"Here's the deal: Palin is the latest G.O.P. distraction," Bob Herbert wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Tuesday. "She's meant to shift attention away from the real issue of this campaign--the awful state of the nation after eight years of Republican rule. The Republicans are brilliant at distractions."
Herbert's right on target. Barack Obama honed in on that point in Denver too, "If you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things." ...
More than anything, this election should be about the big issues of our time--ending a disastrous war, restoring America's reputation in the world and building an economy that works for more than just the very rich. The challenge for Democrats is to frame these issues in a way that connects with traditional American and progressive values, exposes Republican callousness and extremism, and in doing so trumps the GOP's political marketing which cynically and cleverly plays on symbolism. As George Lakoff wrote, "Just arguing the realities, the issues, the hard truths should be enough in times this bad, but the political mind and its response to symbolism cannot be ignored..... Democrats, in addition, need to call an extremist an extremist: to shine a light on the shared anti-democratic ideology of McCain and Palin, the same ideology shared by Bush and Cheney. They share values antithetical to our democracy."
In order to have a fighting chance after eight ruinous years of Bush, the Republicans need voters to lose sight of where we are as a nation and how Republican leadership got us there. We saw that with the GOP's politicization of Hurricane Gustav in an attempt to whitewash eight years of hostility to the notion of government's role as a force for public good. We see it with their hypocritical media-bashing. {Let's not forget, as Bloomberg News' Al Hunt told the New York Times, "Probably no one in American politics over the last twenty years has had a closer relationship with the national press than John McCain."} And we are seeing it again now. McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis admitted as much - as The Nation's Christopher Hayes noted --when he said, "This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." ...
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/354368
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