Things That Make My Head Explode
Commenting on the new McCain campaign ad which again claims--falsely--that Sarah Palin "stopped the Bridge to Nowhere," Marc Ambinder writes:
Second, and much more importantly, the reason the "electorate doesn't seem to penalize campaigns for deliberately distorting the record" is because the electorate doesn't know that campaigns are deliberately distorting the record. The press corps seems to think that if a claim has been debunked in graf 15 of a story in the Washington Post or New York Times, then everyone knows it's false. The reality, though, is that if you were to poll the electorate right now, I'm virtually certain that a large majority would have no idea that Palin and McCain are brazenly lying about the Bridge to Nowhere. That's why they keep repeating it. If voters knew that it was a lie, then the ad wouldn't be very effective. In fact, it would hurt the campaign.
What Ambinder and others need to realize is that politicians engage in these sorts of brazen lies precisely because they know the media will not call them liars, at least not loudly and repeatedly enough to make the lie counterproductive.
In the last week, the McCain campaign has done a truly masterful job of working the refs. In the kind of collective hissy fit that only Republicans can throw, they accused the press corps--which was only doing its job--of being sexist and biased. The press then internalized this critique and over the last few days, coverage of Palin as been about as softball as one can imagine. As Ambinder himself admits in another post, press coverage of Palin "was tough early last week [but] it seems to be admiring and even fawning today, with the Anchorage Daily News waging a one-paper crusade to set the record straight about her mythology."
The fact that the Sarah Palin being portrayed by the media and the McCain campaign bears very little resemblance to the person her home town paper knows her to be is a testament to how effective the Republicans are at working the refs (as Glenn Greenwald lays out in detail here).
This is why the Obama campaign has to be more proactive. While they won't have as much success at it as the McCain campaign does, they need to aggressively work the refs themselves. They also need to stop relying on the media to point out the McCain campaign's most blatant lies. There's obviously some triage that has to be done here. There are just too many lies being made to effectively combat them all. But instead of playing Whack-a-Lie, which is what the Obama campaign has mostly done so far, they should focus heavy resources on rebutting two or three of the most egregious ones. I would start with the Bridge to Nowhere lie (which is now central to the McCain/Palin myth-making effort) and the claim that Obama plans to raise people's taxes. Those two lies are so egregious and so often repeated by the McCain campaign, that if the Obama campaign can successfully convince voters that they are in fact lies, it will be a big blow to the McCain/Palin brand.
McCain has decided that the conditions this year are analogous to 1992 and the way to win the election is to co-opt the Ross Perot vote. That's why he and Palin are positioning themselves so aggressively as straight-talking reformers. They know they've got the Republican vote locked down and they want to win over the independent and swing voters who vote less on pocket-book issues and more on reform/good-government issues (i.e., the 19% of the electorate who went for Perot in 1992).
The most effective way to undermine the straight-talking reformer image that McCain and Palin are trying to cultivate is to show them to be cynical liars. If you can convince voters that your opponents have lied to them about a few very important things, you've gone a long way toward winning.
UPDATE: I somehow didn't see that Matt Yglesias had already written essentially the same post.
UPDATE II: No one does press criticism better that Bob Somerby. This post is a must-read.
BTW: the ad claims that Palin "stopped the Bridge to Nowhere," which is technically true but functionally false. No blowback, though: the electorate doesn't seem to penalize campaigns for deliberately distorting the record of their candidate and their opponent. It's probably an artifact of twenty years' worth of campaign advertisements and has something to do with the way consumers process news.First, it's not even technically true in any meaningful sense that Palin "stopped the Bridge to Nowhere." Yes, she decided not to continue construction of the bridge on the state's own dime, but she had absolutely nothing to do with killing the federal earmark or saving the U.S. taxpayers any money (she actually kept all of the money and spent it on other things).
Second, and much more importantly, the reason the "electorate doesn't seem to penalize campaigns for deliberately distorting the record" is because the electorate doesn't know that campaigns are deliberately distorting the record. The press corps seems to think that if a claim has been debunked in graf 15 of a story in the Washington Post or New York Times, then everyone knows it's false. The reality, though, is that if you were to poll the electorate right now, I'm virtually certain that a large majority would have no idea that Palin and McCain are brazenly lying about the Bridge to Nowhere. That's why they keep repeating it. If voters knew that it was a lie, then the ad wouldn't be very effective. In fact, it would hurt the campaign.
What Ambinder and others need to realize is that politicians engage in these sorts of brazen lies precisely because they know the media will not call them liars, at least not loudly and repeatedly enough to make the lie counterproductive.
In the last week, the McCain campaign has done a truly masterful job of working the refs. In the kind of collective hissy fit that only Republicans can throw, they accused the press corps--which was only doing its job--of being sexist and biased. The press then internalized this critique and over the last few days, coverage of Palin as been about as softball as one can imagine. As Ambinder himself admits in another post, press coverage of Palin "was tough early last week [but] it seems to be admiring and even fawning today, with the Anchorage Daily News waging a one-paper crusade to set the record straight about her mythology."
The fact that the Sarah Palin being portrayed by the media and the McCain campaign bears very little resemblance to the person her home town paper knows her to be is a testament to how effective the Republicans are at working the refs (as Glenn Greenwald lays out in detail here).
This is why the Obama campaign has to be more proactive. While they won't have as much success at it as the McCain campaign does, they need to aggressively work the refs themselves. They also need to stop relying on the media to point out the McCain campaign's most blatant lies. There's obviously some triage that has to be done here. There are just too many lies being made to effectively combat them all. But instead of playing Whack-a-Lie, which is what the Obama campaign has mostly done so far, they should focus heavy resources on rebutting two or three of the most egregious ones. I would start with the Bridge to Nowhere lie (which is now central to the McCain/Palin myth-making effort) and the claim that Obama plans to raise people's taxes. Those two lies are so egregious and so often repeated by the McCain campaign, that if the Obama campaign can successfully convince voters that they are in fact lies, it will be a big blow to the McCain/Palin brand.
McCain has decided that the conditions this year are analogous to 1992 and the way to win the election is to co-opt the Ross Perot vote. That's why he and Palin are positioning themselves so aggressively as straight-talking reformers. They know they've got the Republican vote locked down and they want to win over the independent and swing voters who vote less on pocket-book issues and more on reform/good-government issues (i.e., the 19% of the electorate who went for Perot in 1992).
The most effective way to undermine the straight-talking reformer image that McCain and Palin are trying to cultivate is to show them to be cynical liars. If you can convince voters that your opponents have lied to them about a few very important things, you've gone a long way toward winning.
UPDATE: I somehow didn't see that Matt Yglesias had already written essentially the same post.
UPDATE II: No one does press criticism better that Bob Somerby. This post is a must-read.
posted by A.L. at 11:16 AM
8 Comments:
What Ambinder and others need to realize is that politicians engage in these sorts of brazen lies precisely because they know the media will not call them liars, at least not loudly and repeatedly enough to make the lie counterproductive.
I suspect that you and the unwashed masses of the electorate have different definitions of the term "brazen lies." The reason that nobody cares if Palin stopped the BtoN or whether she has national security experience because her state is close to Russia is because ordinary everyday people expect politicians to be shameless about resume-padding and politically expedient about virtually everything else. Indeed, this trotting about in high dudgeon over stuff like this is exactly how you wind up trivializing the race.
Obama would do better going back and forcing McCain to respond to the issues. All this hysteria and outrage plays into the GOP's hands perfectly. It reinforces the public's stereotyped perception of the Left as whiny and self-righteous and does nothing to reinforce their perception of the Right and intolerant and uncaring.
Interesting point but maybe you ought to go back and check as to how well your suggested approach worked for Kerry.
RM,
Do you remember election 2000? In that race, the Republicans made a very big deal about Al Gore's supposed problem with telling the truth. They turned very minor exaggerations (and often quotes he didn't actually say) into a narrative about him. It was very effective. And Al Gore never said anything in that race remotely as brazen as some of the whoppers coming from the McCain/Palin campaign. Not only that, but Gore wasn't running as some sort of straight-talking maverick.
If the situation were reversed and the Democratic VP candidate was some unknown figure whose very first claims about him/herself were quickly debunked as lies, you better believe the Republicans would brand that person as a liar and fraud, and they would do so with ruthless efficiency. No one would call them whiners.
I'm not saying that Obama and Biden should stop talking about substantive issues. I'm saying they need to fight back against McCain/Palin's attempts to brand themselves. If they don't, they'll lose.
According to theradicalmoderate, it seems that we should accept the fact that the first thing out of Palin's mouth is a lie and that lie in no way should impugn her credibility on other issues. If this particular lie were just "resume-padding", why is it being repeated regularly by the McCain campaign instead of being abandoned or casually walked back before anyone notices? Because they desperately need the public to see these lies as the truth. Republicans love to lie and then cry victim when people call them out on it, but supposedly, Democrats are the "whiny", "self-righteous" ones.
Here's the deal: If you want to be seen as a self-righteously down-home government-loathing "maverick" who is way to cool for namby-pamby things like community service, that's fine. But don't expect to not be challenged on that image when the facts fail to conform to it. Otherwise, this election becomes all about "feeling", and after the last eight years, some of us have had enough of those kinds of elections.
There's a difference between fighting back when your opponent tries to characterize you negatively (which is what both Gore and Kerry failed to do effectively) and making an issue out of trivial stuff in the VP candidate's record. Yes, you could successfully tar Palin if the litany of stuff were endless (so far it's not) and if she were inherently unlikable (so far she's not). The current set of lies isn't enough to mount a campaign to characterize her negatively, and even if you could, she's just the VP candidate. The GOP is streaming her out behind McCain as a decoy and Obama's surrogates are just blazing away. Not only do their attacks do no real damage to the campaign but they're giving away their position. McCain was a competent naval officer, from a family of more-than-competent naval officers. He's got an SOP for what Obama et el. are doing.
I'm having a middle-aged moment; otherwise I could remember the buzzword for the poli-sci theory about voters making up their minds mostly on intangible information about candidates. Both Gore and Kerry came off as pompous, self-righteous stiffs, which allowed their statements to be easily warped into a negative characterization that reinforced that impression. Palin comes off as genuine and down-to-earth. Minor untruths that neither reinforce nor weaken that impression aren't going to do a thing.
Observe what the GOP is doing to Obama. He comes across as very genuine and he's neither pompous nor self-righteous. But he is a bit of a snob. That's why the "rock star" and "community organizer" jabs struck home.
The Dems haven't been nearly as successful reinforcing McCain's personality weaknesses, which I'd sum up as "hothead" and "clueless old man." They tried to go after the "hothead" meme with Palin but they attacked her rather than him. It backfired, making a potential hothead decision look like a good gut decision. They're going at the "clueless" meme with the "Bush III" narrative, which works at a policy level much better than it does at the personal level. They should hit the "clueless" thing harder--going after Palin does nothing.
RM,
I'd agree with you if Palin's lies were in fact trivial. But they're not. Given how little the public knows about Palin, it's a big deal that her signature "accomplishment" is a massive lie. And that McCain's chief stated reason for liking her is a massive lie. The bridge to nowhere lie is central to Palin's public persona. In a real sense it defines her. It's one of the few things anyone has heard about her. That's why the Dems can get mileage out of pointing out what a big lie it is.
Everyone becomes less likable the more you get to know them. The Obama campaign needs us to get to know Palin's flaws. Otherwise, in the public's mind, she actually becomes the icon that McCain has set her up as. She may be a "hockey mom", but she's also a governor who's managed to get embroiled in an abuse of power scandal within her scant 18 months of holding office. And she lied about that too--with tapes to prove it. So, I don't think it's a stretch to start calling her out on it now. Doing so will probably pay dividends for the campaign in the very near future.
And I don't see any factual evidence indicating that Obama is any more of a snob than any other politician, including McCain. Maybe, after the last eight years, competence looks like snobbery.
slag--
Everyone becomes less likable the more you get to know them.
OK, so you manage to make her less likable. In the end, she's still just the VP candidate and nobody cares that much--except the GOP base, who will cry--possibly with some justification--"politics of personal destruction" and proceed to work really hard on their ground game. What have you accomplished that couldn't have been done better and at less cost by ignoring her?
And I don't see any factual evidence indicating that Obama is any more of a snob than any other politician...
What does "factual" have to do with it? This part of the election is 100% perception and Obama's losing it. It's a good thing he's more cogent on the issues than McCain is or he'd be getting his head handed to him.
A.L.--
...it's a big deal that her signature "accomplishment" is a massive lie...
Frankly I think her signature accomplishment is that she tagged the Murkowskis and she and her family aren't living huddled in the lee of a weather station on Sitka, trying to stay warm. She must be doing something right. Or maybe all that "God's plan" stuff isn't as much nonsense as it seems...
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