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Blow Smoke Better?
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Or is the American voter really getting dumber?
By CHUCK McFADDEN
of TheColumnists.com
It was the unfortunate
Civil War general Joe Hooker who once told us that the secret
to winning was to “get thar firstus with the mostest.”
Ol’ Joe didn’t do to well at winning battles -- he
lost the Battle of Chancellorsville big time -- but today’s
Democrats should take his little war homily to heart. And they
haven’t.
Time after time, the Republicans win the rhetorical wars by coming
up with a whopper, plastering it across the media, and then sitting
back and watching it become accepted. The Democrats have played
catchup, getting there lastus with the leastus.
Millions of Americans believe the Health Care Reform Act involves
"Death Panels.” Climate change is a plot driven by
“elites” to fool real Americans who ought to be drilling
for more oil and digging for more coal. Barack Obama was born
in Kenya; he’s a Muslim; he’s not “a real American.”
The sum of human knowledge must be attacked because it collides
with theological or ideological beliefs that are more
comfortable than reality.
Democrats are left sputtering, caught off-guard by the sheer
preposterousness of the Republicans’ mantra. “No
one can really believe all that,” they tell themselves.
Oh, yes, they can, and do.
They do because Republicans have mastered the technique of capturing
the low ground and using it to their advantage. For instance,
it is now revealed truth to millions of Americans that “Obamacare”
will drive up the deficit. It won’t, according to the nonpartisan
Congressional Budget Office. But that truth gets lost in the
Republican Noise Machine.
Until about 40 years ago, Democrats used to be better at this
sort of thing than Republicans were. That’s because Democrats
were more interested in government and politics than the Republicans.
Then the Republicans discovered something that had been under
their noses for decades: You can use the same techniques in political
campaigns that you use in business. Candidates can be sold like
soap.
“Acme soap! Cleaner, brighter, nicer!” “Joe
Blow for the Senate! Cleaner, brighter, nicer!” “Our
string beans have NO CHOLESTEROL!” “Our candidate has
NO POLITICAL EXPERIENCE!” “Our flapjack mix is ALL
NATURAL!” (So is malaria.)
After that, it was easy. Republicans are more patriotic than
Democrats. Republicans are more American. People in small towns
are better than people in big cities. We have to “take
back our country” from unspecified, but surely unpatriotic
liberal elites.
Republicans came to realize that the electorate had neither the
time nor the inclination to study issues and candidates closely.
No, light it up with neon and make it simple, sweet and most
of all pervasive. Electoral success is yours.
Democrats for years persisted in believing that a campaign was
a graduate seminar in political science. They consistently overestimated
the IQ of the American voter, and lost because of it. If you
seek evidence of that, look at the 2010 election, when dozens
and dozens of Tea Party Republicans were swept into office on
platforms that were
laughable. Sarah Palin, the loopy Florida congressman Allen West
and Michele Bachmann are taken seriously. Republican voters in
Missouri will be guided to some extent by the utterances of a
woman who thought her foreign policy qualification was that Putin’s
plane flew over Alaska on its way to a summit meeting in Washington.
It doesn’t, by the way.
Reporters are doing a better job these days of pointing out nonsense
from politicians. Oh, they still convey the utterances of the
politicians to their readers, listeners and viewers. But more
and more, you will see a paragraph or two explaining, politely
and evenhandedly, that what the politician just said isn’t
true because of this and this and this.
The Republicans have an answer for that, of course. It’s
that the “Lamestream Media” are liberal, unfair and
elitist. If the media report something that distresses Republicans,
why, attack the media. It works.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has, in all innocence,
made gaffe after gaffe on the campaign trail. The latest witticism
about his recent trip to foreign lands is “The Mitt hit
the fan.” But, according to Republicans, it wasn’t
Mitt that enraged the British. No, it was the Mainstream Media
who were unfair about a perfectly reasonable remark about how
London’s preparations, or lack of them, for the
Olympics was “disconcerting.” Go to London, insult
your hosts. Mitt went to London to display his diplomatic skills.
He did.
There are signs that the Democrats are beginning to understand
what’s happening to them. They may even be coming up with
cheap shots and nonsense of their own. After all, it was the
Democrats who decades ago came up with the New Deal and the Square
Deal. It was a Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who made
such effective use of his Fireside Chats on the radio. None of
those were cheap shots and nonsense, but they did resonate with
the voters. Maybe the Dems can do something.
So there’s hope. Not for the level of political discourse
in our country, but for the electoral fortunes of the Democrats.
Given what the Republican Party has become, that’s a good
thing.
©2012 by Charles M. McFadden. The McFadden caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The cartoon is courtesy of US Daily Review.com. This column first posted Aug. 7, 2012.
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