The selection of Sarah Palin has the Karl Rove brilliance written all over it. [Please note ironic tone.] They could not have made a better political choice, and I don't believe Rove would have missed that possibility. I think their leaked story of a deadlock between McCain's choice (Lieberman) and Rove's insistence on Romney, forcing a last-minute choice of Palin, is phoney and planted as a smokescreen. The whole thing has Rove's fingerprints all over it. He's probably been planning it ever since McCain became the obvious nominee.
The disaffected religious right wing is now ecstatic. To them, her lack of experience is actually a plus. All that matters to them is summed up in Rush Limbaugh's pithy: Babies, Guns, and Jesus. And on top of that, she's an evangelical Christian and a Warrior Woman who will go up to Washington with her guns blazing. Plus not bad to look at, and she gives a decent speech.
There's no way to win over that group. The Democrats will have to concentrate on their own base, the Independents (a considerable group), and the few moderate Republicans. So far, it's a good strategy: let the surrogates take on Palin's extremism and lack of readiness, and let Obama concentrate on McCain and tie them both to Bush. Notice the headlines: Palin is more like Bush even than McCain.
But I'm getting seriously worried. This is the way Republicans win elections time and again. Find some hot wedge issue (it was gay marriage in 2004; now it's back to abortion), push that and keep the focus away from the real issues (economy, war, health care, environment, energy, education). Democrats are just learning what Republicans knew long ago: people vote with their guts, not their heads.
With Iraq calming down and even Bush coming around to Obama's positions on Iraq and Iran, the war wasn't working as well for them as their political issue. So they had to turn back to social issues. And, man, did they hit the jackpot, all packaged in a good-looking woman who appeals to working people. No experience? Not prepared? Don't worry: the Republican spin-meisters will take care of that.
Please be smart, Democrats. Find the way to fight back without playing their game.
Ralph
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4 comments:
Excellent analysis and advice! It is extraordinarily difficult, however, to fight back without playing their game. Rove has taught them how to play the game and write the rules their way all at the same time. I keep telling myself that we only need to convince those few percentage points around the middle who actually seek to understand, were simply taken in by the Bush/Rove fraud and are ticked off about it. What WE need to learn from their playbook is to GET OUT OUR BASE!!!!
In fact, according to the Dallas Morning News, when Palin was down there to give her 30 minute speech at the Governor's conference - the speech she insisted she had to give even after her water broke, remember? - she was asked there if she'd consider being McCain's VP.
So it seems likely this whole thing was a set-up.
How many falsehoods have to swirl around this woman before people realize she's not intimate with the truth?
Obama is hitting back hard on their claim that she stopped the Bridge to Nowhere, pointing out that she was for it before she was against it, and that as governor she stopped it only after it had become an embarrassment to the state.
I think we're going to see more and more of this. They're moving away now from the great family story and challenging their claims and policies.
And she made her first gaffe today, indicating that she thought Fannie Mae and Freedie Mac were taxpayer supported. In fact, they weren't but now they will be. So it's the opposite of what she believed.
As an outside obeserver for who will be the best steward of the free world, interesting parallel in the election recently announced for the Great White North October14.
The same old rhetoric, barbs abundant with lack of credibility, slurs of calling liar, liar...and this is only Day Two of the Canuck campaign...
Gertrude Stein wrote, "A rose is a Rose is A Rose"...perhaps a politician is a politician is a politician, South or North of our border
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