GOP Takes On AARP — Could This Be Their Waterloo?

Despite the GOP’s lack of numbers in the Democrat-controlled House and Senate, they have been remarkably successful at picking off enemies like Van Jones and ACORN with concerted attacks.

Now, they’re taking on a much bigger target: the AARP, which numbers more than 40 million members. Whereas their past targets have been on the fringes in one way or another, how is a campaign against a mainstream, powerful interest group going to play out?

According to CQPolitics, high-profile House Republicans including HRC chairman Mike Pence are accusing the AARP of working out “backroom deals” with the White House by supporting the Obama administration’s proposed health care plan in exchange for bigger membership and a special exemption from executive pay caps affecting most health insurers: “‘It’s a backroom deal where Washington Democrats are protecting executives at places like AARP,’ Pence charged.”

As Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey points out, the AARP is still, first and foremost, a business with a direct interest in insurance policy; it “was formed 50 years ago for the express purpose of providing insurance to retirees, in the days before Medicare.  Today, over half of its $1.14 billion annual revenue comes from insurance premiums, royalties on credit cards, and so on.”

But does an AARP backlash have legs? “Is AARP The New ACORN?” asked a TPMDC headline, and the (anonymous) AARP official contacted by the site largely said ‘yes.’ “‘Oh, absolutely,’ an AARP official told TPMDC. ‘They’re using their standard methods to target us.'”

The difference between the AARP and other GOP targets this year is that the AARP is big, mainstream, and well-funded. Before either of their respective scandals broke, Van Jones’ record of liberal activism made him an easy target, as did ACORN’s advocacy. Even in instances when conservative attacks haven’t produced noticeable results, like the onslaught against Kevin Jennings for his non-encouragement of statutory rape or the charge that the National Endowment of the Arts has been sucking up to Obama, there hasn’t been that much blowback. The targets — an openly gay activist, a harried federal agency — haven’t been big or popular enough to produce a broader outrage.

But the AARP is different: its power as a political organization comes from the fact that its membership is not all that politicized. The fact that 60,000 of its members left over its position on public health care has been a solace to right-wing blogs, but it’s largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things: recall that 60,000/40,000,000= 0.15%.

Unless the GOP turns up a smoking gun memo in which AARP officials boast about the coke and lap dances they got at an Obama-sponsored Hawaiian soirée, painting the organization as White House cronies just is not going to resonate with the vast swaths of its membership that don’t obsess over bloggy minutiae. And any serious attempt to do so will make the GOP, and not the AARP, look the more off-center of the two.

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