Sponsored Content




Intermarkets' Privacy Policy
Support


Donate to Ace of Spades HQ!



Recent Entries
Absent Friends
Bandersnatch 2024
GnuBreed 2024
Captain Hate 2023
moon_over_vermont 2023
westminsterdogshow 2023
Ann Wilson(Empire1) 2022
Dave In Texas 2022
Jesse in D.C. 2022
OregonMuse 2022
redc1c4 2021
Tami 2021
Chavez the Hugo 2020
Ibguy 2020
Rickl 2019
Joffen 2014
AoSHQ Writers Group
A site for members of the Horde to post their stories seeking beta readers, editing help, brainstorming, and story ideas. Also to share links to potential publishing outlets, writing help sites, and videos posting tips to get published. Contact OrangeEnt for info:
maildrop62 at proton dot me
Cutting The Cord And Email Security
Moron Meet-Ups

NoVaMoMe 2024: 06/08/2024
Arlington, VA
Details to follow


Texas MoMe 2024: 10/18/2024-10/19/2024 Corsicana,TX
Contact Ben Had for info





















« Thursday Morning News Dump | Main | The Morning After The Morning After- ORCA, Amnesty And What Kind Of Nation Are We? »
November 08, 2012

Why We Lost, Gabe's Version of the Story

People telling themselves that we had an insufficiently conservative candidate, that having a more conservative candidate would have made a difference, are kidding themselves. We didn't lose because of conservative or even liberal issues. We lost because of cultural issues -- binders, Big Bird, birth control, and blame Bush. Those four issues would have dogged ANY Republican candidate, regardless of their conservative bonafides.

That, if you want to skip the rest of this post, is the point. Republicans didn't lose a policy debate. They lost a PR contest. And the hardest part is that we insufficiently understood that we were even fighting on cultural grounds and not for political issues.

Binders, Big Bird, birth control, and blame Bush are not conservative or liberal issues. They're cultural issues. And the Left seized them and never let them go for the final two months of the campaign. Romney stood up and said "it's the economy." Swing voters answered: "but how are you different from Bush?" They weren't listening to our argument. They were listening for those cultural signifiers that would reassure them that the candidate was like them.

If there's one thing to take away from this loss it's that you can't force voters to pay attention to political issues. Remember now, swing voters are already a "special" group of people. They don't want to take sides. Politics is icky for them. So trying to persuade them on political grounds is not an efficient use of time. You have to persuade them on cultural grounds.

Swing voters really didn't want to think about the economy. But they sure had lots to say about Sandy clean-up. About Big Bird. About birth control and, God help us, rape. Those cultural issues that Democrats seized -- binders, Big Bird, birth control, and blame Bush -- went largely unrebutted by Romney.

To be honest, they were ignored by just about all the conservative commentariat too. I mean, they're ridiculous topics. Binders? Really? I'm as guilty as anybody else. I was standing here in my office complaining about having to write about something as frivolous and stupid as binders. But it turns out that swing voters are pretty ridiculous people. Go figure. Boy, don't I wish I'd paid more attention to binders now. The people who were frivolous enough to think binders was important were exactly the swing voters we needed to talk to, but didn't.

We should have suspected it after the foreign policy debate. I mean, these men are so close together on foreign policy as to be almost indistinguishable. All that was left was the *cultural* policy: how do we relate to other countries. And Obama's great at being the Great Relator. In the cultural consciousness, he's still bouncing off the Bush years, reassuring everyone that he's different. Romney didn't do that except very briefly right at the end of the campaign.

When I talk about rebutting these cultural issues, I mean a campaign of rebuttal. Almost every Obama ad on TV and radio I heard in the last two days of the election was about abortion and birth control. And they went totally unanswered. Romney's ads during the same period were about the economy. The war on women accusation went entirely unanswered except a few times at debates or on the stump.

It's because we thought those cultural issues were stupid, and, sure, they were. But we weren't supposed to be convincing ourselves. We were supposed to be convincing the neighbors who don't want to be partisan. SNL nailed that point perfectly in their "undecided voters" skit. It's not precisely that swing voters are dumb. It's that they've got other interests than partisans like you and me.

There was only one time during this election when Romney excelled on a cultural issue. It was in July. It was the response "we built that." That was Romney's rebuttal to Obama's "you didn't build that" gaffe and it resonated. For a brief period, we made the President and his supporters into a cultural punchline. That resonated with voters. Because it was cultural, pre-politics.

But "we built that" happened very early in the cycle and we never offered another cultural issue. Obama had several in the final two months. Birth Control. 47%. Big Bird. Binders. And, briefly (thank you, Candy Crowley), Benghazi. The nearest Romney came to a winning cultural issue after "we built that" was Clint Eastwood's empty chair. But that was a little too hokey for younger folks. The response to that chair cut right across generational lines. Older people loved it; younger people loved to mock it.

Put in the simplest terms: Republicans need to find a way to make fun of Democrats on something other than political grounds. Something to cackle over at the water cooler. It's easy to laugh at Democrats when you're safe among Republicans, though. That's preaching to the choir. "He ate a dog" kills among Republicans. It doesn't work so much among swing voters.

We used to be good at this. Think how we mocked Kerry and turned him into a punchline. We turned his words against him -- "for it before I was against it" -- and riffed on that to stick him with the "flip-flopper" label. That was cultural. Not political. We made Kerry out to be a squish and a traitor (thank you, Swiftboat Veterans) and it stuck. It had nothing to do with politics, or perhaps it was pre-politics.

But we didn't do that this time. This time we kept our eye on the ball: "it's about the economy, stupid." Well, yes and no. We were too busy fighting Bill Clinton. We forgot that Obama excels at this cultural stuff. We scorned the Left for their "Dear Leader" propensities, but we failed to offer a rebuttal to it. We told voters that Obama's politics were wrong, but we failed to offer a cultural alternative.

So we lost.

Now, I'm not saying that we should have been fighting on ONLY cultural grounds. Obviously, we have to fight the Democrats' disastrous politics. But we have to offer some cultural signifiers in addition to politics.


digg this
posted by Gabriel Malor at 09:30 AM

| Access Comments




Recent Comments
garrett: ">>Virgin Rock. I think she's originally German. Sh ..."

Philip: "[i]107 We Baptists can drink alcohol...[/i] Spi ..."

tubal: "111 We Baptists can drink alcohol... Posted by: t ..."

Catch Thirty-Thr33: "There's one Harpist that does those and I can watc ..."

Way, Way Downriver [/i][/b]: "Any truth to the claim that minutes after Trump pa ..."

illiniwek: ""Guilty as hell, free as a bird" Obama's ghost ..."

Diogenes: "We Baptists can drink alcohol... Posted by: tubal ..."

OrangeEnt: "Yeah, I don't get those either. You can tell the " ..."

iHeart Radio: "There’s a podcast about people who give no s ..."

pookysgirl, Rush Baby: "Podcasts are just radio talk shows, with video. ..."

tubal: "We Baptists can drink alcohol... ..."

garrett: "I like the reaction videos done by the Classical M ..."

Recent Entries
Search


Polls! Polls! Polls!
Frequently Asked Questions
The (Almost) Complete Paul Anka Integrity Kick
Top Top Tens
Greatest Hitjobs

The Ace of Spades HQ Sex-for-Money Skankathon
A D&D Guide to the Democratic Candidates
Margaret Cho: Just Not Funny
More Margaret Cho Abuse
Margaret Cho: Still Not Funny
Iraqi Prisoner Claims He Was Raped... By Woman
Wonkette Announces "Morning Zoo" Format
John Kerry's "Plan" Causes Surrender of Moqtada al-Sadr's Militia
World Muslim Leaders Apologize for Nick Berg's Beheading
Michael Moore Goes on Lunchtime Manhattan Death-Spree
Milestone: Oliver Willis Posts 400th "Fake News Article" Referencing Britney Spears
Liberal Economists Rue a "New Decade of Greed"
Artificial Insouciance: Maureen Dowd's Word Processor Revolts Against Her Numbing Imbecility
Intelligence Officials Eye Blogs for Tips
They Done Found Us Out, Cletus: Intrepid Internet Detective Figures Out Our Master Plan
Shock: Josh Marshall Almost Mentions Sarin Discovery in Iraq
Leather-Clad Biker Freaks Terrorize Australian Town
When Clinton Was President, Torture Was Cool
What Wonkette Means When She Explains What Tina Brown Means
Wonkette's Stand-Up Act
Wankette HQ Gay-Rumors Du Jour
Here's What's Bugging Me: Goose and Slider
My Own Micah Wright Style Confession of Dishonesty
Outraged "Conservatives" React to the FMA
An On-Line Impression of Dennis Miller Having Sex with a Kodiak Bear
The Story the Rightwing Media Refuses to Report!
Our Lunch with David "Glengarry Glen Ross" Mamet
The House of Love: Paul Krugman
A Michael Moore Mystery (TM)
The Dowd-O-Matic!
Liberal Consistency and Other Myths
Kepler's Laws of Liberal Media Bias
John Kerry-- The Splunge! Candidate
"Divisive" Politics & "Attacks on Patriotism" (very long)
The Donkey ("The Raven" parody)
Powered by
Movable Type 2.64