When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it. ~Clarence Darrow
In response to Rob Salkowitz, posted on his blog, Emphasis Added, 9-08-04,
Bush Then and Now:
Rob,
The most important thing you say here is : "Where are Kerry's “bring it on” commercials...? " The Bonobo-Agogo has an unparalleled fondness for his own shoe leather.
Why are there not coast to coast replays of his "OB-GYN's aren't able to practice their love for the women of this country" already running ? With proper digitalized stroking of his already harshly enunciated word "love", such as was done to falsify the listener's understanding of Howard Dean's "yahoo" outburst, here serving only the rockbottom truth of Zero's unconscious lechery ? The DNC has mostly failed to do its job of defending and promoting their candidate, and Kerry's campaign is only marginally better.
Other than that, i suspect you just do not appreciate how the name-calling game is played. Or the big lie game. Or the game of personality, the apotheosis of the god-king Bush in this case, in which the Self of the voter is stolen and replaced with the pharaonic personna of El Supremo. Rove is a card carrying priest of theocracy, aware or not, and his gods are evil gods. But perhaps your upbringing was too genteel. You have got strategy and tactics confused with the philosophy and logic of your Humanism. And seem to me to be as blind as Spinoza was to the danger one invites from the intolerant society in which one lives.
To put it another way, Rovian Agitprop is a game built on manipulating patterns of magical thinking which are deeply imbedded in a logically incapacitated electorate. Such antics may run counter to your natural preference for iconoclasm, alphanumeric characters as the doors of perception, and understanding the world by analyzing a logical facsimile of it constructed out of broad sampling of the splatters and irrhythms of the real thing. Such Karlovian antics certainly share no ground with your desire for utmost intellectual and spiritual autonomy for each person, since they are designed ab initio to enforce conformity.
I too tingle with schadenfreud over the minimalist Dem effort to return Rove's fusillade of buffalo chips. But that joy is much tempered by observation of the Dem incompetence in this game. A few points:
-Once engaged in the otherwise irrelevant battle of Bush V. Kerry circa 1968-73, the Dems must continue to hit that coWardice key every day until the election. Because Rove will continue to deny, and he will win votes and the election by default otherwise, by technique of having the last lie standing. The Kerry campaign/527's counter to date on this tactic of Rove's is correct, merely insufficient.
-Rove's primary strategy, a winning one, has always been to attack the other candidate's greatest strength. On that score, the Dems ought to have been attacking the Bonobo's greatest strength, his staff, since 2000. Where is the daily anti-Rove barrage? Where is the personal lawsuit against Scooter Libby and/or Rove in the Valerie Plame outing ? Where is the "your son died for Halliburton; with Dick Cheney shown cashing his yearly paycheck from Halliburton" ad ? Where are the actors from The West Wing drama, seen chastizing the current staff of the White House, "have you no shame", etc. ?
-The Bonobo's greatest personal asset is his likeability. The way to attack that strength, and bring out his nasty side in the bargain, is with farce scripted in real presidential locales, to push his bonhomie in the direction it is already going, i.e. into buffoonery. The Boykin has a thick hide, but if the barrage is unrelenting then eventually his tipping point arrives, he lashes out and maybe picks up that "first" drink he wants so badly. A Rove would certainly have in that likely event a killer riff already on disc, stored under embargo at every major news outlet. Watch and learn, Dems. After which, the comics have even more fodder with which to embrace his weakness. This strategy cannot be half-hearted; if it is discontinued after the first time precious little Agogo takes a punishing hit, people will have sympathy for him. The sympathy vote must be busted down by constant attack, so that the masses of moronic voters whose only purpose is to be on the "winning" side of a sportslike contest realize that they will themselves be perpetually stuck to a TarBaby if that TarBaby is not dispatched at the polls.
-Perhaps the heart of Baby's winsome ways is his voice quality. It projects absolute sincerity, which many people mistake for absolute integrity, of which he has none. It is pleasant in and of itself. People who rightly despise the man make a mistake in seeing an identity between the man and the voice. The great value of Fool's voice is that, unlike most people's voices, it bears no relation to his true feelings or intents, because he is a sociopath, who only apes feeling. Nonetheless, that voice and diction, not least his errors of speech, are a political gift.
A substantial strength. How then, in the best tradition of a Rove, to attack that strength ? It is after all difficult to parody a man who is a constant study in self parody. But here is an idea.
Get persons of similar voice, not impersonators, to quote his own words without ironic inflection, then laugh out loud at themselves, and deny the words, over and over. Confuse the imago, the fantasy which Fool projects, with a personal reality, over and over, until the listener is forced to engage his brain or at least some contrary emotions.
-The greatest failure of the Dems is not energizing their base. Where are the coast to coast ads threatening No Jobs, No Freedom of Speech, No Social Security --for christsakes, Greenspan has been the perfect straight man ? Putting much of their national advertising budget into wooing Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania undecideds is sure fire losership. And yet that appears to be the Dem strategy. [ Wisconsin will return to Kerry when the weather gets cold; no huge effort required there. The campaign in Florida is a world unto itself. ]
-There can be little doubt that Repugs will steal popular votes to swing the winner-take-all electoral votes in critical states through their control of new unregulated electronic and optical voting systems. Hence it is of surpassing importance for enabling future resistance to get a large popular vote margin for Kerry, from wherever it can be got. Once again, the telling ads on issues to energize the base should be nationwide and hammered daily in all media for seven weeks. If the Dems would just start on that, the money would arrive to continue the plan, just as it did for Dean. But no, the DNC/DLC is taking its [ abandoned ] constituency for granted.
-The media are clearly owned by and entirely disposed to the Thief in Chief and his corporate backers. They have not and will not play fair, nor give Kerry anything approaching equal time or fair and balanced coverage. The Dems appear to have no plan to oppose this obvious media factor, which is the greatest advantage Bonobo Boy has. The Dems appear unwilling to admit that media favors their own, theirThief, and that even if the Dems outspent the Repugnicans three or four to one instead of just matching him in media dollars, oh unexpected joy, the Dems would still lose the big media battle.
What is more, should Dems attempt to engage greater media coverage by whatever technique, it is a given that some October Surprise will arise such that, while it may not be the predicted dawn of dictatorship, it will most definitely constitute a sufficient excuse for the media to ignore the best laid plans for getting Kerry equal media coverage, such as via the Presidential Debates. The general answer is probably that the media monopoly cannot soon be broken, and that nationwide use of local neighbor to neighbor networks, phone and door to door leafletting, say, are the weaker but only possibility of neutralizing that media advantage. Such networks cannot likely be brought into being quickly; we need to learn the techniques to counter media propaganda. Such networks should have been started last year. Which is not to say that they shouldn't be started now.
-In general, any Populist movement must be prepared to denigrate video and radio media from the first, and to build a face to face, person to person movement. There is no other way to counter the overwhelming power of the Big Lie as disseminated through the big media. Way too late for the Dems to do that of course. Which means that whatever they are doing, it is farce. They might get lucky and win anyway, but not through design.
-Polls have shown for the last month that the supposedly Dem-secure state of California is in play. The candidates and the DNC appear not to believe this, and they may be right, it may be just the usual Repugnican manipulation, an attempt to draw Kerry into wasting time there when he is needed elsewhere, or, play it as it lays, to hold down the liberal vote in California. This state cannot be lost, even if the election is stolen. Hence, ANY day now, the Dems had better spark some exceedingly controversial incidents and statements in California with the immediate purpose of checking the pulse of the liberal vote there. Get the bad news, if such it be, now. Settle the issue of California in September, or ride a banana peel into a late October loss.
A really creative strategy implemented by a fearless operative is needed. Eventually Ahhnold needs to be lumped with/ confined to his Repugnican base in the state and lampooned as the buffoon he is, but now is probably not the time for that strategy.
Readers should not conclude from this posting that I believe that propaganda supercedes issues. I would merely like Democrats to awake from their thirty years in Sleepy Hollow, and accept the current truth, that obtaining and holding the levers of power for the sake of the commonweal is an art well divorced from writing correct social policy or from practicing good manners in campaigning.
5:38:35 PM 
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