Read Frank Rich today!
It's like the old tried-and-true adage in Hollywood PR-- you cannot "kill" a story (bad pr/ exposes) --the only effective way to get rid of it is to
replace it with another story.
Rich applies this beautifully to the Repub sleaze team--endlessly churning out one lie after another about all things/ people/ programs Democratic. And what have the D's done? Mostly choose between going belly-up like a puppy with a big dog or shouting back (often shrilly)or going to B&N for a(nother) book.
Rich has demonstrated the better strategy-- turn their hypocrisy into the story. Point out and up the duplicity and treat it like a sporting event or Spidey topping the weekend. I know O'Franken was the first on the block to do this. I know John Stewart does it. But Rich's update is f**king brilliant! And, I think, a great primer for the campaign.
Two excerpts to whet your appetite:
"The [Clinton]comeback kid's current comeback, even more dramatically than the weeklong siege of Reagan redux, gives us a snapshot of an America eager to wallow in any past, even the silt of Whitewater, to escape the world we live in now. It's a mood that feels less like the sunny nostalgia we imbibe on the Fourth of July than high anxiety. Better a clear-cut evil empire than an axis of evil whose members can't always be distinguished from our "allies." Better lying under oath about oral sex than dissembling with impunity about gathering "mushroom clouds" to justify the wholesale shipping of American troops into a shooting gallery."
<snip>
"On June 22, the same day that "My Life" hit the shelves with its promise of a fresh slice of Monica, the Senate voted almost unanimously, in a rare bipartisan gesture, to increase by more than $240,000 the penalty on broadcasters who trade in "indecency." Like an outrageous coincidence in a bedroom farce, the day of this historic vote was also the one on which Vice President Cheney, visiting the Senate floor for a photo session, used a four-letter word to tell a Democratic Senator, Patrick Leahy, what he could do to himself.
In its account of the Cheney incident, The Washington Post ran the expletive verbatim -- another throwback to the Clinton era. It was the first time the paper had printed this epithet since publishing the unexpurgated Starr Report in 1998. The White House didn't seem to mind. Though Andrew Card, the president's chief of staff, condemned John Kerry for using this same word in a Rolling Stone interview in December -- "I'm very disappointed that he would use that kind of language," the sorrowful Mr. Card had said -- this time the transgression was given a pass."
<end quote>
When I read this, I started to think about how the media & the public has gotten into tracking Box Office receipts for movies/music. (How many diaries on F/9-11 have we had about this?) It used to be that only trade papers printed the numbers. Now every paper prints them, lots of people follow them --like sports stats or the Vegas odds-makers. I bet you anything this could catch--and, if/when it does, it will defuse the dumpsters and shift the focus from the attackee to the duplicity of the attackers. In other words-- let a hundred Daily Shows bloom.