GOP Sabotage? Yes.

CORE MESSAGE

Republicans in Congress want Obama to fail more than they want to help Americans succeed. That's no way to lead.

Connect: Our leaders need to set aside politics and put Americans first.

Define: Republican leaders admit their top political priority is defeating the President. So it's no surprise they won't help America win -- they'd rather Obama lose.

Expose: Since the President does better when America does better, they're doing everything they can to sabotage our economic recovery.

Illustrate: They're threatening to take our economy to the brink of default and economic disaster again just to get more spending cuts, which will mean more layoffs. Either way is lose-lose for America.

Values: Politicians who want their political opponents to fail more than they want Americans to succeed have no business leading our nation.

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STRATEGY BEHIND THIS MESSAGE

• Right now, ordinary Americans are frustrated with the economy and politicians in general -- we have to direct that frustration to where it belongs.
• Unless we are clear about what Washington Republicans are doing and why, it's too easy to just blame all of government and all politicians -- including those who are fighting to help America succeed.

ATTACKS AND RESPONSES

ATTACK: "It's absurd to accuse Republicans of trying to sabotage the economy."
RESPONSE:

• Republican politicians admit their top priority is defeating Obama. Since the President does better when America does better, they're doing everything they can to sabotage our economic recovery.
• So it's no wonder they fought so hard to cut millions of American jobs, lay off our firefighters, teachers, and nurses, and force through the Ryan-Romney budget to kill 4 million more jobs.
• Now Republicans in Congress are again trying to take our country to the brink of default and economic disaster by threatening not to pay America's bills.

ATTACK: "The deficit and debt are creating a cloud of uncertainty that's harming economic growth."
RESPONSE:

• What's creating uncertainty is Republicans promising a repeat of the default crisis that rattled our markets and brought the Tea Party Downgrade, which did more damage to America's credit worthiness than our debt ever has.
• Cutting spending means cutting American jobs, and we can't cut our way back to prosperity. In tough economic times we should be hiring Americans, not firing them. Cutting jobs also takes away customers from our stores -- and that means less hiring everywhere.
• Washington Republicans aren't serious about deficits. They're the ones who fought tooth and nail for the tax giveaways and two unfunded wars that exploded the deficit. Now they're pushing a budget to actually increase the debt even more.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

• Half of Americans believe that Republicans are intentionally stalling efforts to jumpstart the economy to ensure President Obama isn't re-elected.
• GOP Speaker John Boehner recently vowed to hold the federal debt limit hostage again, in order to extract more cuts on the top of the $2.1 trillion in spending cuts they forced into last summer's debt deal -- even though taking more money out of the economy and cutting more jobs will harm the recovery.
• Last summer, the Republicans' reckless political brinkmanship and threats to make America a deadbeat nation led to the first-ever downgrade of the country's credit worthiness and a sharp stock market drop.
• Last year alone, Washington Republicans tried to kill over 7 million jobs.
• If Republican politicians hadn't pushed so hard to lay off our teachers, cops, and firefighters and block efforts to put Americans back to work fixing our roads and bridges, the unemployment rate would be even lower.
• In fact, if public sector employment had grown since the official start of the recovery by the average amount it grew in the three previous recoveries, we'd have nearly 2 more million jobs today.

We develop messaging by aggregating, analyzing and distilling polling, tested messaging, and expert recommendations, and monitoring the media to identify what is and isn't working. See here for some of the experts and organizations we draw on.