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August 21, 2012 12:53 PM “Big Debate” Versus “Big Lies”

By Ed Kilgore

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Mike Tomasky at Daily Beast and Greg Sargent at WaPo’s Plum Line are very determined this morning to bat down the idea that in choosing Paul Ryan for Veep, the Romney campaign has signaled its eagerness to make the election a “big debate” over the challenges facing the country. The proof, they both say, is that the newly minted Romney/Ryan campaign has undertaken a barrage of highly mendacious communications that are designed to obscure rather the debate the big questions, forcing the opposition (in the absence of MSM refereeing) to become one vast and constant truth squad.

I certainly need no persuading about the GOP presidential campaign’s lying ways. But I do dispute the premise that up until now everybody understood the Ryan choice as representing a “Big Debate” or “Big Choice” strategy. My reaction at the time was that the Ryan selection was most likely a sop to the conservative movement to get them off Romney’s back and regain some tactical flexibility. Yes, it most definitely indicated a realization that Romney’s original plan to run on the emptiest, most superficial message imaginable (basically aimed at making Mitt an acceptable risk for voters who had already rejected Obama) hadn’t worked (in no small part because Romney’s own biographical case for the presidency was falling apart) and was the source of constant and ever-escalating complaints from the Right. This was a major strategic concession to an Obama campaign that badly needed to change the election from a “referendum” to a “choice.” But did that mean Republicans were consigned to offering an “honest choice?” Of course not.

Where this can sometimes get confusing, however, is in the epistemology of “honesty.” To cite the most obvious example, Romney’s barrage of ads accusing Obama of “gutting” welfare reform is, to use the technical term for it, a pack of lies. It’s basically made up, with one or two specious footnotes from ideological warhorses like Heritage’s Robert Rector who are undoubtedly thrilled their longtime backwater issue of welfare policy is suddenly in the center of a presidential campaign.

But to conservative ideologues who have wanted a “choice” election as badly as have Obama supporters, these lies are “true” on some “deeper level,” in that they would fall down and start bleeding from the ears if they lost the unshakable belief that Barack Obama is a sinister Alinsky disciple determined to make the federal government a vast machine of redistribution from good people to bad people. I mean, seriously, folks: a large proportion of conservative “base” activists think or at least suspect that people like me and thee are savages who want to legalize infanticide, outlaw religion, and take away their guns, all in the pursuit of stealing their hard-earned money and sharing it with deadbeats whose votes we are buying. In the context of that belief system, how much “evidence” do you need that Obama is gutting welfare reform? Not a lot.

So you can very accurately say the Romney/Ryan campaign is serving up plate after plate of deliberate, despicable lies, and also say they are giving the troops whose precise turnout rate is critical to the outcome what they want to hear and “honestly” believe. It helps that if deployed cleverly, such lies are also persuasive to low-information undecided voters, particularly non-college-educated white folk who assume all politicians are lying most of the time.

Is it possible a “big debate” could break out at some point? Yes, thanks to the specificity of Paul Ryan’s budget and ideological history and Romney’s many promises to toe the conservative movement’s line, some real interaction could occur. But it won’t be easy to produce, and no, it’s not at all what the Romney/Ryan team seems to have in mind.

Ed Kilgore is a contributing writer to the Washington Monthly. He is managing editor for The Democratic Strategist and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. Find him on Twitter: @ed_kilgore.
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Comments

  • Gummo on August 21, 2012 1:10 PM:

    Is it possible a “big debate” could break out at some point?

    No.

    Rmoney & Ryan have no interest in a 'debate.' They will continue to lie to our faces as they've done all along.

    They know they can't win an honest debate. They can read polls as well or better than we can. They know what the country thinks about their ideas when all the distortions are stripped away.

    No, picking Ryan was not part of some imaginary Village "debate." It was pure politics by a man who STILL didn't have the base sewn up mere weeks before the convention.

  • c u n d gulag on August 21, 2012 1:24 PM:

    Slinging mud, and especially racist mud, is all they have left.

    They don't want to debate on ANY issues, they want to use wedge issues to divide and conquer.

    That's worked pretty well for the Republican Party for over 40 years.
    My hope, is that they're going to that well once too often.
    But they have a genuinely terrible Presidential candidate, who stands for nothing, and a preening, over-reaching, self-loving sociopath as their VP candidate.
    So what have they got left, but to sling the old mud?

  • jjm on August 21, 2012 1:54 PM:

    The GOP thought they could Swift Boat Obama all the way to victory. They are piling their lies higher and deeper, and coordinating their 'message' with the Newsweek/Daily Beast liar Niall Ferguson, and the Dinesh D'Sousa film coming out about Obama's roots.

    I believe they have suffered a shock with Obama's early, aggressive campaigning. The election's 'debates' are now about how much and how often Romney lies (from his specious 'I created a million jobs at Bain; errr, I mean 10,000" to his assertion he paid 'taxes every year' -- which taxes? real estate? sales?) Obama, I believe, undermined the GOP's credibility from the get go--and they are trying the offense that they must resort to as their only defense.

    With the Ryan pick, Romney's ccrypto-moderate mask fell away. The fact that Ryan proposed vouchers for Medicare, cutting education and Pell Grants, et al, plus co-sponosred Akin's personhood amendment and his bill on redefining rape tells the tale. The moderate-maybe mask can't be put back on.

  • boatboy_srq on August 21, 2012 3:52 PM:

    But to conservative ideologues who have wanted a “choice” election as badly as have Obama supporters, these lies are “true” on some “deeper level,” in that they would fall down and start bleeding from the ears if they lost the unshakable belief that Barack Obama is a sinister Alinsky disciple determined to make the federal government a vast machine of redistribution from white people to brown people.

    FIFY.

    And let's not forget the mass-murder-by-federally-mandated-abortions, mass-forced-divorces-of-hetero-couples-for-gay-marriage, give-loons-guns-so-voters-will-give-up-their-2nd-amendment-rights-when-those-loons-kill-people (aside: you'd think the sheer number of dashes required to string that together would give them some clue how ridiculous it is) nastiness they ascribe to BHO.

  • TCinLA on August 21, 2012 4:44 PM:

    Well, I for one wouldn't mind outlawing the Southern Baptists, and I'd love to personally take their guns from their cold dead hands.

    /snark

    Seriously, though, what you are outlining is is the kind of political campaign a certain right wing political party in a central European state ran 80 years ago.

  • Anonymous on August 21, 2012 4:57 PM:

    A few relevant quotes:

    "A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side." ~Aristotle

    “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject
    any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has
    captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once
    you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
    - Carl Sagan

    "The resentful man is not a citizen; he is an unthinking being whose discontents will, given sufficient play in the public sphere, poison whatever system plays host to them."
    – Jose Ortega y Gassett

    "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
    George Orwell - "Politics and the English Language"

    If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it... It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
    - Joseph Goebbels

  • TCinLA on August 21, 2012 4:59 PM:

    Anonymous was me

  • Doug on August 21, 2012 9:29 PM:

    "...and also say they are giving the troops...what they want to hear and 'honestly' believe." Ed Kilgore

    One COULD say that. One could also say "enabling" (as in an illness/addiction) or, better still "aiding and abetting"...