Since the days of Ronald Reagan, Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater, the Republican Party has become expert at controlling the political conversation in the United States.
For years, under the pretense of fighting to restore "traditional values," they have focused the nation's attention on issues that are either symbolic (flag burning, the pledge of allegiance, school prayer, etc.), or of marginal concern to the majority of the populace (the mosque at Ground Zero, Acorn, gay marriage, so-called "anchor babies," etc.)
This strategy has been highly effective. It wins elections. As far back as 1989, during the height of the flag burning issue, the following appeared in the New York Times:
"It's going to be a very long campaign season for those who get on the wrong side of this," says John Buckley, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. "On just these kind of issues, they've (the Democrats) lost five out of the last six Presidential campaigns."
This strategy has the added benefit of distracting the public's attention from the profoundly deleterious effects GOP economic policies have had on the nation. By using the tactics of distraction and misdirection, the Republican Party has been able to enact an agenda that is beneficial only to a very narrow segment of society - the wealthy, the very wealthy, large corporations - while creating difficult economic conditions for everyone else.
Another purpose of this strategy is to minimize or drown out discussion of issues the Republican Party would prefer that the public not think about too much or examine too closely (poverty, wealth inequality, wage stagnation, Wall Street chicanery, etc.)
More recently, the Republican Party has taken this strategy one step further. Since President Obama took office, the GOP has dropped all pretense of debating public policy on its merits, and instead has engaged in massive and well-coordinated mis- and dis-information campaigns designed to sway public opinion and kill any legislation Obama proposes.
As a result, the Republican Party not only largely controls the content of the political debate, but the content itself in many instances is demonstrably false (death panels, socialism, government takeover of health care, etc.)
The debate leading up to the recent tax cut compromise is a text-book example.
In the first place, a debate over tax cuts for the wealthy is not the debate the country ought to be having.
The poverty rate in the U.S. is the highest it has been in decades; a record number of people are using food stamps to feed their families; a record number of people report going hungry because they can't afford to buy food; record numbers of families are losing their homes to foreclosure; entire towns are becoming permanently unemployed because of the recession; our nation's infrastructure is literally falling apart.
Yet the GOP managed to focus the political conversation almost exclusively on preserving tax breaks for those who are faring the best and who need help the least.
Secondly, the conversation itself is based on a false premise: that extending tax cuts for the wealthy is essential to "sustain the economic recovery."
The Republican Party - aided and abetted by virtually the entire media - was so relentless about propagating this idea that almost no one bothered to question its fundamental assumption.
Most news outlets failed to ask the most obvious question: If the tax cuts in question have been in place since before the recession and have remained in place for the past two years while the economy has struggled to recover, how does maintaining the status quo boost the economy?
More to the point, a recent Congressional Budget Office report examined the effectiveness of various parts of President Obama's initial stimulus bill and drew the following conclusion:
Direct spending on highway construction, water-system upgrades and energy efficiency were among the most effective, the CBO said, while tax breaks for businesses and higher-income people cost more in lost revenues than they made up for in increased economic activity.
Nevertheless, the GOP managed to convince a majority of Americans that the stimulus has been a "failure," and that cutting taxes for the wealthy is the only certain way to stimulate economic activity.
A recent study about misinformation during the past election further illuminates the problem:
...the poll found strong evidence that voters were substantially misinformed on many of the key issues of the campaign. Such misinformation was correlated with how people voted and their exposure to various news sources.
Voters' misinformation included beliefs at odds with the conclusions of government agencies, generally regarded as non-partisan, consisting of professional economists and scientists.
This study has received a lot of press mostly because of its conclusion that daily viewers of Fox News are the most misinformed people in the nation. This conclusion is, of course, hardly surprising, given the fact that Fox News is the GOP's main media outlet for unfettered dissemination of factually incorrect information.
As entertaining as that conclusion is, the larger picture is far more disturbing. The politics of distraction and misdirection, already so highly effective for the Republican Party, are now being combined with a disinformation campaign so successful that most people can no longer tell fact from fiction.
Opinion is divided on whether President Obama did the right thing by reaching a compromise with the Republicans. Many on the left naturally, and justifiably, feel angry and betrayed. At the opposite end of the spectrum, many on the right are positively gleeful. They believe they have put one over on President Obama and that now, having further increased the deficit, they can pursue their promised agenda of cutting spending once the new Congress takes power.
In the middle is someone like Andrew Sullivan, who believes it was Obama who got the better of the Republicans by getting the stimulus he has always wanted and setting the stage for a two-year battle over taxes and spending - which Sullivan predicts Obama will win.
As usual, no one knows for sure.
What is certain is that the Republican Party, newly empowered in the House of Representatives, will work hard to ensure that the country continues to have the wrong conversation. The new Republican members of Congress came into a office not just on a wave of public discontent, but with the aid of the most dishonest and repellant television ads in the history of political campaigns.
The Republican Party has declared all-out war against President Obama and his "radical agenda."
And as in any war, the first casualty is the truth. Don't expect to hear much of it in the coming two years.