What else can they do?

This is an admission by the Republicans that they are bankrupt.
In a Pivotal Year, GOP Plans to Get Personal

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.

Of course this is no surprise, the Republicans have nothing but six years of failure to run on so the only weapon left is the slime machine.

Will it work? While it has in the past things are different this time. The major impact of negative ads is that people get disgusted and just don't vote. Historically the fewer people who voted the better the chances of the Republicans winning. This is not the past and things are different this time. The anti-Bush - anti-Republican faction is fired up like never before. They won't buy the slime and they will vote. Second, the Republicans have been able to count on the fanatical Religious Right to show up at the polls. There are indications that they are not nearly as fanatical or as nearly likely to vote this time.

This is a sign of desperation. The Republicans know they have nothing to run on. Their one potential "hot button" issue was all but eliminated by infighting in the Republican Party itself - immigration.

Now the Democrats do have a "Hot Button" issue and I'm not talking about Iraq.
Social Security to be Phased out in 2007

In an interview published today in The Wall Street Journal (sub.req.), President Bush told editorial page editor Paul Gigot that next year he plans on partially phasing out Social Security and replacing it with private accounts, and that he thinks he can do it as long as the Republicans retain control of Congress, which he thinks they will.

This is what the Democrats need to be bringing to the voters attention. This is dirt that will stick. Each Republican candidate should be forced to answer the question "where do you stand on SS privatization?"

Update
Republican John Cole

I guess the GOP has decided their performance over the last few years has been so abyssmal that the only way to win is to disgust people so much no one goes to the polls. Remember this the next time one of the online Bush dead-enders claims the Republicans are the party of ideas.