NRCC sent a
young staff member to the district for one week to look through court
records, government and medical documents, and local newspapers to find
embarrassing information about physician Steve Kagen, one of the
leading Democratic candidates in an important swing district, an NRCC
aide said. The researcher discovered that Kagen's allergy clinic has
sued more than 80 patients, mostly for failing to pay their bills.

A
new NRCC ad airing in the Green Bay area, the district's main media
market, warns: “What Dr. Millionaire doesn't want you to know is his
clinic left more than 80 patients behind — suing them. That's right,
suing more than 80 patients.”

In recent elections, Democratic
officials have complained that Republicans are much better at
opposition research. But Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) and Sen. Charles E.
Schumer (D-N.Y.), who chair the Democrats' House and Senate campaign
committees, have invested more heavily in research. Notably, the
researchers dig not only into Republicans, but also their own
candidates. This allows Democrats to anticipate what is coming and be
ready to respond quickly.

One Democratic research success this
year came when Emanuel's staff combed though the archives of several
universities to find a copy of an article Colorado Republican candidate
Rick O'Donnell wrote for an obscure publication in the mid-1990s. A
researcher eventually found the article at George Washington
University. In it, O'Donnell argued that Social Security should be
abolished — a revelation that was highlighted in three sharply worded
DSCC mailings in the district.

Direct-mail appeals often carry
the most negative and potentially damaging messages. Dan Hazelwood, a
leading GOP direct mail consultant, said that if a hypothetical
Democratic candidate favors the establishment of a garbage dump in a
section of the district, for instance, it makes more sense to
“narrow-cast” this message by mail to the people most affected rather
than buying an expensive, districtwide television ad.

The RNC's
expanded role in part reflects concerns that Senate Republicans may not
have enough money to take the fight to Democrats. The National
Republican Senatorial Committee, under Chair Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.),
had $15 million less to spend than the DSCC at the end of July. But,
the RNC is planning to make up the difference. The committee ended July
with nearly $44 million in the bank, four times what the Democratic
National Committee had on hand.

In setting up a separate arm to
spend money on Senate races, the RNC is altering its past practice. In
the past, the RNC simply transferred a large sum of money to the House
and Senate campaign committees and let the chairmen decide how to spend
it. This year, Nelson — a former top official in the Bush reelection
effort and political strategist for House Republicans — will work with
consultants Tony Feather and Curt Anderson to oversee the TV and
direct-mail campaign, which by law must remain independent of
coordination directly with candidates.

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