Letters to the Editor
cabdriver
Published Letters: 594 Editor's Choice: 8
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@johncp
[Read the article: Michelle Obama Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"counterattacks to defend himself"
Setting up a website to track smears is not a "counterattack."
In this instance, "counterattacking" would be to reply to cheap shots about Michell Obama with cheap shots about Cindy McCain.
I'm aware that some Democrats support tactics like that. I think it amounts to simply providing more evidence for the position that that there's no difference between the two candidates and the two major parties in this contest.
I also hear many too many liberals and Democrats with a mystical dread of the "Republican smear machine." bearpaw1 sounds like one of those people.
Yes, you've pointed out that "The web is not a broadcast medium." Strictly speaking, that's true. But the implication that you're making shows that you're grossly misapprehending the power of the blogospere, and the Internet, which has a huge audience of people inclined toward political activism. The broadcast media absolutely has to take notice of the popular reactions on the Internet, a medium with parrallel processing capabilities that provide a peerless reality check. Among other things, the Internet acts as a de facto ombudsman of the media. I think that helps account for the fact that broadcast media outlets ARE engaged in the task of reporting the debunking of smears (or issuing retractions, as the case may be), as the material on the Michelle Obama Watch website clearly shows. They obviously aren't merely speaking into an echo chamber.
Two more points:
1) perhaps the most effective single element of the Republican Smear Machine has been the "chain e-mail"- a medium first employed in the Clinton years, disseminating cheap-shot jokes, false charges, invented history, and similar bogosities far and wide to a loyal and overly credulous audience. My conservative Republican parental household has been barraged by these things for years- as part of a group of about 40 people, on a forwarding list. The emails typically cloak themselves as cracker-barrel wisdom from "grassroots America", but the themes are so consistent and the style so predictable and trite that anyone who's read a lot of them can hear the echos of single authorship in many of them. At the very least, the vast majority of them appear to emanate from a single source, a Republican propaganda skunkworks staffed by the same sort of paid professionals who write and sell joke lists to radio DJs and the like.
There's a huge sampling of these chain e-mails on debunking websites like Snopes.com. I've included a typical example attached to my highlighted screen name sig.
Younger Americans- especially those with primarily liberal parents and family relations- may have little or no idea of this phenomenon and it's extent- but I can tell you that there's a huge chunk of the American public that has been "reached"- and often horrifyingly misled- by the "political chain email" campaigns of the American Right Wing. It's worthy of note that I haven't found a "Left/liberal" analog to this media campaign. I've seen the occasional "partisan liberal" email circulated, but nothing like the steady stream of legends, fables, homilies, nostalgia- and, last but not least, libels and smears- originating from Right-wing sources. In fact, the employment of the tactic appears to draw its inspiration from the "direct mail" campaigns of people like Richard Viguerie and Reed Irvine, who used mass mailings in the late 1970s to build the conservative base that got Ronald Reagan elected president in 1980.
Ironically, the direct mail tactic was initiated back then as a way to bypass the problematic broadcast media of the day, who were perceived by people like Weyrich and Irvine as exhibiting a pervasive "liberal bias" against their favored ideas and causes. But they didn't whine about how the broadcast media was too strong for them. They did an end run. Within the span of a few years, their campaigns put a lot of popular pressure on the media to tow their line, with notable success (although big media consolidation also played an important role.) They built a huge base of committed supporters, voters who whole-heartedly bought their line.
The other irony that's apparent is that the audience for this computer network-based tactic mostly consists of non-Internet surfers, at this point mainly people over the age of 70. I don't know if you've encountered the type, but a lot of older computer users are wary of the Internet, and they primarily use their computers for emails between their circle of friends and acquaintances. They're voluntarily self-limiting their exposure to Internet sources of news information, because they've ingrained a reliance on trusting large media outlets for news content.
They're also a dwindling demographic- unlike the audience who utilizes the Internet as a primary source of news and information. What worked so well as a tactic in 1998 doesn't have the same punch in 2008.
2) While they are not broadcast network shows, the widespread popularity of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report is not to be underestimated. In the guise of comedy, those shows often do what amounts to investigative exposes of the American political scene, week in and week out. And they haven't exactly been banished and shunted to the shadows of the American cultural scene.
Simply as a strict matter of fact, the national Republican Party has more to fear from those two shows than any other political force in the country, simply because 1) it's a huge target with a lot to lose from being exposed, and 2) in it's current incarnation, thoroughly full of shit.
I'm tired of the excuse-making, people giving reasons why the Republican Attack Machine is so supposedly unstoppable. Stop running scared.
If there's nothing to their charges, there's nothing to worry about. Just turn the spotlight on the facts, all the while pointing just how weaselly and desperate the opposition must be, to rely on such ploys.
That isn't a slander, that's a fact.