Republican strategies: macro-style campaigns render “gotcha” moments and fact checks obsolete

You may have noticed that, since 2008, Republican and Tea Party politicians and candidates have become increasingly brazen, saying things that are far from politically correct and wading into icky terrain with regards to the facts. In this post, I give my take on their new communications strategy and why it’s working so well for conservative politicians.

Before Rick Perry announced his campaign for president yesterday, one of his strategists said something very interesting about their new approach to campaigning. Here’s a quote from a Huffington Post article about this new strategy:

“it was clear from Carney's words and demeanor that he believes the small, but symbolic mishaps that have traditionally sapped candidates of momentum and strength in the past -- John McCain's temper, George W. Bush's DUI, Sarah Palin's reading habits, George H.W. Bush's befuddlement at a grocery store scanner and many others -- are no longer potent. Perry called it the "old playbook" of "gotcha" stories.

The new playbook, he said, "hasn't been written yet."

"In a micro-election, all those attacks may or may not work," Carney said. But 2012, he said, will be a "macro-election."”

What Perry is hinting at is that, in today’s elections, small slip-ups and “technicalities” get drowned out by the millions of dollars spent on advertising getting out the broader messages that resonate with people's emotions. 

Just a few years ago, in 2006, gotcha moments still mattered: George Allen famously referred to an Indian-American as a “macaca.” Some analysts say the fallout tipped the election in his opponent’s favor. Allen’s presidential ambitions (he was a potential favorite at the time) were another casualty. Today this might have had much less impact, perhaps none at all.

For example, yesterday, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney was being heckled for saying “corporations are people.” If Perry’s strategists are right, the news cycle will soon leave this incident in the dust and it won’t play even a minor role in Romney’s campaign.

In my eyes, a more insidious manifestation of the macro-campaign is that candidates regularly get away with saying things that connect emotionally with people through prejudice or gut feeling, but are factually inaccurate.

For example, the recent Wisconsin recall elections were objectively centered on public sector workers’ right to collective bargaining, which Gov. Scott Walker and the state GOP representatives were trying to eliminate. Republicans, however, regularly said the election was about forcing public servants to accept cuts in their pay and in their benefits. Although the public workers’ unions accepted the cuts long ago and their protests and recall efforts made no effort to reverse them, the GOP’s message is simpler and resonates more with an electorate that has grown resentful of what they perceive to be special treatment of public sector workers when compared with the private sector’s big layoffs and pay cuts. In the end, for a lot of people, it doesn’t matter that the unions did not resist these particular budget cut: many voters have grown accustomed to associating unions with hardheaded resistance to changes in pensions and pay and will assume that they resisted these particular cuts as well.

[This Washing Post blog entry talks about one of the more blatant efforts to make it look like public workers were resisting the cuts.]

So, republicans are relying on most people not paying close attention to political news and not spending much effort digging into the issues. They tell people what they expect to hear and what is most convenient for the GOP, whether it is true or not. As a result, democrats spend half of their energy just trying to redress the fallacies before getting to the real issues at hand. The republicans, on the other hand, stoke populist angers by hitting their electorate’s emotional chords—at the expense of the truth.

Other examples include John McCain’s claim that Phoenix was the city with the second most number of kidnappings in the world, implying this was tied to illegal immigration, or Michelle Bachmann and other republican politicians and media voices preposterously claiming that President Obama’s trip to India cost $200 million a day. In the past, both of these claims would have led to “gotcha” moments. Journalists would have criticized the perpetrators and the electorate’s perception of the GOP would be adversely affected. Instead, many news outlets went along with the stories, doing almost no fact checking of the GOP leaders, and have still failed to issue retractions. If you look them up now, you will still find many articles that present these obvious fallacies as the truth—you will have to dig to find the fact checks proving they are incorrect. As a result, many people still don’t know these claims have absolutely no basis in fact.

Let me give a personal example of how this strategy can play out. After the BP oil spill in the Mexican Gulf, conservative politicians and media began to report that the Obama administration had refused to repeal the Jones Act, which prevents foreign vessels from entering US waters. The complaint was that the Obama administration was turning away loads of foreign boats that had offered to help in the clean up.

My grandparents, staunch conservatives, watch Fox News regularly and heard this. They complained about it to my brother, who is a moderate, fairly well informed liberal. My brother believed them. After all, what reason did he have to doubt my grandparents? And he came to me complaining about the Jones Act and the Obama administration.

When my brother told me Obama had refused to allow foreign ships to help clean up the BP oil spill, I was stunned—I had no idea what to say or how to reply. I couldn’t counter the erroneous claim, because I had never heard this claim before, because I didn’t watch Fox News, because I had never even heard the issue raised in other media sources.

Fox News and the GOP strategists are relying on two things: first, that republican and democratic voters will not mix and many of their distortions will go unchallenged, and second, that if someone who listens to them repeats their falsehoods to a staunch progressive like myself, said progressive will not be able to challenge the distortion, because they have never even heard the issue raised.

The GOP’s new strategy, then, is to say whatever is most convenient, never apologize (i.e. show weakness) if they propagated a falsehood, and rely on the apathy of voters who will never dig a little deeper.

After the above incident, I did some easy internet searches and found that factcheck.org had investigated the matter and concluded that the Obama administration had in fact issued many exceptions to the Jones Act to the foreign ships the administration’s experts declared were needed. The officials did end up turning away some ships, because they received such an outpouring of offers to aid in the cleanup that there were many redundant services offered. Not only were the offers redundant, many of them came with a price attached or would have involved chemical techniques the US government does not approve. Finally, and most importantly, the government was actually worried there would be too many ships in the oil spill area getting in each other’s way and hampering the broader effort to clean up the oil spill. But that story is a lot harder to tell than “Obama blocks foreign ships from helping in the Gulf cleanup!!!!”

Turns out the people talking about the repeal of the Jones Act, notably a GOP rep from Hawaii, had a history of opposing the Act, because it helps local shipping unions throughout the US. The real aim was not to facilitate the clean-up, but to cripple unions.

Still, to this day, if you do a search on this you will see the factcheck.org analysis and then a slew of right-wing talk show hosts, politicians, and internet publications sounding off against the Obama administration for “hampering the clean efforts to protect cushy union jobs” and the like. No retractions, no apologies, they just steamroll right past what might be an image-tarnishing revelation for them. (Read factcheck.org's analysis of the Jones Act "controversy.")

The last part of this new media strategy is to spew so much absurdity into the airwaves that we can’t isolate any of the individual fallacies for long enough to call attention to the way they are distorting reality and using people’s gut emotions for their political agenda. Seriously, after all the “birther” nonsense or the “death panel” fiasco, what media outlet is going to get caught up in calling out something so minor as an erroneous claim that the Obama administration and unions were hampering clean up efforts in the Gulf, or that Phoenix is not actually the city with the second most kidnappings in the world, or that Obama’s trip to India cost $200 million.

But the real story here is not that the right is regularly getting away with saying blatant lies. The real story is that, in the campaigns coming in 2012, the GOP’s explicit strategy is to steamroll past the facts, ignoring convenient “slip-ups," technicalities, and embarrassing gotcha moments, to strike the right tone and appeal to people’s gut emotions, and they will probably be highly successful. Witness the fact that, because I am writing about this new strategy, we are not considering a more important topic, such as the more fundamental disagreements between the right and the left on, for example, the allocation of government spending.

Being able to anticipate the right’s arguments will play an important role in whether the left is able to quickly address and move past the false issues and distortions. One way to do that is for us to keep one eye on Fox News and other right wing media sources and do some fact checking of our own when an argument sounds fishy. That way you won’t end up stammering like me when my brother first told me Obama was keeping foreign ships from helping the clean up effort in the gulf.

*Update: I recently had an exchange with a conservative in the comment section of the Huff Post in which he tried to blame the unemployed for being too lazy to get jobs. I made the point that they lost their jobs because the Bush administration failed to regulated the financial industry. To that, he responded with one of these bizarre arguments mentioned above, which caught me totally off guard: he said that, in 2003 the Bush administration tried to regulate Fanne Mae and Freddie Mac, but Barney Frank and the democrats stopped the effort, saying Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not in a crisis. After I got over my initial surprise, I did some fact checking: Fox News and right wing media sources have been spreading this argument to shift blame for the 2008 crisis onto the democrats. Barney Frank actually helped forge the legislation under question, and opposed it at the last moment, because the Bush administration and Congressional republicans added in last second changes that Frank and other democrats believed would make it harder for lower-income people to find housing. Fank did not encourage anyone else to vote against the bill and it passed the House despite his “no” vote. It was then shot down in the GOP-controlled Senate on the Bush administration’s orders. Read Barney Frank’s reply to the GOP’s rewriting of Congressional history. And this is factcheck.org's analysis of the back-and-forth claims.

If you’ve encountered a similar fallacious, distorting argument before, leave a comment describing the encounter and maybe I’ll feature the topic in a future post.

Second update: WOW, some people still don't believe that the kidnapping claim and Obama trip claim are erroneous and can't do an internet search to factcheck them on their own. Here's the links:

Phoenix kidnappings:
http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2010/jun/28/john-mccain/mccain-says-phoenix-second-kidnapping-capital-worl/

Obama's India trip:
http://www.factcheck.org/2010/11/ask-factcheck-trip-to-mumbai/