I saw this over at Taegan’s place:
First Read points out that President Obama “isn’t necessarily running against Mitt Romney; he’s running against the Republican Party brand — and making sure that Romney owns that brand. In fact, Romney’s
biggest challenge over the next two or three months will be for him to differentiate himself from the brand.”“There’s been a lot of focus of late on how damaged Romney has become in this process (his high negatives with indies, etc). But we’ve noticed a larger trend: The brand of the GOP is what’s been damaged; Romney may simply be collateral damage. And this is why he has to figure out a way to either improve the GOP’s brand or differentiate himself. Which can he achieve?”
I suppose this is correct. Romney either has to go running away from the modern GOP with his perfect hair on fire or he has to sell the modern GOP as the answer to all our problems. But before we even get started on this analysis, can we stipulate that Romney is a gigantic flip-flopper? Just this morning we learn that Romney was a strong supporter of Cap and Trade as recently as 2003. We have advisers saying he can reinvent himself as soon as he wraps up the nomination just like an Etch a Sketch. We have his wife saying that they will soon unzip the real Romney, and a Republican pro-choice former governor saying that Romney will close the gender gap once he exposes his “real views” on women’s issues.
I know the American people are bored to death by the nominating process but in a digital age you simply can’t get away with saying one thing today and another thing tomorrow. Even if people didn’t see it when you said you were going to destroy Planned Parenthood, they’ll hear about it later, especially if you turn around and say you’re going to fund it to the gills. So, yes, we can agree that the modern GOP has a spoiled brand, but Romney has branded himself as wishy-washy and unprincipled and soulless. He can perhaps overcome that first impression, but not by more flip-flopping. In fact, I’d say that Mitt Romney has less room to move to the center than any candidate I’ve ever seen.
And that may explain why he basically gave up on that idea by embracing Paul Ryan’s radical budget plan and traveling around Wisconsin with Ryan attached to his hip. The president ably demonstrated yesterday how vulnerable the Republicans have made themselves by voting for the Ryan Plan. In response, the right is flailing in agonized pain. Their only response is sustained, systemic lying of the kind that makes all statisticians and logicians die a little bit every single day.
And it’s really hard to maintain a program of sustained and systemic lying. Bush and Cheney were successful for several post-9/11 years in leading this country into war under the threat of a mushroom cloud, but even they eventually became the boys who cried wolf. And they had a critical advantage. They had the power of incumbency.
Ask yourself, who is more credible, Mitt Romney or President Obama? It would take unimaginable amounts of money and the ability to create free media for himself at any time for Romney to have any chance of convincing a majority of the people that Paul Ryan’s budget plan is good for them. In a Citizens United world with a mighty right-wing media wurlitzer, this isn’t totally out of the question, but it seems unlikely to work.
The truth, though, is that Romney will try to move to the center at the same time that he tries to sell Ryan’s radical plan. And here’s what I think will happen.
The most damaging thing about Sarah Palin wasn’t who she was or what she said. The most damaging thing was that she forced ordinary Republicans to pretend she was qualified and prepared to be president. She destroyed people’s integrity. She convinced millions to abandon any standards of logic or reason. And the result was a massive outbreak of really hateful stupidity: “I want Medicare, not socialized medicine.” Mitt Romney, in defending the math in Ryan’s plan while denying its impact on social programs, is going to force the Republicans to engage in a sixth-month tour-de-force of dishonesty where no scientific or logical standard is honored and in which scientists are disregarded and disparaged.
It’s a Culture War on math. A Culture War on going to college. A Culture War on credentialed experts. An air war of saturation talking points, all of which do violence to the truth.
It will be depressing. But it will also be dangerous because, as we saw with Palin, the fallout has a long half-life even if the Democrats ultimately prevail.
I think he has a third choice: stay on the right and persuade hacks like Chuck Todd to cover him as if he’s moved to the center, even though he hasn’t.
Which is probably exactly what will happen, given that Todd and others like him are in utter denial about the GOP’s descent into madness. It’s only a question of whether honest journalism and blogging will trump hackery.
And that is also how damage is done.
If you’re a journalist who wants to preserve a reputation for objectivity, it’s really hard to go out each day and say that one side is telling unbelievable lies. It’s also hard to do your job if the GOP becomes convinced that talking to you results in nothing but bad press.
This campaign of lies does damage to the integrity of the press corp. I mean, I know they are short on integrity to begin with, but I don’t Chuck Todd is a bad guy. Trying to treat Romney as if he’s anything but a pathological liar will eat away at his soul.
I mean, I know they are short on integrity to begin with, but I don’t Chuck Todd is a bad guy. Trying to treat Romney as if he’s anything but a pathological liar will eat away at his soul.
How many millions is Chuck Todd getting paid to sooth his soul?
more than I’m making, that’s for sure.
I have no idea what Chuck Todd gets paid. My point is that it’s very difficult to arbitrate a political disagreement when one side has completely left reality behind. It’s one thing to say that tax cuts will grow the economy. It’s another to say that cut the budget by many trillions of dollars and no one will get hurt and no programs will be impacted.
My point is that it’s very difficult to arbitrate a political disagreement when one side has completely left reality behind.
No, it’s not. Just look at the past 15 years, or 20 for that matter.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” — Philip K. Dick
BooMan,
It’s time to BRING IT!!
And, I think that’s what the President’s speech yesterday was all about.
I’m not worried about the President. It’s the rest of those mofo Democrats, whose asses better fall in line and begin parroting the President.
PERIOD.
We already have the Pew study where they proved that the President received 90% NEGATIVE COVERAGE.
That he has any approval ratings at all is a miracle.
So, yeah, we gotta push back.
Lying is all they have.
Because, lying is all they do.
That is because there are only 168 hours in a week, people who watch TV want some programming to justify it, and there is a saturation limit on bullshit.
Still, I wonder when we’ll see the first billion-dollar Koch-funded 30-second attack spot saturating the audience.
Media companies are going to be in high cotton this year.
if I was the Dems I would quietly have blockbooked all the advertising on the last week of the campaign, as the last 2 weeks will be a nationwide shitstorm of Romney ads the like of which the world has never seen. That was his pattern in the primaries and they had better get ready for it now.
I really do wonder how long it will or take, or if it is even possible to come back into the world of reality, for that significant minority of people in this country who have swallowed the imaginary world put forth by the GOP and their wurlitzer.
They actually have no need to ever leave the biosphere of their own imaginations and paranoia, do they? Even after President Obama leaves office, their fervent grip on unreality will likely not be loosened. It will just wait for the next Democrat to come along and it will morph to fit the requisite environment.
It is just difficult to imagine one of our two major political parties continuing to exist under these circumstances, without the GOP either splitting into two parties or having a political armageddon take place which will settle the issue within the GOP. I just have a hard time visualizing any other options, though I’m sure there are a few.
What happened to the folks taken in by Father Coughlin and Joe McCarthy?
Did they ever get disenthralled? Or did they have kids like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter?
We have no excuse for not making perfectly clear what the agenda of the republican party is: a constant enlargement of corporate control over every aspect of our lives, and a constant reduction of government investment in the 99%. The rapid free-marketeers who are not immediate beneficiaries of skyrocketing inequality are simply useful idiots providing cover for an ideology that seeks not the vain fantasy of free markets but an ever greater concentration of private wealth and influence.
We have no excuse for not making perfectly clear what the agenda of the republican party is: a constant enlargement of corporate control over every aspect of our lives, and a constant reduction of government investment in the 99%.
Problem is, the Democratic Party establishment wants the same thing. Only 66% corporate control, not 100%
Great Speech (start at 5:45):
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/PressAnn
Like others here I have wondered why the GOP candidates, a particularly weak field, held so many debates. On and on and on.
Last night the penny finally dropped. I think I understand. Most of the candidates, maybe not Romney, but the others, wanted as much exposure as possible, and Citizens United made that possible, even inevitable. And they wanted to push the envelope to give maximum exposure to their ideas.
Well, they pushed the envelope all right. They pushed the GOP just that little way it needed to go into la la land. They exposed their ideas all right, and I doubt they convinced anyone who wasn’t already on their side, but they sure turned off a lot of independents and even some Republicans and generally said to the rest of America, “we are a bunch of clowns, you’ve got to be insane to vote for us.”
If you don’t believe it, look at the polls. The president’s job approval has been on a steady rise since last September.
Romney’s best strategy from now on would be to say nothing about anything. If he tries to move into “normal” he’ll lose the base, who can’t stand him anyway. But Romney will not be able to clam up, he can’t run the kind of contentless campaign they used to run in the 1970s. So I say, “Let Romney be Romney” and continue his gaff-a-minute.
Meanwhile the GOP will ramp up the insanity to 11. It ain’t gonna help, most Americans already know they’re insane, and you’re right, Romney cannot get away from that whether he wants to or not. He’s their candidate. Obama made a death threat to Chelsea to get himself on the ballot, right. I can see the next step, Bill Clinton says they’re full of shit and they come back — “You see, that just PROVES Obama’s got him by the balls. The power of this Kenyan communist Muslim knows no bounds.
“Mitt Romney, in defending the math in Ryan’s plan while denying its impact on social programs, is going to force the Republicans to engage in a sixth-month tour-de-force of dishonesty where no scientific or logical standard is honored and in which scientists are disregarded and disparaged. “
Yes this is what will happen, except that he’s not going to force the Republicans to do it. They will do it gladly and of their own free will. In fact they have been doing it for quite some time. I don’t see where it’s got them except to make themselves even crazier than they were, and for evryone else that’s not them to see that happening before their eyes.
I don’t know if you ever read Jacques Ellul. He wrote on propaganda and I find his stuff deterministic and depressing. But one basic point I remember. he said people believe propaganda basically because it tells them things they WANT to believe. I think the number of people in this country who want to believe Republican propaganda is about 27%. It doesn’t seem to be getting any bogger. I think the rest will get more turned off, especially with the countervailign message which couldn’t be more different. Most people want hope, not fear, and that is the key. the Republicans have been trying to make people afraid — in a big way — since 9/11. I’m not saying that wasn’t a scary event, I’m saying htat even at the time they did NOETHING to try to reassure people, only to scare them, and that stuck out for me like a sore thumb. FDR told America, under even scarier circumstances, there is nothing ot fear but fear itself. The GOP told America, there is everything to fear, and the only thing they fear is lack of fear itself. They are beneath contempt.
Seems to me this election will be the first truly internet-age campaign. It’s unlikely that the old strategies will apply the way they used to. Fact checking is too easy, and too easy to propagate. Saturation lie-bombing has its own law of diminishing returns as all the crap begins to irritate and turn off the voters it’s trying to energize.
The contrast between Obama, yeah, with all his flaws, and Romney is stark. Any decent Dem campaign can almost not help but make that obvious even to the uninformed. The upside of the constant propaganda assaults is that they can’t work without getting voters involved. And, except for the usual lovers of ignorance, that’s one point for us.
Just from the title you lost me. What has been going on since 9/11/01? Sanity? Civil discourse? Rational discussion? All you have to look at is the Ryan budget and you know reason has long since left the building.
Good analysis, Boo.
The Republican brand is more strongly hung around Romney’s neck than it even was on McCain — at least until it became McCain-Palin.
The (in)actions of the GOP for the last three years galvanized the brand, and Romney’s refusal to offer much of any specifics of his own has given him zero space between his own brand and the party.
And he’s only made it worse as he’s fought off one contender after another.
The Ryan thing caps it. The fact that he couldn’t get Ryan to hold off putting his budget out until after he nailed the nomination is also telling. In fact as the presumptive nominee I should have told Ryan to put out a different budget that might actually fly. Now he owns it.
At minimum it shows him to just be brain dead as a politician.
At the national level: GOP = Whigs. Don’t know how they will dig out of this.
But you are right the half life of dumbfuck thinking this crap creates is very long.
And, in the end, forty-some percent of voters will go for Romney. Why?? What do they get out of it? Is there still that much greed plus bigotry plus religious extremism in the US in 2012?? FORTY-SOME PERCENT?!? (please excuse the all-caps incredulity)