Recognize the tactic of Rovian Projection

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

2 candidates:

#1 - Child of privilege raised in an Admiral's household, barely scraped though the Naval Academy, is currently married to a beer heiress, owns 4 properties mortgage-free valued in the millions, and his wife says that one simply must have a personal plane to get around Arizona. Has currently stopped speaking to the press apparently.

#2- Raised by a single mother and grandparents, becomes Harvard Law Review editor, community organizer, law school professor, author, owns a single mortgaged property valued at around 650,000, married to lawyer wife.

Now, given the above, who would you normally think could conceivably be characterized as - "elitist" "arrogant" and "out of touch" with the concerns of Middle America?

Amazing that those pejorative terms have been linked by the media to NUMBER 2!!!! In our Alice in Wonderland world, terms that could have been used to effectively describe Number 1 have been pre-emptively projected onto Number 2, effectively taking them out of play as adjectives for Number 1.

Rovian projection is taking your own weaknesses and projecting them onto the opposition first. This weakens the opposition and inoculates you. But, it requires orchestration and everyone being on the same page.

So, one day every single pundit and media personage got up and decided that Obama was "arrogant" and "elite" independently? I hardly think so.

[Demeter]

1. Even More: Consider the Accusations of "Acting Presidential"

Why, George Bush doesn't act anything at all like that! It's ludicrous on its face.