- Attack your opponent where he’s strongest.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This is a fairly old idea, but the Republican party, on the national level, has been particularly skilled at this recently–think of the swiftboating of military hero John Kerry. Right now, Obama’s greatest strength is the enthusiasm and excitement about his campaign. As distinguished from actual political support–clearly he’s polling well and has a healthy chance against McCain, but the buzz and hype over his candidacy, fairly or not, far exceeds that of McCain, who seems to be running for dogcatcher this week.
David Plotz of Slate (who supports Obama!): “That’s slightly fascistic…. That’s a very, like, let’s rally the nation [style of speaking]. I don’t want to be rallied.”
You may remember that Tribune Company Star Columnist Jonah Goldberg wrote a book arguing that the liberal wing of the modern Democratic party is fascist, based on the “purity test” principle–check off certain similarities to the Nazis, like environmentalism, organic food (seriously), animal rights (no, seriously), the New Deal, and so forth, and get a fascism score. This is of course total lunacy, but thanks to his prominence (thanks, LA Times!) the argument has enough pull to become an undercurrent in the exciting new Obama=Hitler meme. Hullabaloo and Jesse Taylor have much, much more on this.
