Why Republican talking heads make no sense

[JohnnyRingo]

Have our views changed....Or has the someone shifted the viewpoint to the right?


Like Everything Else, Blame Clinton

excerpt:

The research shows, not surprisingly, that Kerry is no more likely to change positions than Bush, perhaps less so, but that is not the point. The Republicans going all the way back to Clinton (for him, the moniker was "waffler") have painted the Democrats as vacillating and therefore, "wussy," partly because of Clinton's very success at finding compromise between positions:

And, when Clinton embraced the death penalty, welfare reform, and middle-class tax cuts, suddenly the issues the GOP had used to pulverize generations of hapless Democrats were off the table. Republicans, saddled with unpopular stances of their own (on issues like health care, education, and the environment), suddenly had little choice but to run on character.

<snip>

Having no attractive agenda to speak of ("the ownership society"?), Republicans have since Clinton played on the lack of expertise of the mass media reporters they speak to, knowing that the only thing they can effectively cover are character issues.


Republicans, at this point, are far more advanced than Democrats in circulating the kinds of damaging anecdotes that political reporters will repeat, and that can make the leap into the popular culture. First, they have a more sophisticated understanding of how narratives about candidates are established and how to play into them. Second, they have access to a partisan media network that Democrats are only in the formative stages of reproducing.

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