09.10.08
Unfit for High Office
There’s a reason we at EOW avoid writing about strictly national topics. It is because Josh Marshall at TPM does it best. His post this morning, as usual, was jolting:
All politicians stretch the truth, massage it into the best fit with their message. But, let’s face it, John McCain is running a campaign almost entirely based on straight up lies.
The relentlessness of the rapid news cycle, the passion many feel for their candidate and the importance of the Presidential election, the drama that drives eyeballs to advertiser-supported media, the deafening crosstalk of point-counterpoint all swirling with the force of a hurricane, still 55 days from landfall, is raising our collective blood pressure. Heightened stress is affecting not just the political junkies like our fellow bloggers and seasoned journalists, but the casual observer as well. Only now, eight weeks out from election day, the notorious low information voter is beginning to focus on the national story.
What they are seeing is a Republican campaign that is morally untethered, in full self-defense instinct, lowering itself to visceral attacks completely detached from reality. Repeated, willful lies, designed to confuse and disorient.
This is a technique that Republicans have mastered over the years. Their strategy is simple. Rational thinking voters already know that Barack Obama is going to help the vast majority of Americans who make less than $250,000 per year. They know that the Republican party has made this country less safe. They know the Republican party has squandered the prosperity of the 90s and looted the treasury. They know that our health care system, besides being morally repugnant, is harming global competitiveness of U. S. business.
The list could go on and on. There is no way a rational voter could look at the choices before us in November and consciously pull the Republican lever. So their strategy is to strip voters of their consciousness. Tear away their rational thoughts by making them angry or fearful. Disorient them with dizzying spin. Refuse to put the word “Republican” visibly on display at their national convention, or allow the leader of their party, the current disgraced occupant on the White House from appearing in person. Lie as if there were no consequences.
The Republicans can only win with voters not operating in a rational state of mind. The point of everything they are doing is to break us down, scare and confuse us. How we react to their attacks will determine the outcome. That is why Marshall’s post is so intensely poignant.
This is clearly a testing time for Obama supporters. But I want to return to a point I made a few years ago during the Social Security battle with President Bush. Winning and losing is never fully in one’s control — not in politics or in life. What is always within our control is how we fight and bear up under pressure.
Please go read the entire post.