Morning Jolt - The Obama Team's All-Out Smear Effort, and the Soptic Optics

NRO Newsletters . . .

Morning Jolt

. . . with Jim Geraghty

August 9, 2012

In This Issue . . .

1. The Obama Team's All-Out Smear Effort, and the Soptic Optics

2. Welcome to Public Discourse, Where Ninnies Hate You and Tell You So Constantly

3. We'll See Ads Claiming Romney Will Nuke Little Girls and Daisies Soon

4. Addendum

Here's your Thursday Morning Jolt.

Enjoy!

Jim

1. The Obama Campaign's All-Out Smear Effort, and the Soptic Optics

The new hold music when you dial the Obama campaign: Shaggy's "Wasn't Me." (Video at link is kinda iffy on being safe for work; if you're not familiar with the song, it's about one shiftless guy advising another that when caught philandering, to insist innocence no matter how implausible.)

The guy on our conference call? Never heard of him.

[Joe] Soptic, laid off from Bain Capital-owned GST Steel, stars in a Priorities USA Action spot this week in which he tells of how his wife died without health insurance after he lost his job. Soptic also appeared, wearing what appears to be an identical shirt, in a May television ad for the Obama campaign.

Asked about the Priorities spot on MSNBC Wednesday morning, Robert Gibbs said he doesn't "know the specifics" while Stephanie Cutter said on CNN: "I don't know the facts about when Mr. Soptic's wife got sick or the facts about his health insurance."

And Jen Psaki told reporters on Air Force One that "we don't' have any knowledge of the story of the family," according to Yahoo! News.

But Cutter hosted an Obama campaign conference call in May in which Soptic told reporters the very story featured in the Priorities spot.

Moe Lane observes that the hardhat Soptic wears at the beginning of the campaign clip appears to be on the shelf behind him at the union hall in the Priorities USA ad, and concludes, "To sum up, there was an interesting point from @mike_scrimpf: le affaire Soptic does have more than a passing resemblance to an incident from 2010 where soon-to-be-former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland got caught recycling the same professional victim in his campaign ads. Not a point-to-point correspondence, but it does show just how non-spontaneous these spontaneous stories really are. Not to mention how effective they are, too. Which is to say, less than you'd think."

2. Welcome to Public Discourse, Where Ninnies Hate You and Tell You So Constantly

A Morning Jolt reader wrote in yesterday, mentioning that his wife is a freelance writer, and recently had a column appear in a major newspaper.

He describes the reaction:

You can probably imagine what the comments and emails and tweets are like.

A few people even looked up our phone number and called to say hi. How thoughtful.

This stings! And I have a thick skin.

I wish people had read the piece more carefully. Some of the complaints are groundless. Some are valid, to a point, although I see some nuances that make a difference. Maybe, maybe not. But people can be pretty cruel.

I told the reader he and his wife may want to get an unlisted number. It's unfortunate, but we live in a world where people feel entitled to share their disdain for you in almost any way possible. And instead of reading something or watching something and exclaiming, "boy, that guy's nuts!" and moving on -- the way I feel when somebody insists I read the latest by Michael Tomasky or Andrew Sullivan -- they feel the need to find that person and let them know how much they disapprove.

Being active in the public debate increasingly means sealing off the rest of your life from it, and having two hermetically sealed spheres, public and private. The public debate is the Wild West; decency, respect, self-control and class are whispered as mythical attributes of a bygone age. (Maybe this starts at the top.) Hopefully your private life is quite different in its tone and mood.

In fact, if you express your views in public on a regular basis, chances are high that at some point you'll get a death threat. Here are some of the folks who have received death threats in the past month or so:

Comedian Jon Lovitz.
A Spanish field-hockey player.
A Somali comedian -- who was actually murdered.
Actress Ellen Page.
Bank employees in Cyprus.
Drew Peterson's defense attorneys.
The guy who wrote the first negative review of The Dark Knight Rises.

"I want to kill you" is the new "I disagree."

I don't want to be cynical when I hear someone complaining about getting death threats, because it's almost always frightening and surreal to receive one. Normal people don't express a desire to kill each other over mundane disputes. (They reserve it for appropriate occasions, such as an insult to their loved ones, someone cutting them off in traffic, or when a referee makes an awful call.) But the ubiquity of death threats, and the ever-lowering bar to trigger an expression of allegedly murderous rage in some numbskull with access to an e-mail account, have rapidly devalued them on the scale of the Weimar Republic's Papiermark.

I increasingly find myself rolling my eyes when a public figure cites e-mails threatening as a claim to a particular status of victimhood, or ipso facto evidence of the extremism and rage of those who disagree with them. Your critics may indeed be extreme and enraged . . . but the rise of e-mail has permitted people to express a lot more extreme and enraged views. (I like Amelia Hamilton's method of handling it all.)

Anyway, back to the "double life" of those in the public debate -- like superheroes, we wear our masks and do (rhetorical) battle with our foes, and then, hopefully, we step away from the computer, the telephone, the television, or web camera and resume a home life as mundane as Peter Parker's or Clark Kent's.

Some may bristle and believe that the "double life" concept is dishonest (and for some, it may be). But an advocate, commentator, pundit, writer, or activist is not a reality-television star. The product is what you say and the arguments you seek to advance, not you. If your personality brings people to share your passions and brings them to support the causes you believe in, wonderful. But our politics shouldn't be competing cults of personality.

As for when the split between private and public becomes dishonest . . . my following little vignette of "life as a pundit" is based upon actual interactions:

When you show up to do television punditry, they first stick you in the green room, the waiting room with coffee, and you'll meet some famous or semi-famous other Washington figure. And you'll talk to them. And nine times out of ten, they're really nice people. You start talking politics with them, and you find they're nothing like what you pictured. They're cracking jokes, they're laughing at their own allies, they're admitting their own side screws up or your side has a good point, and you think . . . oh! I've completely misjudged this person! We're going to go on and have a great conversation!

And then the cameras go on, and there's this Jeckyl-and-Hyde transformation, and suddenly you're on opposite the Talking Point-o-matic 2000. And they're pounding the table and full of righteous indignation that you know is phony, because they didn't have it five minutes ago when there were no cameras on. In fact, seven minutes ago they were laughing at their own side for clinging to such implausible and unpersuasive talking points. And now you feel like you're going to get steamrolled because he just called your side a bunch of child-molesting war criminals, so you've got to call his side a bunch of glue-sniffing communists, but you didn't really set out to do that.

Off-camera political consultant: "I keep telling my clients to not do X!" On-camera political consultant: "X rocks!"

3. We'll See Ads Claiming that Romney Will Nuke Little Girls and Daisies Soon

Jay Cost lays out why things may not be as grim as many Romney supporters think:

Obama's polling right now suggests that he has only locked down the core Democratic vote; what's more, those not currently in his voting coalition tend to disapprove of his job as president. Indeed, the Gallup job approval poll finds him with just 31 percent support from "pure" independents, i.e. those with no party affiliation whatsoever.

It is extraordinarily difficult for incumbent presidents to win the votes of people who disapprove of the job they are doing. Hence, this race is Romney's to win.

But it is not his to lose. And that's an important distinction.

It is difficult to overcome the hurdle that Obama faces -- to win voters who think you've done a bad job as president -- but not impossible. Richard Nixon in 1972 won a significant chunk of his disapprovers because the McGovern-Shriver ticket was not a serious option. Lyndon Johnson managed the same in 1964, as he made the Goldwater-Miller ticket out to be a threat to humanity itself.

The 1964 election is particularly important to understanding the 2012 campaign. I have argued in the past that, bereft of popular legislative achievements, a sound economy, or a manageable deficit, President Obama is left running a version of LBJ's 1964 campaign. Johnson was worried that passage of the Civil Rights Act would spark a backlash that would keep him from his goal of the largest victory in history. Hence, the "frontlash" strategy, designed to make typically Republican voters (mostly moderates in the Northeast) scared to death of Goldwater. "The stakes are too high," LBJ warned the country in ad after ad.

Obama is basically running this campaign. If LBJ made Goldwater a threat to western civilization, Obama is trying to make Romney into a corporate raider who will bring about a new feudalism.

Does the Romney camp understand this? Are they prepared?

4. Addendum

Via Pejman Yousefzadeh, a look at how the tabloid Gotham Gazette covered the events of The Dark Knight Rises.

I kept waiting for news that the Rapid City Monuments had fired their special teams coach, citing unacceptable performance on kickoff coverage. "It's as if our whole special teams unit just disappeared right after the opening kickoff," lamented the general manager.