Infantile politics
: Fell asleep on the couch last night before I had a chance to recommend Dahlia Lithwick's guest column in The Times on the backfiring attempts to infantalize Bush as a campaign tactic of his opponents.
The tactic backfires because when you call Bush an idiot you also, by necessary extension, risk calling anyone who ever voted for him or considered voting for him or even supported him as President an idiot, and you also ignore the power of the people around him, who are not idiots. It's a rather idiotic strategy, for it turns off the people you are hoping to win over.
That is the same problem I have with all the Swifties' spittle-sputtering I can so conveniently follow in daily detail over at Instaphnom. As I said in a comment below when I dared mention the conservakerfluffle here, I'm looking at this as a voter and as a voter, I do not care about this nonstory -- just as I did not care about the nonstory of Bush's alleged military vacation -- and the more you screech about it, the more I turn off as a voter. I know I am not alone.
I actually have two problems with this:
First, it drags the political debate and campaign into the septic tank. Weren't we supposed to be better than that in this new medium? Weren't we supposed to be smart and talk about issues and what mattered in voters' lives and avoid the shallow, useless, mean-spirited example of attack journalism. Weren't we, huh?
Second, this all distracts from the real debate that should be occurring -- over health care, troop pullouts, Iraq, homeland security, the economy....
I'm equal-opportunity on this. I dismissed the attacks on Bush and the National Guard. I dismissed and attacked Michael Moore for his hatchet job on Bush in Fahrenheit 9/11. And I dismiss these attacks-for-attacks'-sake on Kerry. Shut up already. Stop wasting my time. Stop sputtering. Stop yelling at me to care about something I don't care about. Stop treating me like I'm some sort of lying pondscum if I consider voting for one of the two candidates for President -- either of them. I'm a voter, not an accomplice.
So now see how Lithwick goes after liberals in a liberal newspaper for the way they are going after conservative Bush:
It cannot have escaped anyone's notice that much of the current Bush-bashing aims to infantilize him. The most devastating segment in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," for instance, features the president - just after he learned of the second attack on the World Trade Center - perched on a chair in a Florida classroom, looking glazed and confused as he listens to a reading of "The Pet Goat." Mr. Bush's aide might well have whispered the news to one of the assembled students to greater effect, and the implication is inescapable: for seven long minutes, the president was Not a Man....
What's wrong with continuing efforts to characterize Mr. Bush as a not-particularly-smart third grader? For one thing, it plays to every stereotype of liberals as snotty know-it-alls who think everyone in a red state is anti-intellectual or simple-minded. It answers name-calling from the right with name-calling from the left.
These assertions also insult anyone who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000. Rather than offering an argument for Mr. Kerry, they merely disparage swing voters, who may be tempted to defect to the Democrats over the war or the economy, by sneering that they voted for a kid - and a dumb kid at that.
One of the most enduring memories from the Bush-Gore debates in 2000 was Al Gore, all sighs and eye-rolls, trapped in what must have felt like the middle-school playground fight from hell instead of a presidential debate. Everything about Mr. Gore's demeanor signaled that he felt he was giving a punk kid a much-needed scolding. Which missed the point: a lot of very smart people voted for Mr. Bush in 2000 because to them, he represented a return to honesty and morality. Dismissing him as a stupid child, and these voters as stupid-children-by-association, is no way to win them back.
Furthermore, the campaign to cast Mr. Bush as a bumbling child ignores the very grown-up machine that stands behind him. Infantilizing the president shifts the focus away from the Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Ashcrofts and Wolfowitzes....
Read the rest, please.
