Coming after an intensely fought election campaign with a compelling — indeed mediagenic, rock- star cultural conservative like Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket, a strong Obama victory would imply:
That most Americans don’t actually share cultural conservative’s vision of themselves as “the real America,” opposed by only a minority of educated elites.That most Americans don’t share the view that Obama and Democrats are essentially un-American and unpatriotic.
That most Americans do, in fact, believe that it was eight years of Republican pro-free market policies that created the current economic crisis.
This, conservatives simply cannot accept. As a result, in the last few days, we have seen the beginnings of the new conservative narrative start to emerge from Steve Schmidt’s Rovian media operation within the McCain campaign. The key elements of this new narrative are as follows:
1. That Barack Obama is not only actually a secret radical/terrorist sympathizer but that there has been a vast and concerted conspiracy by “the mainstream media filter” to hide this truth from voters.
2. That leading Dems including Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Harry Reed are the primary culprits in the current financial crisis
3. That primarily Black “goons and hooligans” are going to steal the election.
Each of these new tropes has been launched by one or more of the major McCain campaign ads in the last few days and each is widely repeated and reinforced by extensive viral e-mail campaigns.
Which is to say that “the conservative movement” will follow the trail blazed by internet wingnuts: constructing conspiracy theories about how Ward Churchill and SOHNEHO, along with ACORN and/or the NAACP (which they appear to have confused with C.O.B.R.A.), are secretly working together on nefarious schemes to make them look like conspiracy theorists.
Vega, con’t:
When McCain finally felt obligated to speak up and disagree with these distortions last Friday he was roundly booed by his own supporters – and it will only get worse after the election. If McCain does not rigidly stick to the new conservative script that Steve Schmidt has handed him to read and he loses the election, the conservatives – including Sarah – “et tu, Brutus” – Palin – will turn on him like wild hyenas.
If you think Democrats have been mean to McCain this year, just wait until you hear the conservatives rip him apart after the election. They will call him a “weakling,” “a bumbling fool” and a “senile, doddering old man who let an easy victory escape him.” “After all,” they will add knowingly, “he was never really a true conservative to start with.” This “the loss was all McCain’s fault” rationalization will actually provide the fourth and final element of the new conservative narrative.
This may seem cruel, but conservatives really have little choice except to explain the election in this way because a key part of their world view is an unrelenting insistence that politics is a simple morality play of good vs. evil — with themselves invariably in the heroes’ role. In this storyline Conservatives are always basically right and always essentially pure – they do not make fundamental mistakes or display major moral and ethical failings (if an individual conservative does any of these things, it simply proves that he or she was not actually a “real” conservative to begin with).
Bill Kristol, with his typical lizard cunning, is positioning himself well for the post-McCain Night of Long Knives. Sarah Palin is, too. Others are not so perspicacious. National Review is at war with itself. David Brooks – put in the impossible position of defending this nonsense to the general public – opts to just look lost. This positioning is important, because it will determine who will defend the Cloud Fortress of True Conservatism against the Black Helicopters of the Community Organazis, or whatever. And where McCain? Not looking good:
Miami, Florida – February 20, 2006 ― Leaders from a diverse array of sectors will hold a rally in Miami on Thursday, February 23, 2006, in support of comprehensive immigration reform in an effort to keep immigration reform at the forefront of the public debate. Leaders from both political parties, immigrant communities, labor, business, and religious organizations will gather to call on Washington to enact workable reform.
The rally will feature Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) as the headline speaker along with elected officials, immigrants and key local and national leaders. Sen. McCain is one of the chief sponsors of the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act; bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform legislation introduced last Congress and scheduled for consideration by the Senate in the coming weeks. A similar rally with Sen. McCain is planned for New York City on February 27 [...]
The rally in Miami is being sponsored by the New American Opportunity campaign (NAOC) in partnership with ACORN, Catholic Legal Services – Archdiocese of Miami, Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, Florida Immigrant Coalition, Miami Dade College, People for the American Way/Mi Familia Vota en Acción, Service Employees International Union, and UNITE HERE.
Looks like we need to expand the Illuminati Org Chart. Pressed the right way – encouraged along the path to blissful irrelevence they have started on – this could render them impotent for decades, and result in lulz too cheap to meter.
October 13, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Truly, the Nacht der langen Cheetos is nigh. To paraphrase Sarah Palin, “Purge Baby, Purge!”
October 13, 2008 at 9:46 pm
I knew Steve Schmidt was retarded when he proclaimed that he was using the false outrage technique.
How fucking stupid do you have to be to tell the press that you are purposefully pretending to be outraged. Right dude, voters want to get caught up in Steve-o’s OMG minutia mini-problem tour during the middle of what must seem like Armageddon to millions of dimwitted dipshits known as undecided voters twenty days out.
Just stay home if you can’t fucking tell the difference between a Republican 72-year-old and his autistic nurse or a Black Irish Democrat and Labour James Baker.
October 13, 2008 at 9:55 pm
I love how Obama explained to the “town hall” in the second debate that his health care plan is better then McCain’s because insurance companies wouldn’t shelter their HQs in havens like the credit card companies do in Delaware to avoid regulation, and everyone just pretended like it didn’t happen.
Way to attack your running mate? You know you’re cruising when this doesn’t register. I mean if the credit card companies are doning this maybe Barack should talk to Tom Carper or I don’t know?
October 13, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Just stop doning this.
October 13, 2008 at 10:34 pm
“Way to attack your running mate?”
Only if you’re a socker MILF w/ a nervous winky. Delaware is, like, invisible to 99.9% of Americans. Why, you can’t even see it from Sarah Palin’s house.
When the remaining .1% actually DO see it, it looks like New Jersey’s prolapsed rectum.
October 14, 2008 at 8:22 am
that poor kittums :(((
October 14, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Ah, so McCain is about to be Bob Doled.
October 14, 2008 at 3:08 pm
The thing that will interesting to watch over the next few weeks is going to be how Palin strats distancing herself from McCain.
Palin has a huge upside in the social conservative movement, whereas McCain is going to be a pariah in 22 days. In order to keep her future political career viable I expect her to start undermining McCain any day now, playing to the most extereme elem,ents of the party. In fact I expect that before the electioon it will become obvious that Palin and McCaion “disagree on strategy” with opening Palin pandering to the most violent, vile, racist elements of the party dispite McCain’s discomfort and despite what will probably be obvious indications that it is counter productive. Palin can’t afford to go down quietly, otherwise the theme that “McCain briught her up to the biog leagues too early” will start to take root and she’ll wind up a footnite. What she needs to do is go nuclear and her doing so will guarantee her future success.
I suspect that even now she is assembling a group of loyalists within the campaign who support her personally over and above the ticket, peeling support away from McCain from within his own campaign. The fact is, she needs to jump ship before it goes down, and she needs to start that process now.
All of this will likely benefit Obama in the election but don’t be surprised to see Palin run for President in 2012 on the ugliest platform we’ve seen in generations.
October 14, 2008 at 3:55 pm
The phrase “…lulz too cheap to meter” by itself is able to generate a small coal plant’s worth of lulz.
October 15, 2008 at 8:37 am
To be fair (I can’t BELIEVE I just suggested we be fair to the wingnuts, but there it is), I don’t see how this is all that different from the left wing contention that at least 2004 was stolen in Ohio. We’ve all heard it. There is even some evidence of its truth. And the lonely left, the ones too angry to be involved in the process, by and large have been saying it ever since.
But nobody notices or cares, because we’ve all decided that, whether it’s true or not that Ohio was stolen, it will never be proven or even brought up in a meaningful way. There is not enough evidence to convince the world, so, though we believe (or even KNOW) that it’s true, we are forced to act like Bush won Ohio fair and square. So we just call the man the preznit and go on our angry, resentful paths.
(NB: I actually love it when I’m called angry by the wingnuts. I would be devastated if I could see my country broken, my constitution trampled and my future mortgaged for a stupid war and tax cuts for the rich, and be so broken down as to NOT be angry!)
And while you know, I know, and everyone else knows that 2000 was stolen, too, that one was at least stolen in such a way that we all acknowledged it. This one is different.
Just as it was only the far left that even cared that Ohio might have been stolen, it will be only the wingnuts that will keep trumpeting this. Facts won’t shut them down. The Corner will get all of their citizen journalists working to show that it MIGHT have happened, and that will be enough to convince them that it did happen (again, just like the left wing conspiracy theorists talk about Ohio in 2004).
But we’ll just ignore them and work with (and, at times, against) President Obama, continuing to try to make this great nation greater. That’s because we don’t need them to tell us what makes America great. We ARE what makes America great.
But I know some left wing conspiracy theorists with whom they could probably socialize. Which might at least get them out of their basements. And laid. Well, probably not laid. But out of the basement is a good first step!