Negative Advertising

I was up early enough this AM to watch a bit of Don Imus on MSNBC. For those that don’t know him, he is an irreverent pseudo cowboy that broadcasts from NYC, but is either #1 or close to it as a radio personality inside the Washington beltway. He has a lot of politicians and media people on. McCain, Kerry, and Biden are favorite politicians, Tom Oliphant from the Boston Globe and Tim Russert from NBC news are on there quite a bit. Russert was on this AM.

It seems that his shtick of early AM, seems like just joshing around, off the wall comments gets folks to let their hair down a bit and they seem to enjoy pontificating on there even a bit more than normal. Russert did masterful job of talking about how “After 911 the Bush people just wanted to keep moving forward with the war on terror without investigation, and after no WMD were found in Iraq they had the same idea again, now they seem to think that the time to figure out what went wrong in New Orleans is after the rebuilding.”. He went on to discuss how we can do both, and there needs to be deep study, because the American people seem to have been “lied to” about homeland security as they were “lied to” about WMD. The Federal Government has failed, and we need to understand why.

Russert was very smooth in his “drawing of connections”, and even managed to touch ever so slightly that things might have not been done “perfectly” by the city and state governments, but then moved right back to “responsibility being at the top”. While Russert is MSM, I wouldn’t have previously put him in the rabid Bush-hater class, but his performance of this AM and I hear on his “Meet the Press” show on Sunday show that he is drifting to the “rabid class”.

For the left, the “let’s beat on the Federal Government since it is run by Bush” has to be a bit pyrrhic. As they savage FEMA, Homeland Security, and whatever other surrogates they can find for the hated Bush, most people are simply going to get the message “Government Doesn’t Work”. The very people who cheer for ever more massive federal bureaucracy are forced to paint it as powerlessness and ineffective. Of course they “mean well”, they REALLY only want to savage Bush, but since he is President, people get confused and think he is part of “the government”.

Someone wrote a piece for the back of US Nudes and World Retort (better known and US News and World Report ;-) ) long ago, in which they brilliantly pointed out that if Coke and Pepsi discovered negative politics to the extent that the US parties discovered it after Watergate, nobody would be drinking soft drinks in this country. The airwaves would be full of shocking exposures of rotting teeth, heart attacks from obesity and caffeine, mice, fingers and all matter of deleterious found in containers and on and on. In general, they avoid negative advertising because they BOTH want to keep selling their product, and they know that negative ads would hurt BOTH them and their competitors.

What is the MSM media and and the Democrats really “selling” when they go after Bush? Well, what they THINK they are selling is that he is a horrible President, and by extension Republicans are horrible, and so voters should vote for Democrats for Congress and the Senate in ’06. But how likely is that to work? It works GREAT with the already Bush hating mad as hell 20% who immediately parrot the “Bush is incompetent, Bush hates Blacks, Republicans cut the budget so the dikes failed, etc”. It sounds good in their echo chamber. People like to bitch as well, so for a few weeks a few more sheep may pick up the bleat, but is that going to last for over a year?

But what is the BIG message? “Government doesn’t work”. We spent a bunch of money on Government and it didn’t help. In fact, they have missed a HUGE chance to point out that Government DID work … it worked in Mississippi, it worked in Texas, it worked all over Florida last year as 3 hurricanes were dealt with. It also is working big time from the feds … lots of choppers rescuing 10s of thousands of people who failed to heed a warning, federal and National Guard troops bringing order and aid, the Corps of Engineers fixing the levees, pumps flown in from across the whole country. The very folks that are the biggest fans of government, which in general IS working are forced by their hatred of Bush to give that very government a black eye.

Most people understand that it is the “system” that works more than the temporary occupants of various elected and appointed offices. As a conservative I’m often amazed by how well it really does work … even under Bill Clinton, so dedicated to the Presidency that he not only brought pizza into the office, but sex as well. Talk about competent leadership. It is big and often bloated, but nearly everyone at all levels is very likely to try their very best to deal with a hurricane where lives are at stake. If must be so hard to be a lefty and have Bush be this horrible buffoon that is completely incompetent … so much so that he is “criminally negligent” in his handling of a natural disaster, yet he keeps on beating your party in elections. Even worse, how fragile does that make the Federal Government? How many people in how many places of work rely on word from the very top to react to the basic tasks of their business? Like none?

Bias is expected, but if they stay on this track the MSM and the Democrats have a very legitimate chance to hurt themselves and the causes they claim to support far worse than they hurt Bush.