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O'Donnell thinks strategy against Perlmutter working

New poll appears to show Republican gaining on Dem

Chris Barge, Rocky Mountain News

Published October 11, 2006 at midnight

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Rick O'Donnell drove by the darkened campaign headquarters of opponent Ed Perlmutter on Monday night then pulled up to his own headquarters about a mile down the road.

The lights were on. His volunteers were working.

And a new Denver Post poll showed he was gaining on Perlmutter.

Things might just be going as planned after all, the Republican said he thought to himself.

The new poll puts O'Donnell only 6 percentage points behind Democrat Perlmutter in the race to replace Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez in suburban Denver's 7th Congressional District.

That's a marked improvement over the 17-point Perlmutter lead shown three weeks ago by a Survey USA poll.

Now, O'Donnell says he thinks he is on track to be within 3 points by Election Day. At that point, he said he's convinced that his well-oiled Republican get-out-the-vote machine will put him over the top.

"Today is the first day people get to vote. I feel great about that," O'Donnell said Tuesday after a debate in front of a Perlmutter-friendly crowd at Denver's Brown Palace Hotel.

Perlmutter's campaign thinks O'Donnell is overly optimistic.

Perlmutter's lead is actually bigger than the latest poll shows and his popularity with independent voters will carry him to victory on Nov. 7, spokesman Scott Chase said.

O'Donnell is out of touch with voters on the issues of Social Security, pushing for more troops in Iraq and on wanting to take boys out of the second semester of their senior year to enlist in mandatory national service, including helping secure the Mexican border, Chase said.

"We're now four weeks out," Chase said. "Every day and every week, whether it's scandals in Washington, the war in Iraq or President Bush himself, the issues continue to scream that there's a need for a change in Washington. Rick knows his party and his ideas are not being accepted by voters."

But O'Donnell's aides pointed Tuesday to a sentence in a memo their candidate wrote to them Aug. 29:

"We need to stay focused on three crucial issues," O'Donnell wrote then. "Clear contrast on taxes, clear contrast on immigration, and the issues of conflicts of interest."

As strategies go, O'Donnell has basically stayed on-message.

He took a risky detour three weeks ago that he now thinks is paying off. That's when he paid $100,000 for an ad apologizing for writing when he was a 24-year-old "know-it- all kid" that it was time to "slay" Social Security.

The ad also said Perlmutter wants to raise taxes and cut benefits to fix Social Security - a position Perlmutter rebuts.

Since then, O'Donnell has taken to the airwaves with an ad saying Perlmutter supports amnesty for illegal immigrants - something Perl-mutter also says is not true.

And in a debate Monday, O'Donnell hammered on the idea that Perlmutter is a walking conflict of interest because his wife is a Washington lobbyist.

Perlmutter rebutted the claim and accused O'Donnell of attacking his wife out of desperation from being behind in the polls.

"Quite frankly I'm not going to be lectured by a Republican on ethics, given what's been done by Mark Foley, Tom DeLay" and other Republicans in Washington, Perlmutter said at the debate hosted by the Aurora Chamber of Commerce.

But O'Donnell said voters are starting to see past Perlmutter's -anti-Republican rhetoric.

"At the end of the day voters see they're voting for me; they're not voting for Bush," he said.

He held up a copy of the 38-page book he's been distributing to voters, outlining his positions on the issues. "This is penetrating," he said.

"We did what we needed to do over the past six weeks to get where we are today," he added.

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