All we have to fear is their fear itself
- From: trudogg <trudogg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2007 10:08:39 -0400
[...I think a major question the GOP should be asking themselves is
why are we still supporting George Bush when he is leading this party,
and the country, into failure? His continued support by conservatives
is also a mystery...he is not a conservative, neither fiscally or
socially. But if the bugaboo of "party loyalty" is all encompassing,
then maybe it's time the Republicans did fail and disappear. Hopefully
whatever takes their place will have more sense...]
The all-consuming, addictive question in every political junkie's mind
is how Republicans will fare in 2008. An Intro to Govt text would
profess the two majors parties are squaring off with roughly equal
power today, but since the White House wields the veto pen, and since
Democrats have thin Congressional majorities, and since senate
Republicans can block at will any Democratic legislation from floor
consideration, the GOP retains a kind of unbroken, de facto control
till the next election cycle. Ergo, it's the next cycle that
determines the GOP's national power, not the most recent one.
The Politico has a good overview of internal worries over "increasing
public discontent toward President Bush, the Iraq war and the GOP
brand in general" in "Republicans Fear 2008 Meltdown." Their troubled
landscape, however, instills me with more nervousness than delight.
For the GOP the bad news seems to be mounting:
Polling data released this month confirm what GOP officials are
picking up anecdotally: Swing voters are swinging away from
Republicans at high velocity. Most alarming to GOP strategists is a
new survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center that found 50
percent of those interviewed consider themselves a Democrat or leaning
that way; only 35 percent tilt Republican.
For others, that of course is the good news. Any tectonic shift in
party identification at this stage spells organic trouble for the
"conservative" party of massive deficits and reckless interventionism
two years down the road. What to do? "That's what we're struggling
with, honestly," Republican Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito. "Do
you positively brand yourself, or do you negatively brand the other
side?"
Whoa -- there's a puzzler, and one they won't struggle with for long,
since honesty does battle with conservatism as the party's least
genuine characteristic. My predictive powers are as feeble as
anyone's, but I'll go out on a limb here and venture that negative
branding will triumph in this half-hearted struggle. Care to bet,
Congresswoman?
And that branding will be a whopper; a thing of actual beauty to
propaganda lovers everywhere fascinated by the dark art's creative
ability to remake day into night.
Already, there are some troubling trends on the money front,
according to GOP fundraisers.... Corporate PACs gave almost 60 percent
of their money to Democrats in the first two months this year, a
striking shift away from Republicans.
There you go. There's a minor propagandistic opportunity right there,
a trend that seems bad but can actually be converted into a positive
(for the GOP) negative (for the Dems): The Democratic Party is the
party of corporate greed and influence. Now, no doubt there is
authentic merit to the argument of shifting graft, yet when the
recipient is proferred as the party of corporate influence, as opposed
to a party of corporate influence -- well, the definite over
indefinite article makes all the difference.
Hammer away at that message hard enough and long enough and you're
bound to win converts, all of whom will gradually forget the GOP's own
history as corporate whore and come to believe it's now the
paleoconservative party of anticorporatist Pat Buchanan. Don't believe
it? Just look at their paltry corporate contributions. Corporations
don't much like Republicans. But, dear workers of the world, they love
the Dems.
Again, that would be a rather minor arrow in any propagandistic quiver
of misleading garbage, and even, admittedly, a rather far-fetched one,
even for the most propagandistically talented. But one musn't dismiss
the power of that fundamental tenet of effective propaganda: the
bigger the lie or distortion, the better.
That's why "Republicans Fear 2008 Meltdown" left me more nervous than
delighted. For it follows that the greater their fear, the more
propaganda they'll spew, the bigger the lies will be, and all the
better for them.
Decades ago the GOP had the organizational foresight to create a vast
network of Orwellian-Machiavellian think tanks to feed conservative
media outlets and infuence the mainstream, all of which enables them
to mobilize the base and sway swing voters with a professional flair
and immediacy that Democrats still only dream of.
In short, given enough time and motivating fear, they have the proper
resources to sell anything.
P.M. Carpenter
.
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