Institutionalized
The irrepressible Dave Neiwart at Orcinus has a lengthy post about the now well-established patterns of racially charged (and otherwise duplicitous) political advertising. Well worth a couple of minutes to get a feel for just how institutionalized this is:
It’s important to understand the role that people like [Floyd] Brown [creator of the "Willie Horton" ads] play. Not only does he enable the right to feed red meat to their more extremist elements while giving them a certain “plausible deniablity” (thus the official distancing, which Brown explicitly welcomes), he plays an even greater part in transmitting ideas from the extremist right into the mainstream, thanks largely to a complaisant media willing to lend him the mantle of credibility he doesn’t deserve.
Meanwhile, John Oliver at the Daily Show did a brilliant and frankly disturbing piece on Brown and this class of political communicator (this was old-school Daily Show, too, in which people are hoisted upon petards of their own design). Take a look.
For more on why this matters—and why some of us feel we’ve seen this movie before—also check out Greenwald, succinct as ever, on the political persistence of 1988:
…just as is true now, the GOP operatives running Bush the First’s campaign — Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes — realized that they could never win the election if Americas voted on the basis of substance, policy positions and issues. They thus resolved to shift the playing field away from issues to manipulative, adolescent questions of patriotism, manliness, and personal likability. Hence: Dukakis is an effete elitist who doesn’t believe in the Pledge of Allegiance; he looks dorky bowling wearing a helmet; he proved he wasn’t a man when he failed to show primal rage when asked in a debate about his wife being hypothetically raped, etc. etc.
With the help of a media enthralled to such shallow, easy-to-chatter-about attacks, they succeeded in electing a highly unpopular figure from a scandal-plagued, discredited party. And Republicans, with their media partners, have been using that depraved playbook ever since, and will continue to do so this year. For the 1988 election, Reagan’s severe economic mismanagement, his disastrous foreign policy filled with savage covert wars, and widespread perceptions that top Reagan officials had blatantly lied about breaking the law were all just disappeared. Actual issues played virtually no role in George Bush the First’s 40-state triumph.
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In exactly the same way, John McCain’s only hope for winning is to ensure a similar disappearance of the issues which Americans continuously say are most important to them — namely, the disastrous Bush/Cheney economic policies and the need to extricate ourselves from the Iraq War. If the actual concerns of American voters are allowed to determine the election outcome — as they did in 2006 — the GOP has no chance. Thus, the only prospect for a McCain victory is to have the media flood the country with the types of childish, gossipy trash that has predominated thus far — lapel pins and Pledge of Allegiance symbolism and endless fixations on pastor sermons. That is what makes all the dark plagues which our political and media class have enabled — those images of dead Iraqi children and foreclosure signs and crushing collective debt and collapsed American credibility and a truly lawless government — blissfully disappear.
Certainly the hope (and the message) is that this year is different. Maybe Brand Barack really can outflank the political fear industry. Maybe everything will work out and voters will feel free to make political choices based on accurate information rather that disingenuous emotional appeals. (Let it be so, may it please the FSM!) To my thinking, those possibilities don’t diminish the importance of watching carefully to understand what’s going to happen and pushing back on the media.
