Days of Change

Day 1255 – Slow Your Roll

I missed the Hilary Rosen story today, only having heard about it when she “apologized.” In essence, she said that Ann Romney should not tell her husband what economic issues women faced because she never worked a day in her life. Something few have mentioned is that when Mitt talked about his wife’s stories of economic hardship, it was what Ann learned by talking to real working women dealing with hardship, rather than women like Hilary Rosen, who may have had employment, but nothing that a blue collar worker would consider a real job.

But I digress. The key point is not about Rosen. This is a kind of guerrilla trial balloon, where the White House wants to see how much of this Mitt Romney as Mr. Moneybags 1% can go before people regard it as the kind of communist manifestation Barack Obama marinated in for 20 years. I would advise the conservative media to slow their roll, so to speak, and not push back quite as hard.

One of the biggest successes of new media has been in taking down ACORN. Breitbart didn’t succeed by being outraged early on. He let others fall over themselves minimizing the isolated incident and then pounced with the avalanche of incidents. In 2002 and 2004, the huge amounts of liberal idiocy and disrespect for middle America did a lot to damage the Democratic brand. Axelrod reigned in the “official” attacks as much as possible and let it be known that liberals who wanted to help Obama should be positive rather than negative. The media was handling the whisper campaign to denigrate john McCain and Sarah Palin.

This year, Obama supporters are especially unhinged. They are disappointed in Obama, but they plan to dance with the one who brung them. The only way to get excited about the election is to vilify Republicans. That vilification takes the form of disparaging middle America and its values. Conservatives need to give liberals enough rope to hang themselves. Given the chance, they will say the most outrageous crap and ast the same time think they’re reasonable.