Drew Westen writing in The New Republic warns us about Republican smears of Barack Obama.
When I was doing focus groups with swing voters in the early winter, nearly half of every group we met with would either assert confidently or wonder aloud whether Obama was a Muslim or didn't believe in the Pledge of Allegiance.
This is going to get very, very bad. Any audacity is possible. Recall that George “AWOL” Bush defeated John “Silver Star” Kerry by portraying Kerry as a coward, and Republicans have been laying brick on dog-whistle appeals to racism since Nixon.
The Obama campaign has cooked up a Fight The Smears website, with the intent of debunking them as fast as they're created. I'm inclined to agree that the Gore and Kerry campaigns were hurt by not firing back quickly and forcefully enough against BS smears. But if you try to combat them as fast as Republicans cook ’em up, does it just turn into whack-a-mole?
I guess we'll see.
2 comments:
Trudeau has incorporated this into a sequence of his strip--alternating between the Obama "hotline" and the vet returning home.
I hadn't been reading lately. Sure enough, here it is.
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