Reply #2: Republicans have some theory of "the President as empty suit and source of distraction"

[struggle4progress]

Every winning coalition is something of a mish-mash

Nixon's Southern strategy required the Republicans to assemble an alliance of laissez-faire corporatists and racist yahoos. The cement for this alliance has always been a nonsensical blather that serves two ends: (1) it convinces cynical manipulators that the campaign understands advertising techniques necessary to manipulate the public and that the candidate if victorious will be able to distract attention, screening the real details of the administration from public scrutiny; and (2) the blather includes enough codewords to excite support from the yahoos

Reagan blathered bilge for eight years, and many folk wasted their energy responding to the distraction; meanwhile, behind the scenes, his appointees did what they wanted without the spotlight of attention. W uses the same strategy: his incoherent and inconsistent jabber has distracted much of the nation from the crimes of his regime

Palin was chosen because she would excel as an air-headed empty-suit distraction. "Joe"-the-Plumber's briefly famous because the campaign could grab a word here and a sentence fragment there, to excite the yahoos to wave plungers and shout "Communists!" at reporters. The lesson is simply that McCain would "govern" as Reagan did, using soundbites to create little controversies that distract attention from whatever his administration actually does

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