Political Propaganda 101

A friend of mine got sucked in by the "Obama's not an American citizen" scam. I showed him how it couldn't be true. Then he asked me why so much smoke if there's no fire. I tried to give him a brief answer but it evolved into the following piece:

The underlying goal of a political party is to defeat the other side and either get back in power, or to stay in power.

Power enables a party to reward its patrons. The goal of the patrons is those rewards. The goal of the party is power and its cut of the take, distributed in various ways, from lunches and travel to unbelieveably lucrative jobs—usually for lobbying—on behalf of the patrons’ businesses, acquired after a politician retires from Congress or the Executive Branch.

Many of these reward paths aren’t spelled out in a memo (which could be leaked, after all). They’re just understood.

Often you have to betray your voters in order to reward your patrons. This is best accomplished by making your side so tribal—and so antagonistic to the other side—and so fearful of what will happen if the other side wins—that your side votes your way, betraying themselves and their loved ones, because you’ve convinced them that it’s that or the deep blue sea.

And people tend to be swayed by appearances. As long as your side looks and speaks like the epitome of your-side-ness, many won’t believe that you’re robbing them blind. Likewise, you need to make the other side look and speak unlike your base.

That was why, for example, the Republicans repeatedly ran ads showing John Kerry windsurfing, showing clips from when he was a young longhaired war protestor, showing him speaking in the Senate in long, convoluted senatorial sentences, showing his African wife acting all foreign. Bush, on the other hand, concealed his Harvard MBA by talking like bubba down the block—as if he’d grown up as a cowhand on a ranch (he bought his ranch after winning the presidency), instead of being the scion of an immensely wealthy, well-connected family..

Gaining or retaining power is best achieved by a multipronged, multilayered approach: tactically, you fire up your base, persuade the middle to lean your way, and make the other side depressed and confused, depressing their vote and their advocacy for their side. Strategically, you define every potential presidential candidate as untrustworthy and belonging to the Other Tribe—the one with bad morals, disrespect for everything good and pure, and on the take from Special Interests (well, neither side has to make that one up). Layered under that, on the Republican side, is a campaign that has been going on since FDR was president to make Americans distrust and dislike government; then this is tapped whenever the Democrats have a chance of reregulating any business the Republicans’ patrons own. Conversely, the Democrats have been trying to paint the Republicans as the Party of the Rich for the same length of time—defining G.O.P. as meaning Greed Over Principles.

Come time for the actual campaign—once each party is close to having a candidate---the following steps are applied:

First you have to fire up your base. Those are the people who will win primaries for you. Psychologically these people see the world in sharp divisions and bright colors. White hats, black hats.

Each side has a core constituency that will vote your way—if they vote. You don’t need to convince this group to vote your way. You just need to get them to the polls. They’ll go if they’re mad and/or scared. So you need to enrage/terrify them.

Outside that core constituency is a group that’s inclined to vote your way but who aren’t as tribal as the hardcore constituency. They will treat what you say more critically, and if you go too far with what’s used on the core group, you run the risk of turning them off or even driving them to the other side. So to fire up the core group with the real red-meat stuff that won’t hold up to close scrutiny, you make sure the wild stuff comes from “friends,” not your party, not officially.

This is the “clean hands” approach.

In America today, it’s a snap to set up superficially independent advocacy groups, directed and financed by the same special interests that contribute lavishly to the party. Then for the less-committed, the party fronts its own peeps, speaking more reasonably—or at least sounding more reasonable in terms of tone of voice and general deportment. Then they do the denial-affirmation dance. That is, they disavow any connection to the crazies saying the crazy thing (whatever it is). But then they go on to say that, however, maybe there’s fire where there’s smoke. Maybe responsible people should look into these claims. Maybe there’s some substance to them, somehow. Not really, of course. But…

So in this way the Party keeps its hands clean while continuing to stir the pot, while not alienating its own zealots, while at the same time sowing distrust and confusion about the other part to the less-passionate-middle and those in the other party who are susceptible to these sorts of manuverings.

Remember, in the world of politics, the parties are the outward manifestation of power, but the real power is often in the shadows, because its goals are so antithetical to yours that exposure does it no good. For the Left, it’s trade unions, organizations representing hyphenated groups (Latin-Americans, African-Americans, Catholic-Americans as far as illegal immigration is concerned, etc. For the Right it's the inversion of Socialism--those who believe business should control government--mainly the bulk of the wealthiest 1/2 of 1% of the country.

But what falsehoods should you peddle?

Answer: those that give concrete expression to your base’s deepest fears and anxieties—while at the same time giving the base plausible deniability that any of these concrete expressions are related to anything that’s indefensible in polite society.

Thus you can’t oppose a candidate because he’s a she, or not white, or too smart, or not a Christian (or perhaps a Jew). But that’s no problem. If he’s a she you accuse her of being tough/combative—implicitly a ball-buster. If he isn’t white you accuse him of being foreign—of only pretending to have American values/heritage. If he’s smart you accuse him of having foreign ideas, of looking down on ordinary people (this can work even if the person comes from low-to-middle class circumstances and the opponent is filthy rich, as long as you manipulate appearances appropriately). If he’s a Christian you can accuse him of being a bad Christian, liking a controversial Christian pastor, or being Christian in a way that’s different from familiar white Christianity.

In each case you must be very, very careful to never say what you want them to think. You just link what the opponent actually is to something that sounds plausible that gets them to think what you want them to think.

For example, a majority of Republicans came to believe Saddam Hussein pretty much planned 9/11 and provided logistical support for it. Bush never said this. But every time he mentioned 9/11 or Bin Ladin he then mentioned Saddam Hussein. It was artful. Then when he was accused of claiming Saddam did 9/11, he could honestly say “I never said so.” Which is true. But he knew that what he did say would make his followers think that. So he wasn’t a liar. He was a deceiver. That’s better, right?

Of course there are a multitude of tricks I haven’t mentioned here, but which both sides use to make you think Good Things about what they want you to agree with and Bad Things about what they want you to oppose.

For example, during his election campaign Obama said we have to grant illegal immigrants some sort of amnesty because it would be logistically impossible—and unkind—to round up and deport so many millions of people. This is what’s known as a False Choice Fallacy. He never mentioned the simple fact that if we change the way we do things so they can’t make a living here, they’ll go home the same way they came—on their own hook. Whether you advocate for or against illegal immigration, you should recognize that this was a patently false and misleading argument.

There’s also sarcasm, which both sides use constantly. For example, Sean Hannity, part of the right wing noise machine, commonly refers to Obama as The Anointed One. The propagandists who give Hannity his talking points use this to make Obama’s popularity seem like a bad thing, and his supporters like dazzled dopes.

And of course the campaign goes on after the election, because there’s always the next election, and even if the president isn’t up for reelection, a good chunk of Congress is.

So even though Obama’s citizenship will never be challenged successfully in court, the birther campaign serves to delegitimize him and allows those who don’t like his race, his foreign father, or that father’s religion, to attack Obama’s race, foreignness and not-religion without having to do any of those things explicitly. Again, plausible deniability. So the Republican Noise Machine will flog this issue on the down low as long as they can, using the AIDS virus model that worked so with with the Swift Boat Campaign.

The great thing about being on the Republican side of this is that there’s always money to finance the innumerable right wing radio stations and the TV network and the push polling (fake polling designed to plant rumors) and the whisper campaigns and the astroturf organizing. Sometimes the Democrats have to scramble for funds. And though most journalists are registered Democrats, their livelihood depends on chasing scandal, so they’ll gallop off after anything that promises juicy headlines. Clinton’s peccadilloes got spread all over the mainstream media, leading to his very testy relationship with the press that was supposedly in the tank for him. Most reporters like Obama but that didn’t stop them from running after everything the Republican Noise Machine put out there.

There’s also the art of omission. You ignore something you'd said previously was crucial. Thus when it was Clinton vs. Bush I, character was why you should vote for a president, because Clinton was a womanizer and Bush I was a loyal family man. Obama is a loyal family man, while McCain cheated on his first wife flagrantly, then dumped her after she was crippled in a car accident. Plus, Obama's and his wife and children are America’s darlings. They did take a whack at Michelle, calling her an Angry Black Woman, but she blew that one into bits on the campaign trail. So in that campaign, character--at least of the family variety--no longer mattered a bit. The issue just vanished.

Normally you attack the other guy’s strengths as well as his weaknesses, if you can find a cleavage line to drive a wedge into. Thus Kerry’s war record, which was vulnerable because Kerry is such a stiff, and because so many old veterans loathed him because of his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War, which they’ve revised in their memories so they can think we were winning but were forced to lose by the Democrats. Kerry played into that unintentionally. With Clinton his home life was vulnerable mostly because of his womanizing, but also because Hillary is smart—which lots of men find threatening—and his daughter was homely (ironic, since she’s gorgeous now). So they attacked his whole family, though only the most hardcore took the bait about his daughter’s ugliness (Rush Limbaugh being the best example).

But another feature of propaganda campaigns is that you try lots of stuff and see what sticks. As long as the attempts don’t come from party officials you can always dislaim them if they don’t work.

I hope all this answers your question as to why the birther business has been pursued to diligently.

more on birthers

Have you ever crafted a long, detailed response to a comment thread for a column in a major newspaper, only to find the comments were closed just before you hit the Send button?

That just happened to me. It was a Washington Post column by Eugene Robinson titled "The Berserk Birthers" from Tuesday, August 4, 2009. If you look at the most recent page of comments before they closed it, you'll recognize the names I refer to here. But they're interchangeable, really, because there are only a handful of approaches the birthers use, and I think I've tackled them all here:

I assume that williepet1, ekim53, JustTruthPIs, workingclassslave, FactandTruth—and all their ilk—are patriotic Americans who want the best for our nation and sincerely believe what they're saying here.

So why do they believe this stuff? I'm still puzzling over this. Perhaps it's a need for "inside knowledge." Throughout human history otherwise intelligent people have fallen for some charlatan promising secret knowledge hidden from the rest of us. But I can't read my buddy's mind, so really I'm only speculating.

My spouse is a diehard Republican but doesn’t believe this stuff, so I can't ask her, and at the church we attend—which is probably 90% Republican—I get the impression that only a handful are birthers. But these are urban Republicans living in a college town in coastal California, mostly with advanced degrees. So they're not your typical redneck right winger.

What I do know is that the Republican Party leadership is pushing this (under the table of course, to keep their hands clean), and their most partisan adherents are running with it.

I wish they could trust FactCheck.org, a scrupulously nonpartisan Annenberg Foundation website. No partisan Democrat would think FactCheck leans left. For example, they detailed any number of "factual errors" and spin in Obama's claims about his healthcare proposals. Anyone who checks their back issues will see them tear into everyone from both parties' leadership down to Congressmens' campaigns on both sides--when the campaigns say things that just aren't so.

For Obama's birth, FactCheck.org actually flew staffers to Hawaii to inspect the original documents and supporting materials. Anyone who wants to can check all this out on their site. They've also detailed how the birthers' claims mutate constantly as fact-checking journalists research and debunk one claim after another. They're like the AIDS virus, which also mutates constantly to avoid our immune system's defenses.

Some details:

williepete1 trots out the "he's hiding it" ploy. As if the GOP's opposition researchers wouldn't have attacked Obama's bona fides in the election campaign if there were any truth to it. Yet willipete1 believes he's smarter than all the PhDs and private eyes of the Republican National Committee, amply financed by the Angry Billionaire's Club.

Or maybe williepete1 thinks the RNC and the DNC are in cahoots, guided by the Masons, or the Rothschilds Bank, or the alien entities in the Feds' basement (cue the Twilight Zone music)?

Ekim53 uses the "even if he's legit he's an unpredictable, dangerous socialist." The long-term Republican Party strategy has been to define every single real or potential Democratic presidential candidate as exactly these things, well in advance of the formal election campaign, regardless of who he or she really is.

For example, George McGovern was a war hero. He piloted B24 bombers over Germany for dozens of missions in WWII, while Ronald Regan acted in Hollywood. Yet you'd never know it from the campaigns. Likewise Kerry was a decorated war veteran, while Bush II was a high-class draft dodger. Yet they made McGovern and Kerry into mentally unstable Com-yew-nist America-haters. And the draft dodgers into war-heroes.

Socialists want government to own business. Democrats just want to regulate them—to avoid massive recessions. Republicans want business to own government. What's the name for that?

The fruit of the RNC multigenerational investment in Democrat candidate character assassination is folks like williepete1, who believes the people trying to save him are out to get him, while the people he's defending really are. Apart from the sheer evil of the RNC, you've got to hand it to them—like John Dillenger, they're very good at their work.

JustTruthPIs makes the same claims as williepete1, only with more words. He also had to believe that he's smarter than the entire staff of the Republican National Committee, or that the committee is part of some monstrous conspiracy—possibly to fatten Americans up for aliens' dining pleasure…

Ditto workingclassslave, only snarkier.

Lastly, to FactAndTruth: There is no way anyone can abrogate a natural-born American citizen's citizenship if he's under 18. Not a stepfather. Not another country. No one. This isn't rocket science law—it's basic stuff. Why don't you get it?

Honestly, you need to seek qualified help. Do you have a pastor you can talk to? A sane spouse? As it stands you're embarrassing yourself, and every response just digs the hole you're in deeper.

If you want to get to China, book a flight.

Birthers Shmirthers

It's called Situational Narcissism when someone--usually a CEO or a celebrity--surrounds himself with toadies, and eventually comes to believe he's infallible.

I think political zealots get into a similar state because today you can arrange to get all your news from TV, radio, network and book sources that pander to your biases, be they left wing or right wing.

Once inside the Zealot Zone they egg each other on, spinning more and more outre theories in a race to the ideological bottom (wherein dwell the Birthers).

It really started when Reagan killed the FCC Fairness Doctrine, enabling the spread of right wing radio, funded by the Angry Billionaire's Club.

And though Internet advocates thought it would enhance diversity of information, the exact opposite has happened. It's possible to surround yourself only with sources that agree with you, and demographic movements have also trended toward purer and purer Red and Blue counties across the country.

I've seen this at work. I attended a conservative political forum recently, and afterward people chatted with each other. It was as if they were vying to see how far out their conspiracy theories could be spun.

It was like back fence gossip at its most poisonous.

But it's wrong to focus on the Birthers. They're just the foot soldiers in a long-term strategy by the Angry Billionaire's Club, aimed at delegitimizing not just Obama but all future potential Democratic presidential candidates, and the party's leadership as well.

See, you get to power in America by one of two routes: forge a centrist majority, as Obama did, or build a partisan crusade that demonizes the other side, as Bush 43 did under Carl Rove's tutelage.

The Republicans have evidently chosen the latter as their 2010/2012 strategy.

Do this and you wind up with roughly half the country despising you. But this route's goal is only 50.01% of the vote, and what 49.9% of the country thinks of you doesn't matter in the slightest.

For 2010 the Republicans left in Congress need to keep their seats, which are nearly all in bright Red areas. So for that they've chosen a howling crusade with pitchforks and torches, laying siege to Obama the America-hating foreign mole Antichrist up in the castle.

They do this by attacking the person's strongest points, not his weakest. Obama is a gifted speaker--so you make that seem strange. Like he's a Svengali, and his supporters hypnotized sheeple. He's a better and more devoted family man than a majority of Republican Congressmen. There isn't the faintest whiff of scandal to exploit there, but they can make him seem like a foreign family man with a foreign family, trying to turn America into a foreign country--at least to the party faithful. He tends to give substantive answers, so they paint him as a boring double-dome. They don't attack his nonexistent military record because it's not a strong point, just as they attacked Kerry's because it was.

None of this makes sense if your goal is centrist consensus. But it's perfectly rational if you've rationally chosen a rabidly partisan tack.

Sure, only 28% believe he's a furriner. But many more than that just aren't sure. They're uneasy about him. That's the idea. Make the faithful rabid and the moderates fearful and unsure enough to opt for the devil they know.

You can see the same approach playing out with healthcare reform.