Strategy Made Simple

[Plaid Adder]

I've been thinking about whether now is the time to panic. Here is what I came up with.

We can at this point assume that the pool of voters who would potentially support a McCain-Palin ticket breaks down into four categories:

1) The ill-informed (further subdivides into the uninformed and the misinformed)
2) The extremely rich
3) The minions of the Christian Right
4) Idiots

The #4 category is broader than usual this year because it includes people who claim not to be racist but won't vote for a Black president, in addition to all the usual idiots (people who vote based on whose face and voice they like better, people who vote based on how hot they think the candidates are, people who vote for whoever's ad they saw last, people who vote for Nader).

It is possible to inform the ill-informed, but the media makes this pretty difficult by reinforcing the misinformation 24/7 via their "coverage" of every highly newsworthy lying ad the McCain campaign puts out--and of course by training people to be incapable of paying attention to any argument lasting longer than 90 seconds. The extremely rich are not necessarily a lock for McCain's campaign because it is clear that neither he nor Palin know jack shit about the economy, and the extremely rich do worry about the market some. However, since Obama's campaign is structurally prevented from pandering to the extremely rich there's not much headway to make there. Ditto with the minions of the Christian Right, who would vote for anyone with Palin's fundie pedigree.

So we are left with the idiots. Some idiots can be won over through intensive TV advertizing; but I'm not particularly confident that this is a statistically significant number, and there are many reasons why the typical TV-driven idiot would fall harder for Palin at this moment in time.

So basically, the pool of potential McCain-Palin voters is going to be difficult to chip away at. Therefore, the strategy is simple: don't try to change them. Just outnumber them.

This is what the "ground game" is about. And the pisser with that is, we won't know if it's working till election day, because new voters are less likely to show up in polls. But that's apparently what Obama's campaign is staking most of its chips on, and I think in general that makes sense. We can bitch all we want about "why doesn't he fight back." The evidence suggests to me that he _is_ fighting back. Every one of these ads has been answered by his campaign people or by Obama himself in his campaign appearances. I hear the responses. Language like "disgusting," "dishonorable," and "lies" has been used aplenty. He only _appears_ to be taking it lying down because *he does not have a gigantic free-of-charge media bullhorn poised to repeat his every word until it is dinned into every American's ears,* whereas the Republican candidate, for whatever reason, does.

The media will always trash our candidate. We will never 'win' the media game; it is designed to make us lose. We have to win the *numbers* game, and that is about voter registration, GOTV, combating voter purges and election fraud.

Eyes on the @#$! prize,

The Plaid Adder

[Cleita]

1. Maybe the rapture will come and eliminate category #3.

One can wish!

[HereSince1628]

2. "Idiots" there is a category we can welcome people into...

Why do they seem like idiots? Maybe there is something there that would indicate an appropriate approach to welcoming to cast a vote for the winning team.

[Cleita]

3. ...

:kick: