Toxic Shock Jock Syndrome

Stirling Newberry has some very interesting ideas why the GOP strategy was working for the last 10-15 years and it is now going wrong.

For years the Democrats were screamingly furious as to why the Republicans could run on the "3G" attack - Guns, Gays and Giveaways - "The gay UN stormtrooper is coming to take your gun and give it to those laaaazy black people." It was even more offensive in practice than my description of it here.

We shouldn't be surprised, the media is a creature of demand, and when the intelligentsia went to cable, and thence the internet - to boutique blogs and underground websites for stock tips, media became, increasingly, targeted at the frustrated plugger, going into work, doing his job, and wondering why he couldn't get ahead. The conservatives told him - his taxes were too high, paying for useless bureaucrats and welfare queens. They'd cut out the waste, and, for nothing, send him a check.

While liberal hacks might fulminate about how "they" could smear us, and liberal wonks worry that "we" didn't have enough think tanks, the real equation was that when people were unhappy, they blamed liberalism and the government. Now, they blame Bush.

This is why Bush is beating the war drums. It is the last issue he has which keeps him from being an untouchable.

What is happening is a revolt of the very "guys on the make" core who spear carried for the Republicans because they thought they could do more, if they were regulated less. In a sense, they are the precursors of the internet attitude - wanting to move up, but finding that the corporate ladder wasn't to their taste... They never wanted government off of people's backs, they wanted the road blocks they felt to moving up removed.

An election strategy has to balance Flipping - getting people to change sides - GOTV - getting out their supporters - and KITV - Keeping in the other side's supporters, or deactivating swing voters who might flip. With each of these there is a cost - and a campaign has to gauge what the most effective combination is.

Flipping is work in politics which has both the best reputation and the worst. The best because it is affirming to persuade the undecided. On the other hand, it requires promising less, it requires selling out on those marginal positions that excite the activist base.

Keep in the vote is, of course, convincing the other side's supporters that it isn't worth voting. Deactivating swing voters and activists. Paradoxically the more flipping a party does, the more vulnerable to KITV they are - they've promised less and less, and the basic KITV attack is "it doesn't matter, they are all bums."

If you are connected to enough people - one of them will be the right mate for you, have a job, will buy your stuff, will read your blog. A big enough Netropolis, and everyone could find the people they need in their lives.

And connected is what the Republicans don't want, can't do, and their rhetoric of separating and scraping by can't speak to. This is why equal marriage has such resonance - it is about people wanting to be connected, and wanting to be connected to communities as that fundamental unit - the couple - which all communities recognize.

The new politics, being about connection, and about faith in connection - is inherently unRepublican. Or at least, un post-modern Republican.

The reason, you see, that Guns, Gays and Giveaways worked is they struck at the fundamental story, that last line of defense. People yell just as their lie is about to be uncovered, and they scream politically when their last line of defense is threatened. As people came to see that they cannot evade the great waves of globalization and technology - they have come not to believe the rhetoric.

Thus the Republicans have to run to "self-centered" rhetoric in the last places it works - in the narrative of terrorism. "You have to look out for yourself, buddy" is the story behind the aggressive rhetoric Bush uses - but it is working less and less, because people believe it less and less. The sneering at international institutions, so popular once, is now falling apart because going it alone - which Americans had to do as inflation ate away savings and comfort zones in the 1970's - is no longer what we want to do.

The election is swinging - races in the Senate written off are now in play - in Pennsylvania and Colorado for example. The presidential race is already tilting away from an increasingly vulnerable Bush. Even a heavily gerrymandered congress no longer seems as easily done a deal.

The rhetoric has changed, because how people view their relationship to others has, instead of trying to grab on to their own and claw by themselves, they want to Ebay their way to a better job and a better life.

And the Democrats have been, for almost a century, the party of binding the nation together, and reaching out into the world.

el - even this digest is long, a lot of ideas in here. Is this a good paradigm?