GORILLA DUST
How do you get voters to vote against their economic interest?
Impossible you say?
We do it all the time in America.
Instead of having them focus on what's important, all you have to do is to divert their attention to some non-economic issue that you build up int a wedge-issue of iconic proportion.
Abortion, for example. Before 1973 this was a non-issue in national political affairs. Each state had its own laws on the subject. Then along came Roe v. Wade (1973) recognizing a woman's right to choose whether to abort as a matter of individual liberty and guess what. Those opposed to abortion, particularly social conservatives, the religious right, the GOP base realized that money was to be made and votes gathered by appealing to the like-minded in huge mailing campaigns. The Republic is going to hell in a handbasket, babies are being murdered, through abortion. Send money and vote for the following. Voters sent money and elected George W. Bush, and his father before him, and Ronald Reagan.
What does abortion have to do with whether we go to war or the economy collapses? Nothing, except that it helps elect social conservatives (who are against abortion and gay rights such as marriage) and social conservatives are more likely to vote for right-planted candidates who are harmful to their economic interests (George W. Bush, for example) than center or left planted candidates who may help them with, say health care legislation.
The problem with health care legislation, politically, is that right-wing opponents can deride it as "socialized medicine," as they have since the 1960s, if not earlier.
But last week, Congress voted to save the economy, a few days after the House voted not to save the economy (the House flip-flopped) to the tune of $700 Billion in the famous "Cash for Trash" program, which hasn't seemed to help, as the market is diving down this morning.
By focusing on abortion instead of the economy, the government stands accused of taking its eye off the ball, just as voters took their eyes off the ball. The result is that the ball is being driven out of the park outside the foul lines.
Ross Perot introduced the term "gorilla dust" when he ran as a 3rd party candidate against Bill Clinton in 1992. I hadn't heard it then and haven't seen it since except last evening reading Jack Beatty's "Age of Betrayal," in which he describes the decades following the Civil War when the nation abandoned not only the poor blacks recently freed from slavery, but the poor whites who were no better off economically.
This was the age where those who controlled the railroads, mines, Wall Street, became obscenely rich while those who did the work with their hands lapsed into penury. Never had extremes in wealth grown so far apart. The government was captured by the wealth. Jay Gould ran the government from Wall Street.
Efforts were made to curb the abuse (the Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1890) but its teeth were removed by a Supreme Court in which vacancies were filled by presidents of both parties beholden to Wall Street. No matter which party won the White House (Republicans mostly) Wall Steet won.
As America changed economically, expressed in a huge expansion of rail and mines and industry, plus a rising labor movement marked by innumberable strikes to protest the abuses (long hours, low wages, unsafe conditions, child and women labor) broken up by the national guard and private goons, the voters responded to "waving the bloody shirt" of the Civil War, in which voters were reminded to vote for the party of Lincoln (the GOP) and not the Democrats who were soft on the war when not actually opposed.
Beatty reintroduces the term "gorilla dust," later coined by Perot, to describe how the voters voted against their economic interests when distracted by the bloody shirt.
An article by Howard Myerson in this mornings' Washington Post provides the latest example of throwing gorilla dust to influence a presidential election, as the McCain supporters feel the need to change the subject away from the economy, where McCain dies, to the fact that Obama has an acquaintance who was a Weatherman during the Vietnam war. The Weatherman were home-grown American terrorists (the Weather Underground) who bombed public offices to protest the war, killing a number of people in the process, some innocent and some of their own. Decades later two of these people are university professors but this doesn't mean they've repudiated their past, necessarily. One was reported as commenting that he wished he done more to protest the war but it came out sounding as though he may have wished he'd done more bombing, or so say the McCain people. Obama is stuck with this character, unfortunately, and McCain and his attack-dog, Palin, are on the hunt, using it to bash him from now to election day, as though the Obama had endoresed the former terrorist rather than the other way around.
Perhaps if Obama could get Ayers to endorse McCain he'd be onto something.
Meanwhile, watch out for the gorilla dust. It's a bit like the football lineman who throws dust from the field into the eyes of the player he's blocking, taking him out of the play.
If you don't want to be taken out of the play, inoculate yourself from the gorilla dust.
A Pal Around McCain
By Harold Meyerson
Monday, October 6, 2008; A15
"There's no question that we have to change the subject here," a senior Republican operative told The Post's Michael D. Shear in a story published Saturday.
The "subject" in question is the economy and how to fix it. As Americans have taken their eye off the ball -- that is, off John McCain's sterling qualities of character and command -- by focusing on the economy, Barack Obama has surged into the lead nationally and in many key battleground states.
So long as the candidates talk about that pesky economy, McCain's handlers have realized, McCain will continue to swoon. Thus the campaign has announced that it will go on the attack again on the momentous topics of Obama's ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, the onetime Weatherman who has been a University of Illinois education professor for nearly two decades.
Campaigning on Saturday in Colorado, Sarah Palin accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists" by associating with Ayers, citing as her source a New York Times story from that morning. In fact, the story concluded that the Obama-Ayers "relationship" consisted of both men attending the board meetings of two Chicago organizations and that there had been no contact between the men, other than bumping into each other on the sidewalk (they live in the same neighborhood), since Obama went to the U.S. Senate in January 2005.
The story of Obama's interaction with Ayers is drenched in irony, since it is basically a tale of Obama being co-opted into Chicago's civic establishment. In 1995, Obama, then a young lawyer with political ambitions but as yet no office, was recruited to chair the board of a school reform organization funded and established by the Annenberg Foundation -- a group that distributes the wealth of the estate of Walter Annenberg, Richard Nixon's ambassador to Britain. It was only then that Obama met Ayers, who already was a board member and a figure in Chicago's education-policy elite. (Mayor Richard Daley, that known radical, told the Times that he had consulted Ayers on education issues for years.)
Go join your city's establishment, and see what it gets you.
But if the McCain people want to rummage through presidential candidates' associations, real or imagined, to turn up figures who threaten to pull down this proud republic, they should begin in-house. Chief among those to whom responsibility attaches for the financial crisis that is plunging the nation into recession is former Texas senator Phil Gramm, McCain's own economic guru.
Gramm was always Wall Street's man in the Senate. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during the Clinton administration, he consistently underfunded the Securities and Exchange Commission and kept it from stopping accounting firms from auditing corporations with which they had conflicts of interest. Gramm's piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up. As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion. And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up.
The CFMA also prohibited government regulation of the energy-trading market, which enabled Enron to nearly bankrupt the state of California before bankrupting itself.
The problem with this exercise, of course, is that Gramm's relationship to McCain is not comparable to the relationships that Ayers or Wright have with Obama. The idea that either Ayers or Wright would have any impact on the workings of an Obama administration is nonsensical. But Gramm and McCain do have an enduring political and economic alliance. McCain chaired Gramm's short-lived presidential campaign in 1996; Gramm is co-chair of McCain's current effort. McCain has not repudiated reports that Gramm is on the shortlist to become Treasury secretary if McCain is elected, even after Gramm labeled America "a nation of whiners."
If we are to believe his managers, McCain will charge into tomorrow night's debate seeking to "change the subject" from the economy to Obama's dangerous liaisons. It's not, however, likely to be a winning tactic. Obama will argue that in a time of deepening economic crisis, the public deserves a debate in which the candidates focus on their ideas for recovery rather than tendentious attacks on their rival's presumed associates. If pressed, though, he can mention that it is McCain's senior economic adviser who has diminished American solvency and power beyond the wildest dreams of anti-American terrorists.
