BALTIMORE: Republicans in the US House of Representatives, having seen their 2010 election victory dissolve into a near-suicidal tax fight, are promoting a repackaged jobs message they hope carries them to victory in the 2012 elections.
At three-day retreat at a harbourfront hotel in Baltimore, an hour's drive from Washington, House Speaker John Boehner mobilized prayer sessions, motivational speakers, spin doctors and even colourful New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to cheer up his 242-member House Republican conference.
House Republicans were ebullient when they gathered last year for their annual retreat after wresting control of the House from Democrats in elections a few months earlier. Twelve months later, the party faces a tough fight to hold those gains.
Polls show that Americans blame Republicans more than Democrats for the gridlock in Congress that has paralyzed decision-making on some of the toughest problems facing the country - job creation and dangerously high deficits.
By the time the retreat wrapped up on Saturday after gripe sessions, policy discussions and lectures on tactics and messaging, House Republicans may not have figured out how they will handle those problems, but Boehner proclaimed to reporters that in 2012, "our focus will be on the economy and jobs."
With a national jobless rate of 8.5 percent and millions of long-term unemployed people losing hope, Republicans and Democrats will both try to convince voters in the November presidential and congressional elections that they hold the keys to an improving economy.
President Barack Obama and fellow Democrats want to position themselves as protectors of the poor and middle class and a bulwark against Republicans who want to enrich the already rich.
Republicans counter that a free-spending president who racked up about $5 trillion in government debt wants nothing more than to overregulated job-creating companies and drive the country into the same economic ditch into which Europe is peering.
Emerging from the retreat, House Republicans plan to tout the 30 pieces of legislation they passed last year aimed at spurring job growth. While it is unclear how many jobs those bills would have actually created, Republicans will complain the measures were killed by an uncooperative Democratic majority in the Senate.
The strategy is clear to rebut Obama's concerted efforts to paint Republicans as obstructionist for refusing to pass his own $447 billion jobs bill. The 30 jobs bills will become a staple of the Republican election rhetoric, but that could open the party to the same accusations they level against Obama that they are simply rehashing old ideas instead of proposing new ones.
"We must be the party of small business," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican, urged fellow lawmakers at the retreat, which was held behind closed doors.
"If you say it once an hour, it's not enough, if you say it every 15 minutes, it's still not enough," Cantor said. Both parties cast themselves as the champions of small businesses, which economists say are the engines of US economic growth and job creation.
Cantor, who has courted the often rebellious 85 first-term or "freshmen" congressmen, many of them small-government Tea Party activists, acknowledged their disappointment with the slow pace of change in Washington.
Reflecting on his party's year in control of the House which ended with the US budget being about the same size as when Republicans took power Cantor told the rank and file, "We learned this year that progress must be more incremental than some of us would have liked."
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