Most of us have heard and laughed at Stephen Colbert’s neologism “truthiness,” defined by him as “truth that comes from the gut, not books,” and defined by Merriam-Webster Online as “”the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.”
Well, check out this quote from “Republican strategist” John Feehery in today’s Washington Post, referring to the demonstrably false claims that Sarah Palin fought and slew the “Bridge To Nowhere:”

The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there’s a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she’s new, she’s popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent. As long as those are out there, these little facts don’t really matter.

How truthy!

Third Way and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner have recently conducted a survey of public attitudes on national security issues that should be a bright red blinking light for Democrats.
The bad news is that the ancient “credibility gap” between Ds and Rs on national security issues has reemerged during this presidential campaign. The good news is that is can be reduced or erased if Democrats continue to show they are willing to use military force when necessary, support the military in its essential roles, and have a “smart but tough” strategy for defending the country. And the present opportunity for Democrats is that Americans are open to the argument that Republicans, including John McCain, have “reckless” views on national security issues. Here’s the key paragraph from the study:

As suggested by the most effective political ads from the past—from the “daisy ad” against Barry Goldwater, to the ads showing images of Michael Dukakis in a tank—the central question when it comes to national security is usually “which party represents the greater risk?” To change the historic perceptions about Democrats and Republicans for the first time since Vietnam, Democrats must win that argument. They must prove that they are just as tough as Republicans—unblinking in their willingness to use every tool at their disposal, including force, to protect the country. But now Democrats also have an opportunity to prove that Republicans pose a greater risk on security by defining their own approach as smart and contrasting the approach of Bush-era Republicans as reckless and out of touch.

In the end, this issue represents a subset, and perhaps the most important subset, of the election’s key question: at a time when Americans are very unhappy with their governance, who offers the best chance for “responsible” change: the supposedly “mavericky” Republican ticket that actually maintains the domestic and national security policies of the current administration? Or Democrats who have learned the key lessons about their own past political weaknesses, and the real-life failures of the GOP?

It took me a while to read it, but Mark Schmitt’s meditation on the Republican National Convention at the American Prospect site nicely captured the essence of the McCain-Palin campaign, as reflected in McCain’s own acceptance speech:

[B]y stripping away in embarrassment all aspects of his own party, by declaring independence without new ideology, and allegiance to nothing but a self-defined notion of “Country First,” it was McCain who was left standing alone, the raw individual, resting everything on his own story, his own honor, his own instincts. It was a far bigger claim than the man or his speech could deliver.

I’d note that McCain has added Sarah Palin’s “own story, [her] own honor, [her] own instincts” to the rationale for the GOP ticket, but that’s exactly why her selection represented a doubling-down of McCain’s strategic gamble of posing as a “maverick” while championing Bush policies, not some audacious history-making tilt to the center. Picking Palin guaranteed him among conservative activists all the slack he needed to say and do whatever he needed to get elected. It was an added bonus that Palin herself is perhaps even more adept than her running-mate at using her “story” to disguise her actual views, which wouldn’t command more than a small minority of voters if put to a direct test.

The headline from Jonathan Martin and Jim VandeHei of The Politico says it all: “McCain, Palin push biography, not issues.”

When John McCain’s campaign manager said last week that this presidential election “is not about issues,” it wasn’t a Freudian slip. It was an unvarnished preview of McCain’s new campaign plan.
In the past week, McCain — with new running mate Sarah Palin always close by his side — has transformed the Republican campaign narrative into what amounts to a running biography of this new political odd couple.
In the duo’s new stump speech and their first post-convention ad, the impression campaign strategists hope to leave is unmistakable. McCain is the war hero. Palin is the Every­mom. And together, they will rattle Washington.
Considering the big challenges the country faces — two wars and a wobbly economy, for starters — the focus on personal narratives might strike some as jarringly superficial for the times.

Well, you go to war with the candidates you’ve got, and the McCain-Palin ticket has no policy ideas other than those which are identified with the Bush-Cheney administration and/or the right wing of the Republican Party. I’m reminded of a comment that William F. Buckley once made about a photo-laden biography of his political nemesis, New York Mayor John Lindsay: “If I were commissioned to write a favorable biography of Lindsay, it would consist entirely of photographs.”
There’s a school of thought, particularly strong among Democrats, that says issues “don’t matter” in presidential elections; that it’s all about character, and narrative, and striking the right emotional chords. We are often told that Al Gore and John Kerry lost because they didn’t understand this “truth.”
I don’t buy it, especially this year. Sure, elections are not public policy seminars; many voters are unversed on policy, and/or don’t trust that politicians will do what they promise when in office; and the majority of voters have made up their minds on party ID grounds before any debate on issues occurs. But voters do have concrete concerns that are connected to specific needs, for themselves and their country, and specific grievances about the performance of those in power today. It need not be an exercise in sterile wonkery to point out, for example, that John McCain’s health care plan is a carbon-copy of Bush’s most recent proposal, that would undermine job-based health insurance, drive millions of Americans into expensive individual policies, and make it even harder than it already is for people with pre-existing conditions to get coverage. This argument can and should be made with passion and even anger. But it needs to be made, against the effort by Team McCain to get across the finish line without discussing or defending what the man might actually do as president. (The debates will be a high hurdle for this effort).
Bring on the passionate wonkery, the compelling talking points, the policy debates wrapped in narrative and the needs of “real people!” To a remarkable degree, the Republican ticket is ceding the whole vast ground of America’s future agenda to Democrats. Let’s use it.

A quick addendum to our two earlier posts today: Hotline‘s got the Obama campaign’s 30-second ad rebutting the McCain-Palin “Original Mavericks” ad.

Our staff post earlier today cited a Tom Toles cartoon as perfectly expressing the absurd “maverick” message of the Republican National Convention.
Barack Obama apparently thought so, too; he quoted much of the cartoon’s script on two occasions today. But he should have gone on to say that the real cartoon is the McCain-Palin ad claiming the ticket as “original mavericks” who are devoted to fighting Republicans and corporate interests. It would have been more credible if Daffy Duck had narrated.

As expected, the McCain campaign’s addition of Sarah Palin to the ticket is being used to double-down on its highly deceptive claim that it offers some sort of repudiation to the Republican policies of the last eight years.
The latest McCain-Palin ad, dubbed “Original Mavericks,” is a small masterpiece of mendacity. Aside from the fact that it trumpets one heavily documented lie (that Palin “stopped the Bridge to Nowhere”), the idea that McCain and Palin can best be understood as warriors fighting Republicans and corporations is breathtakingly dishonest.
The best response yet made to this whole line of argument was yesterday’s Tom Toles cartoon in the Washington Post. It shows McCain and Palin standing outside the White House, with McCain hurling this threat:

Look out, Mr Bush! With the exception of economic policy and energy policy and social issues and tax policy and foreign policy and Supreme Court appointments and Rove-style politics, we’re coming in there to shake things up!

Rebutting the Republican ticket’s “maverick” claims is the most urgent challenge for Democrats between now and Election Day. If they are truly “mavericks” in any respect, it’s because they’d take the country in an even more extreme direction than the Bush-Cheney administration.

Dry wit Sarah Vowell’s cultural commentary is always worth a read. But on Saturday she hit on a couple of political messaging angles Dem ad-makers should think about. Here’s a clip from Vowell’s op-ed in the New York Times:

During a gubernatorial debate in 2006, Governor Palin claimed that if her daughter, then 16, were impregnated as the result of being raped, Ms. Palin would hope that the girl would “choose life,” which is a polite way of saying she would expect a tenth-grader to give birth to her rapist’s baby.
Here’s a not-so-polite fact about the United States: According to Amnesty International, a woman is raped here every six minutes.
Like his running mate, Senator McCain has been a true-blue opponent of abortion rights during his political career. Unlike his running mate, he supports the right to terminate a pregnancy in cases of rape, incest and to save the life of the mother. So does President Bush. During a Republican primary debate in 2000, Senator McCain denounced Mr. Bush for being in favor of the exception but not having the guts to push for putting it in writing in the official Republican Party platform that year.
This year, Senator McCain himself didn’t bother to stand up to the right wing of his party to insist that the rape and incest exception be written into the Republican Party platform. Just as he failed to stand up to the right wing of his party in choosing his running mate. His first choice was reported to be Senator Joseph Lieberman, a man who stood up to the Democratic Party to the extent that he isn’t even a Democrat anymore.

Some promising memes brewing here. First. McCain dumps his ‘principles’ whenever he smells an opportunity for more power (see Vega’s Aug. 6 post at TDS for more on this angle). Second, he backs down from political bullies. Third, If anything should happen to 72-76 year-old McCain during his term, President Palin — it’s difficult to even think the words — will appoint Supreme Court justices who favor her extremist positions on outlawing abortions, and perhaps her troubling ideas about book-banning.
As our recent staff post reported, healthy majorities of single women of all races are already tilting toward Obama. Some well-targeted ads (women watch more TV and surf more net than men) could help awaken more single women to the disturbing prospect of the McCain-Palin policies on abortion, and just might cut a little slice out of McCain’s big lead lead among white married women.
And Dems concerned about how the Catholic vote factors into the Palin effect, and anyone struggling with abortion as a personal and political issue, may find helpful our veep nominee’s comments on Meet the Press. As Biden explained,

It’s a personal and private issue. For me, as a Roman Catholic, I’m prepared to accept the teachings of my church. But let me tell you. There are an awful lot of people of great confessional faiths–Protestants, Jews, Muslims and others–who have a different view. They believe in God as strongly as I do. They’re intensely as religious as I am religious. They believe in their faith and they believe in human life, and they have differing views as to when life–I’m prepared as a matter of faith to accept that life begins at the moment of conception. But that is my judgment. For me to impose that judgment on everyone else who is equally and maybe even more devout than I am seems to me is inappropriate in a pluralistic society.

The entire transcript and netcast of Biden’s Sunday appearance on MTP are highly recommended for illuminating the stark contrast in the gravitas of the Dem and GOP veep nominees — and, more importantly, for what it says about the presidential nominees who selected them.

In modern politics it has become increasingly important to be able to present the Democratic perspective in either very brief, one or two sentence sound-bites or short, one paragraph summaries of major issues and perspectives.
The format of many political discussions on television and radio allows each participant to speak only a few words at a time before being interrupted. Many “roundtables” and other print discussions give each individual commentator space for only one or two paragraphs.
In this kind of communication environment, having a set of sharply worded, succinct statements of the Democratic position on major issues becomes critical.
The speakers at the recent Democratic Convention produced dozens of first-rate sound-bites and short, one-paragraph summaries of this kind. TDS has brought together a large group of these quotes in a convenient format for use by Democratic spokespeople, citizen advocates and grass-roots supporters.
We believe you will find this collection quite useful during the coming weeks.
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