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.
Yes, considering that America has always been about the selling of IN; they have even been enabled enough to sell OUT!
Posted by: Vic Anderson | March 30, 2007 at 09:28 PM
GOPers are vile hypocrites, so it comes easy to them to lie and foist crap on the American public.
Posted by: Jay Randal | March 31, 2007 at 12:49 AM