Dog Bites Man

"Dog Bites Man" is headline shorthand for a news story that isn't new and the recently resurfaced Billmon uses it as the title of his most recent post commenting on the WaPo story about the plan for the Republicans to play dirty this election. Like, I mean... d'uh!

In a Pivotal Year, GOP Plans to Get Personal
Millions to Go to Digging Up Dirt on Democrats

By Jim VandeHei and Chris Cillizza
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 10, 2006

Republicans are planning to spend the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest over the final 60 days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, which this year dispatched a half-dozen operatives to comb through tax, court and other records looking for damaging information on Democratic candidates, plans to spend more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget on what officials described as negative ads.

Billmon does make some intersting observations about this otherwise non-newsy report that link nicely with one of my earlier posts on the topic of campaign tactics that might prove successful.

I think it was P.T. Barnum who said that nobody ever went broke underestimating (or in Shrub's case, misunderestimating) the intelligence of the American people. That's not entirely fair: Americans can be very smart, even brilliant, about some things [unfortunately, these things are not usually] politics and current affairs.

[...]

All this helps create the sea of political ignorance and apathy on which Rovian admirals (and their less competent Democratic opponents) launch their attack vessels, armed with sales techniques borrowed from the advertising industry and the social psychology departments of the major research universities.

A diarist at Daily Kos relays this exceedingly cynical primer, allegedly written by an anonymous Madison Avenue executive, explaining how the battles are fought:

Understand that you are dealing with a target audience that doesn't care enough, or simply refuses to devote the time to learn the real facts regarding the real issues. Instead, their perception has BECOME the facts! . . .

Do not try to change this reality. Work with it. The perception you create IS the reality! Take heart! If they perceive something despite obvious evidence to the contrary, you will be able to make them perceive any number of things!

If this sounds eerily familiar, it's probably because you read Ron Suskind's 2004 pre-election interview with an anonymous White House official:

'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. While you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out."

There are many things you can call that point of view and the style of politics it supports. Democracy isn't one of them.