Biting Back

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Little stories that seem to fit together … Mike Allen and Andy Barr write for The Politico,

A roomful of academics erupted in angry boos Tuesday morning after political analyst Michael Barone said journalists trashed Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee, because “she did not abort her Down syndrome baby.”

Barone said in an e-mail that he “was attempting to be humorous and … went over the line.” …

…“The liberal media attacked Sarah Palin because she did not abort her Down syndrome baby,” Barone said, according to accounts by attendees. “They wanted her to kill that child. … I’m talking about my media colleagues with whom I’ve worked for 35 years.” …

… About 500 people were in the room, and some walked out.

Of course Barone wasn’t attempting to be humorous. He was being mean and hateful, period. What’s interesting to me is the way the audience reacted. He was speaking to members of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, which means it was not an Ivy League elitist crowd. And they didn’t just sit there, seething but silent; they weren’t having it. They bit back.

Some post-election analysis in the Greensboro Telegram says Elizabeth Dole lost her Senate seat because of negative campaigning.

Instead of fighting back with positive ads that portrayed herself in a positive light and tried to counteract the negative impressions being created of her with the electorate, Dole spent most of her money going after Hagan. …

… The final straw for Dole may have been the “Godless Americans” ad. She had actually been tightening the race in PPP’s tracking polls but much of her crossover support from Democrats fell apart in the days after she went on the air with that message, which may have hurt her perception as a moderate with swing voters.

Note the closing sentence:

That tactic might have worked in a North Carolina campaign 20 years ago. But the state has changed, and Kay Hagan is more 21st century North Carolina than Elizabeth Dole is.

In the recent election both sides used negative campaigns, but not to the same effect. Joni Balter writes for The Seattle Times,

Obama was called a Muslim — as a swearword not a religion — a terrorist, a socialist, a Marxist and every other “ist.” Yet Obama never lost his focus. His advertising pals did their best to portray McCain as George Bush’s clone. Voters found that image scarier. Eeeeeeeeee.

I think voters found the “Bush clone” charge more credible, also.

Obama’s reassuring voice and sometimes boring consistent talk about helping the middle class gave him the edge. Voters wanted a president with a few new ideas. McCain flopped around from message to message, idea to idea.

Mud, even really clever mud, looks trivial in an economic meltdown. The voters may be amazed or numbed by the level of sludge but they clamor for solutions. That is where Obama beat McCain. Because McCain offered few new ideas, the dirt became the message

I think it’s more than just “economic meltdown” causing the change of attitude toward toxic campaigns. I think people are just sick to death of the hate and the lies. Younger people in particular grew up being marketed to in mass media, and IMO on the whole they’re far less credulous about advertising claims than their elders.

Somewhere in the past week I read that a pre-election poll found that something like two-thirds of voters saw Obama as “liberal.” So the GOP worked the “liberal” line — most liberal Democrat in Congress, I think they called him, which isn’t true — and it didn’t frighten anyone. I think for most people the word liberal, like fascist, has become a meaningless pejorative divorced from any political definition. It’s like calling someone a douchebag, in other words. It defines an adversary by the speaker’s dislike of him, and nothing more.

Now, I would like to educate people as to what liberal really means and restore the term to its previous luster. But conservatives had better beware that the term conservative is going down the same road, to mean something like flaming douchebag.

But the larger point is that the country has changed. I think the Atwater-Rove style of scorched-earth campaigning has lost its effectiveness. I’m not saying negative campaigns will go away, but I think the “anything goes” days are over. I think people are sick to death of being emotionally manipulated and lied to by politicians who, when they’re elected, turn out to be really, really bad.

9 thoughts on “Biting Back”

  1. Elizabeth Dole did run some positive ads about herself in August when Kay Hagan made a surge in the polls, and cause panic in the Dole Campaign. I think that Ad buy seriously drain Dole’s coffers in August. If the Dole Campaign didn’t panic, ran the ads in October, she may have had a chance

    The “Godless” ads were probably a last ditch attempt with not much money to take Hagan down. Besides being idiotic in nature, they were very poorly made.

    Even if Dole ran a good campaign, she had many marks against her, from the Economy, to the State Republican Party not exactly thrilled with her keeping her distance from North Carolina, like helping out with a County Fundraiser, or a local candidate. She was just a cautious, out of touch Senator, with a bad staff for constituent services.

  2. Glenn Greenwald observed something similar a few weeks before the election. He noted three separate, independent cases (starring Sarah Palin, Michele Bachman, and somebody else), where the conservative politician in question made some attack on liberals – of the kind we have become quite used to ever since Reagan – and in each case, the politician in question felt compelled to either backpedal or retract the attack. This is so signicant – three separate datapoints of the same phenomenon.

    The audience reaction you cited above is part of this. If the election results weren’t enough, it’s data like this that shows the conservative movement, or at least their attack tactics have peaked in their effectiveness and are now backfiring on them. And if these people can’t attack, they’re then revealed to be completely bereft of ideas and solutions.

    It’s hard to know how much of this is due to Obama’s successful insistence on campaigning on ideas, and how much of it is simply that the public has seen enough of the wreckage conservative policies have wrought. A fortuitous convergence, I’d say.

  3. I was born and raised in Connecticut. After living in Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York, I spent 25 years after marrying Elly in Connecticut before we moved to Maryland and then West Virginia for work reasons.

    Until my working for CSC as a commuter to and from Texas took up the time, I spent five years as a Justice of the Peace in Marlborough, CT. My specialty was marrying other atheists like me.

    Today the first same-sex couples received Connecticut marriage licenses as the new law passed in my home state became the reality it is. I would have been thrilled to be performing weddings there now. I can’t tell you how proud I am of Connecticut… and how disappointed I am at California.

    Under The LobsterScope

  4. “the term conservative is going down the same road, to mean something like flaming douchebag.”

    I would replace “is going” with “has gone.”

    Republicans have only themselves to blame for this. In order to ensure a second term for Bush, most of them worked overtime to silence any and all dissent within the Republican Party by redefining “conservative” to mean someone who agrees with Bush 100% of the time. A moderate was defined as someone who agrees with Bush between 98% and 99.9% of the time. Anyone who agreed with Bush less than 98% of the time was defined as a loony, leftist, Marxist lesbian, or something to that effect.

    The math is simple enough for even Rove to understand. Under Rovian mathematical theory, Conservative=Bush. The American people have done their own calculations and come to the conclusion that Bush=Flaming Douchebag. So, if Conservative=Bush and Bush=Flaming Douchebag, logic and reason dictate that Conservative=Flaming Douchebag, as well.

  5. I do think Dumbya has seriously damaged the GOP brand and the political label “conservative”, but I think it still comes down to fear and the economy. People are moved by fear–terrorists, immigrants, taxes, people of color, gays etc, but in 2008 all of those fears which the GOP trotted out as usual were trumped by their fears about the economy. Second, I think ideology plays a strong part in elections when times are relatively good. When times are bad, however, ideology goes out the window–the only issue is who is more likely to get things fixed. I am sure that a lot of people who would say they do not trust liberals and who hate the idea of socialism voted for Obama with the belief that he is a liberal with some socialist tendencies and did so for only one reason–because they thought he had a better chance to fix the economy. If Obama and the Dems succeed in rescuing the country from GOP misrule they will sow the seeds for the GOP taking over agin in the future. If times are good again, people will start focusing on ideology and the “culture wars” again having forgotten that it was the GOP that got us into this mess.

  6. ” If times are good again, people will start focusing on ideology and the “culture wars” again having forgotten that it was the GOP that got us into this mess.” It will be a long time before things get good again. The GOP seems to not be able to come up with any solutiions to the mess. They are not allowed to say the word ressession…how can you fix something you can’t even acknowledge? Did you see them today?…Palin is on TV talking about the election she lost and her future and the dow lost another 400 pts. No one has asked Palin about the Alaskan budget…as oil has dropped under $60 a barrel that must represent a drop in the revenue Alaska gets from the oil companies…Does she expect a shortfall? What budget cuts will she be making?

  8. I agree entirely that one factor that helped save use from a Bush third term was that the press started biting back during the campaign. In the 2004 election, by contrast, the press was still in a he said / she said mode where the Swiftboaters and their ilk would get unlimited and relatively uncritical exposure, followed, at best, by some very late and tepid analysis. The media now are very quick to do fact-checking and even straight news stories will comment on the veracity (or lack thereof) of politicians’ claims. The instant application of the truth became a kind of force-field that prevented the mud Palin and McCain were throwing at Obama from sticking.

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