Setanta wrote:nimh wrote:sozobe wrote:While the origin was different, and while it may well not be the last such incident, I think this whole thing is definitely Obama's Swiftboating. I exerted so much energy in 2004 trying to point out the Swiftboaters' lies (here and elsewhere) -- I kept hoping that people would say "Oh, in that case, nevermind." Didn't happen. I'd back individual posters into a corner in one thread and then a week later they'd be back proclaiming Kerry's horribleness because of [insert Swiftboater lie here].
It just came down to whether they liked him or not. If they didn't, they used the Swiftboat stuff as a cudgel. If they did, they saw through the accusations.
Very, very true.
<stifles>
These things are never about convincing supporters, or changing the minds of opponents--they are about creating doubt n the minds of the undecided. We have people here who constantly say, in effect, "Supporters won't believe it, opponents won't believe anything else--so what?" That's a narrow, dualistic point of view. Many, many voters don't decide until late in any campaign, and it's arguable that significant numbers don't know whom they'll vote for the night before the election.
Smears are, or are thought to be, effective for that reason.
They are, often, effective enough to fashion slim electoral wins. And from those come power. And possession of power, in the hands of those who would abuse it without much or any second thought, comes the last 8 years.
On this thread or another, Nimh recently observed that this election was not bringing out the best in us. Elizabeth Drew, writing in the
New York Review of Books, said "This election is dividing friends and families like no other I've seen." That's a significant observation, given that Drew has been doing bright political journalism all her adult life and was born in 1935.
Part of what many of us must be trying to get our heads around is, how did we get here? How has it come to be that such depths of passion are presently aroused?
It is somewhat clarifying to imagine the immediate present had Romney or Giuliani or another Republican candidate achieved the nomination rather than McCain. I doubt there would be any significant difference to what we are now witnessing.
But remove either Obama or Clinton and a very different picture presents itself. Or, to make the difference even more clear, imagine neither of them running. The left, given the last eight or twenty years, came up to this nomination cycle passionate and mobilized and would surely have been so absent Obama or Clinton, but both of these individuals have fostered particularly acute and serious constituencies. Gender and race are key. That's not a bad thing, it is just a real thing. Can we imagine a Biden/Richardson battle now engendering the same level of internecine passions?
But the swiftboating of Obama was inevitable and predictable to a full 100% certainty. If Clinton comes out ahead, we'll see it again directed against her. And we would have seen it if Biden had won, or Richardson.
It is simply the nature of the modern american right, via it's leading personalities and via the propaganda mechanisms it has established, and via the easy facilitization of modern news media for stoking fears and emotions rather than addressing policy or wonk stuff.
And every day here, we read posts from tico or foxfire or nappy or okie or gunga or McG or real life or others and we have all the evidence we'd ever need to see how an entire segment of the american population has been, and are being, trained to think (and thus perceive) in very particular ways. That training is NOT designed to bring out their better angels. Reaction out of fears and hatreds is the goal.
