Dear Dr. Democrat:

Mystified in Micanopy

Dear Mystified:

They’re carpet bombing Obama with lies in order to a) keep him and the media distracted as they scurry around refuting lie after lie, and b) shredding Obama’s biggest asset, his charisma. Carpet bombing with lies is how Swiftboating works. John Kerry decided not to engage in the scurrying around, and it lost him the election. It’s also what Rove did to McCain in South Carolina in 2000. It always works.

Republicans have gamed our imperfect system. They have thoroughly discredited the media (often with the media’s help), so that when the MSM debunks one of their lies, GOP voters discount it out of hand. They also carefully craft the lies so that they’re not easily disproven, a la “I never had sex with that woman.”

A currrent McCain-Palin lie is, “Obama requested $1 billion in earmarks this year.” This year, he requested $0. In the four years he’s been in the Senate he has requested about $1 billion, but unlike the other senators he made his request amounts public. Oh, and Palin has requested $495 million in earmarks in her 21 months as governor. None of this really matters on the political stage, however, because the average voter starts snoring after the “B” in billion.

Even the best strategy that doesn’t involve lying and skullduggery has little chance against the dirty politics being played by McCain and Palin.

The best news I saw last week was that Obama had lunch with Bill Clinton. With all his faults and recent missteps, Clinton is better at political strategy than Rove. But even the best strategy that doesn’t involve lying and skullduggery has little chance against the dirty politics being played by McCain and Palin.

The only way to win is to play offense on their sleazy turf — as I like to say, to cram the truth down their throats. Republicans absorb minor defeats. They don’t care if they get caught lying by the MSM or the Dems because they have created an alternative reality among their followers in which their accusers — the Dems and the MSM — have no crediblity. Obama has proved that he can nail them, but what needs to be done is a total annihilation, something that leaves McCain totally discredited.

I don’t know what that is — maybe a zinger a la “You’re no Jack Kennedy” in the debates. Otherwise, this is, as it always has been, John McCain’s contest to lose. The best we can hope for today is that Obama can take all the states Kerry took plus Ohio. That is possible, mainly because the GOP in Ohio is in disarray from scandal, but even there, those scandals are now two years old and fading in voters’ memories.

If the situation were reversed, the GOP would have no compunction about going after our guy’s war record and POW status. In the way of Rove, you attack your opponent’s strength. None of us watched it, but McCain’s intro at the GOP convention was a video about his POW years that was preceded by a video of 9/11 that showed previously banned footage of people jumping out of the upper floors of the World Trade Center. I believe those two pieces of video, in addition to Palin’s personality and the fortuitous fact that the hurricane prevented Bush and Cheney from speaking live, flipped the election.

Another solution that’s being bandied about is to replace Biden with Clinton. That would be an extreme move that the other side would portray as desperate.

Also, Arianna Huffington had some good advice last week on Left, Right and Center. She said that when we focus on Palin, it helps McCain. When we focus on McCain, especially when he is tied to Bush, it hurts him. Still, Palin’s charisma should be more easy to shred than Obama’s — they made a pretty good start on Saturday Night Live, if you’ve seen the clips.

History provides some hope. In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro’s highest polling was in the first two weeks after she was nominated. And in 2000, about 30 percent of Republicans said they were so mad about what Rove had done to McCain in S.C. that they would not vote for Bush in November. I don’t have the exact figure in front of me but, if memory serves, when the votes were counted the number of Republicans who voted for Gore or Nader was minniscule, like under 5 percent.

And sometimes fate provides a game changer. The banking crisis today puts the ball in Obama’s court. Conversely, Bush is going all out to have Osama bin Laden captured by November 4, which would probably seal the election for McCain.