Mediaboss Marketing

With Fox News and radio talk-show hosts urging Republicans to make Benghazi a central issue in Washington, U.S. House Speaker John Boehner cautioned his colleagues to take a different approach.

After agreeing to create a select committee to investigate the 2012 attacks in Libya, Boehner warned Republican lawmakers that grandstanding on the issue risked provoking a voter backlash, according to two people at a private meeting yesterday attended by the speaker. They described the discussion on condition of anonymity.

Its a very two-edged sword, said Representative Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican who also was at the meeting and worked for the partys House campaign committee before winning his congressional seat in 2002.

Boehners advice reflects concern among Republicans that in probing Benghazi, the peril at the polls is at least as strong as the chance for political gain. That could prove especially so if it appears the party is talking about the deaths of four Americans in the attacks mainly as a way to win votes.

One measure of the uncertainty in Republican ranks: Benghazi-related advertisements have been run on behalf of just three candidates since the beginning of last year, all of them in Republican primaries, according to New York-based Kantar Medias CMAG, which tracks advertising.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican up for re-election this year, aired an ad last month that included footage of him saying President Barack Obama misled the nation on Benghazi. Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, mentioned Benghazi in two spots en route to a March primary win.

Benghazi ads accounted for 0.5 percent of the 227,119 overall campaign spots tracked by CMAG.

Democrats are pushing back. They say the select committee is a political exercise aimed in part at weakening Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state at the time of the attacks and a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2016.

Democratic leaders are weighing boycotting the panel. Some, including the head of the House Democratic campaign arm, Representative Steve Israel of New York, deride the committee as a stunt and say they want no part of it. Others, including Representative Henry Waxman of California, say Democrats need to be part of the proceedings to effectively fight back.

Congress started investigating the Benghazi attacks less than a month after they occurred on Sept. 11, 2012, spotlighting the Obama administrations erroneous initial claim that the violence stemmed from spontaneously inspired demonstrations over an anti-Islamic video.

See the article here:
Benghazi Committee Possible Risk for Republicans, Clinton