The press team at the Republican National Committee -- the party’s national office -- must think it’s playing capture the flag.
At a Democratic press conference in Cleveland announcing the party’s debate schedule, staffers from the RNC press office distributed what appeared to be a report, titled “2014 DNC Autopsy.” But all the pages in the packet were blank.
Get it? Neither did anyone else.
Apparently, the stunt was intended to highlight the fact that the Democratic National Committee has yet to release its full report dissecting the party's losses in the 2014 election. The DNC released a preliminary autopsy earlier this year, but has yet to release the final version.
Naturally, the pranksters -- a cohort that included GOP deputy press secretaries Raffi Williams and James Hewitt as well as GOP spokespeople Fred Brown and Ali Pardo -- got kicked out, after which they took to Twitter:
DNC spokeswoman Christina Freundlich said that instead of focusing on Democrats’ losses in the last election, Republicans should learn from their own 2012 autopsy report. The RNC report, which received wide press coverage, attributed the party’s losses to alienating Latino and women voters as well as its hardline stance on gay marriage. “The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself,” the report read.
“Maybe Republicans should spend more time reading their own report,” Freundlich said. “Anyone who watched tonight’s debate probably felt like they were in a time warp from four years ago. Repealing the Affordable Care Act, calling our nation’s immigrants ‘illegals,’ defunding women’s health care -- you would think that Republicans would have learned from their own autopsy report, but instead are recycling their failed 2012 ideas.”
Very few people outside of Washington -- and only a select few in the capital -- care about the Democrats’ autopsy of the 2014 election. What’s most surprising about the childish stunt is that you’d think these PR professionals, who are used to dealing with blowback from others’ gaffes, would have thought twice before committing one of their own. Rather than notice that the DNC hasn’t released its final report, journalists mostly noticed that press officers from the Republican National Committee were acting like high school kids on senior cut day.
The RNC press office did not respond to a request for comment.
