No Vampires

The latest email just sent this morning to the Human Events list:

Now, step by step, and as clearly as possible, I will try to outline what is going on here and why emails like these represent a crucial strategic opportunity for progressives who wish to help defeat the Big Cons that will unfold during this year's general election.

1) What you are looking at. This fundraising ad, sent to the email list of the conservative magazine Human Events, claims to be an attempt to raise money to more widely air this television commercial.

2) It is actually a much more complicated political performance than that, one that advances several conservative goals simultaneously besides that of paying for more airings of the commercial, including:

A) Get people talking about the commercial so it stays in the public's attention as a "story," thereby earning free shows on the news, rendering a supposedly "local" ad buy national. Media Matters explains how this has begun happening>; this latest turn advances the strategy one step further: by advertising that the commercial is already being talked about by the mainstream media, it alerts any media who sees this email that this commercial is already "out there," as "fair game"—and ripe for yet further coverage.

B) Circulates a potentally "sticky" smear—Obama as aider and abetter of domestic terrorism—among the conservative grassroots, thereby energizing the base to put aside their reluctance to fight for John McCain by rendering the specter of an Obama presidency horrifying.

C) Perform crucial market research. Tickling the American people's lizard brains is no easy task, precisely because the fears that lay buried in our subconscious are so inchoate and mysterious. Which images of Obama will excite the electorate's disgust reflex? Since 2007, conservatives have thrown several against the wall, though none of them have quite yet stuck. First there was the image of Obama as a secret Muslim. Then it was Obama as scary black nationalist. There was, too, Obama as henpecked husband with the scary negress castrating wife. None have really quite stuck. Fundaising solicitations like the above email, however, can serve as an early warning system about what kind of images mightstick. Professional conservatives can simply see how much money solicitations based on various such smears raise, and use that amount as a de facto scorecard. Next time a commercial like this is produced—say, one establishing Obama as a secret homosexual, secret goat fucker, secret child-molester, or whatever—they can run similar such appeals, to figure out which one is worth the approaching the big-money boys for an appeal to turn it into the Swiftboat of 2008.

3) God bless the Internet. Such early inning gambits to (a) get smears "out there", (b) use smears to rile up the base,and (b) test-market smears to see which ones have the power to stic would have happened anyway in any presidential election year. Conservatives have run the same con in every presidential election year. Usually, however, they're able to keep it in the shadows. This year, however, the Internet renders that impossible—and makes it newly possible for progressives to fight back: this year, we can see monitor poker hands before they play their big bet.