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Saturday, October 20, 2012

GOP Election tactics

This election season, the GOP is taking four key strategies to their recent success to the extreme. Extremes radical enough to impinge on Americans' conscious minds.

It is obvious that these strategies have been incredibly successful. But, I would suggest that the main condition for their success has been that they confirm the biases and prejudices of their audience and so are repeated daily by the right wing echo chamber aimed solely at the low effort thinking of the average low-information voter.

These tactics are:

1. Money shoveled into advertising.
The ridiculous and patently partisan Supreme Court ruling opened the doors to unlimited amounts of plutocratic cash, and it is pouring into ridiculous levels of advertising. But intrusive advertising has a powerful tendency to lose its effectiveness, as commercial advertisers know all too well. Will the American people begin to react negatively to one party outspending the other by massive margins?

2. The constant scapegoating of minorities and the dismissal of women as equal citizens.
When the political attacks on minorities and women, who form a small majority of the country, become aggressively overt, will they lead to political blowback?

3. Voter suppression and caging.
It's been going on since 1789, of course, and when you suppress the rights of a single minority group, other folks can shrug it off. But now, they are suppressing the votes of multiple minority groups, the poor and the elderly. Which means us, our neighbors, friends and our grandparents. These suppression tactics will be experienced by millions of Americans, some who have been voting in what they perceive as their interests for decades. Is this blatant attack on democracy going too far even for complacent America?

4. Lying as a campaign tactic.
Lee Atwater taught the lessons of Josef Goebbels to the GOP--lie large and often, and if repeated, people will believe the lies. The GOP has been lying above and beyond the spin-line since the 1980s. But normally, they lie with message discipline, so it can be repeated by by right wing media, and pundits verbatim. However Romney and Ryan are lying impulsively,  without consistency, often contradicting their previous positions and statements. And the lies increasingly contradict the actual lived experience of most Americans. Will the GOP finally develop a serious credibility problem?

Obviously, it is my hope that these tactics finally begin to backfire this year and lying to America will begin to engender consequences. If that happened, I think we would see a break in the rigid fervor of right wing ideology that has gripped the nation since they canonized Reagan.. Credibility once lost is almost impossible to regain, and we in the reality-based world have for decades been yearning for a return to some form of intellectual consistency in the nation. The GOP is basically betting the house on taking their trusted tactics to the horizon. It would be ideologically satisfying to see them lose that bet.

But will it happen? There are some encouraging signs I think. But these Goebbels-inspired tactics are still awfully strong.
What do you think?

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