The NY Times has a story up about the harder edge that Team Romney plans for the fall campaign. They have realized that nobody likes Mitt and just blaming President Obama for all economic problems since 2007 is not going to do it. And so they plan to use the GOP Convention to ramp up the harsh, pointed and targeted attacks on the President they’ve been experimenting with in August. These attacks are all aimed at white voters of a certain age. It takes the story 12 paragraphs to get to the heart of this strategy, but at least they call it out (emphasis and bracketed note added):
Mr. Romney’s chances hinge to a large degree on running up his advantage among white voters in swing states who show deep strains of opposition to Mr. Obama [because he’s black] but do not yet trust Mr. Romney to look out for their interests, Republican strategists say.
Many of those voters are economically disaffected, and the Romney campaign has been trying to reach them with appeals built around an assertion that Mr. Obama is making it easier for welfare recipients to avoid work. The Romney campaign is airing an advertisement falsely charging that Mr. Obama has “quietly announced” plans to eliminate work and job training requirements for welfare beneficiaries, a message Mr. Romney’s aides said resonates with working-class voters who see government as doing nothing for them.
The moves reflect a campaign infused with a sharper edge and overtones of class and race. On Friday, Mr. Romney said at a rally that no one had ever had to ask him about his birth certificate, and Mr. Ryan invoked his Catholicism and love of hunting. Democrats angrily said Mr. Romney’s remark associated him with the fringe “birther” camp seeking falsely to portray Mr. Obama as not American.
The GOP convention is going to be three days of code-talking and race baiting dog-whistles. Any lie will be fine if it promotes white fear. And the lies that test best to cause white voters to vote based on race will be repeated over and over and over again by team wingnut. I’d suggest we create a drinking game for every dog-whistle mentioned in the coming days, but then we would all be on a week long bender.
I’m glad that the NY Times called out the welfare lie as a lie, but disappointed that it was buried 12 graphs in. And they have yet to call out Team Mitt’s emerging “vote for me I’m white” campaign. Unless media outlets aggressively call out these race baiting lies, Team Mitt will continue to use them more and more. There should be a price paid for running a campaign based on lies and a shameless attempt to divide the Nation by race, but unless the folks call out and condemn the tactic it will be the dominant feature of Mitt’s closing campaign strategy.
I have little hope that Romney will pay a price for this crap as the press loves to pretend that “both sides do it” and that will give Team Mitt all the protection that they need to run their Ni-CLANG! strategy 24/7 from here on out.
That means we have to work twice as hard to get out the vote. We must defeat this weasel.
Cheers
piratedan
well since both sides do it is a journalistic truism, where in the hell are all of those Obama ads stating that there’s a Ni-clang! in the White House?
JPL
Palin’s entire speech crossed the line into racism and although it did not help her, it might help Mitt. The economy is struggling and last election people knew who was the blame. They expected the President to work miracles overnight. MSM will let Mitt lie his way until the election.
Spaghetti Lee
One common mindset I see among conservatives, especially the libertarian types, is about how Romney/Ryan (especially Ryan) is the dawning of a new era of small government and individual enterpreneurship, blah blah blah, and how those statist Democrats are so old hat, so anyone who wants to be part of the future better get on the R/R train.
This is the future? ‘Lazy black welfare queen’ smears that were a cliche when Reagan used them? Good God, if it wasn’t so offensive it would be pathetic. Romney has no ideas, no convictions, no goals or promises for America, I’m not even sure he knows why he’s running, other than “I’m a rich guy and I want it”. So this is all they have, because there’s no other way they can convince people to vote for them.
I do get nervous about hypotheticals like this, because it comes a bit too close to blaming Obama for all the racial hate he gets, but what do you think the polls would look like if Obama was white? 70-30? More? The only reason Romney is in this race is because there’s a lot of racists in the country and he’s entirely happy to exploit that racism. God knows he’s got nothing else going for him.
scav
Accusations of terror-inducing “quietly announced” plans from a man who thinks things should be discussed in quiet rooms? Oh, wait, that was two seconds ago, silly me. Must be like the quiet plans to take away all the guns and have the UN invade the day after the election and force all pregnant white xians into abortion camps and I give up.
JGabriel
Dennis G. @ Top:
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
They won’t. The media may have engaged in some pushback against racism during President Obama’s first campaign, but that was most likely based on a Villager’s sense that they needed to be fair to the first black presidential candidate.
Now that we actually have a black president, the Villager’s will cynically treat racism as just another tactic, one that can be fairly deployed against any minority candidates.
I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it. I don’t see them making life uncomfortable for GOP candidates.
.
arguingwithsignposts
Dennis,
Getting back to your reply to my comment in last night’s post, do you really believe a national party wants to intentionally cancel the first day of its quadrennial convention just because it isn’t going to be on the networks (or whatever other reason)?
That’s bordering on wingnut-grade conspiracy mongering.
cmorenc
@DennisG:
Query whether the whistles and lies will be so egregious as to provoke a backlash of media commentary pointedly directed at the mendacity without quite using the term “lie”. This is most likely to happen with the “welfare work requirement” attack. Aside from obvious shilling for the GOP on Fox, I’m hardly uniformly hopeful about this with purportedly more nonpartisan outlets like CNN, based on the hackery displayed so far by Anderson Cooper in openly bending over backwards to display skepticism about the merits of criticisms of Romney’s Bain ties or of how closely Ronney’s tied himself to abortion absolutism in selecting Paul Ryan, supporting “personhood” amendments, and failure to demand exceptions to the party’s absolutist-worded anti-abortion plank.
Linda Featheringill
“There should be a price paid for running a campaign based on lies and a shameless attempt to divide the Nation by race, but unless the folks call out and condemn the tactic it will be the dominate feature of Mitt’s closing campaign strategy.”
dominate should be dominant. [picky, picky]
General Stuck
It was always going to come down to this. It was the only path for an unliked (even by own party) chameleon whose only redeeming pseudo virtue was raw and unfettered ambition. The problem is, that the party nutters have slammed shut so many doors to every voting block other than white males, I doubt it will work when today’s CNN poll shows women of all races are washing their hands of Romney as per his party (and he by servile proxy) going full caveman on the female voting population.
Romney is like the dude who falls into an arroyo during a flash flood, with people on shore tossing out all kinds of flotation devices that float away. Until a good Samaritan spots a rock with his name on it.
mamayaga
Somewhat OT, but I hadn’t realized that Charlie Pierce is blogging all weekend on his way to Tampa. Some of his posts from the road are small masterpieces and worth a look.
Alexandra
Flying monkeys are out in swarms all over the political sections of various forums I frequent. It’s staggering how full of racist bullshit they are… and frankly, I haven’t got the time or inclination to battle them anymore. Better to focus on the persuadables, I guess, but one thing that seems clear: they’re not praising Mitt Romney at all or vaunting any of his supposed merits. They’re also desperate to not talk about George W. Bush; someone who should be hung around the neck of Republicans for the next 30 years, just as wingnuts have done with Carter.
The largest story about this election is that people seem to have completely forgotten the absolutely terrible state of affairs in late 2008, an economic collapse of the kind not seen in most of our lifetimes. Obama deserves re-election just for pulling things out of the terrifying nose-dive and it irritates the hell out of me to see some self-professed liberals be so lukewarm about him.
Ta-Nahesi Coates is right: Having to be twice as good as any white guy is a double standard.
Patricia Kayden
But Dennis, the Repubs have already put out the ads claiming that Obama secretly changed welfare laws so that all Negros can sit around watching tv and get their welfare checks mailed directly to their homes.
Those ads haven’t worked in swinging the polls dramatically to Romneybot 2.0’s direction. His dog whistles will have to be more explicit. Just put a Grand Wizard in his next commercials and call it a day.
Tokyokie
Everybody knows Mitt isn’t really a racist. But he has to play one on TV.
ChrisNYC
I think the explosion on Friday over the birtherism will help. I think the assholes in the MSM got beaten up over that, at last, in one sustained burst. Made the GOP racebaiting a news theme for the rest of the campaign, just like the war on women.
Ben Franklin
@cmorenc:
Coded phrases are SOP to the GOP, so it’s not news. Someone should write down all the creative speech-writing done by the Elephantine. That, would be NEWS.
WereBear
The President did it so well most people have no clue how close we came to utter, sparrow-roasting-on-a-curtain-rod, disaster.
Wag
27 percent of registered female voters think Romney has the interests of women at heart? There’s that pesky number again. His support can’t go any lower.
Dennis G.
@arguingwithsignposts: I am cynical when it comes to the GOP. They would like to control the message and have four days where they get free media. The media decided not to cover Monday night and they were already moving the schedule around to have the folks they don’t care about speak that night. The lack of full media coverage caused them to change their plans and the hurricane gave them cover to drop the weakest (and/or most problematic) speakers from the schedule. The same thing happened last time.
The hurricane in 2008 gave them an excuse to avoid having George W Bush at the event and they took it. This year, the hurricane is really having an impact on the event, but I suspect that they don’t mind running a three day event.
Dennis SGMM
Anyone want to suggest the over/under on how long it takes the Republicans to demand that, in the interest of fairness, the networks only televise three days of the Democrats’ convention?
MikeBoyScout
@10 mamayaga: Thanks for that. I was not aware either until you told us.
Linda Featheringill
@Tokyokie: #13
George Wallace said, later in his life, that he wasn’t really a racist but played on in order to get votes. He pandered to the voters in his area.
John Edwards pandered to us far lefties. The song he sang was very attractive and I for one fell for it.
Mitt Romney is also pandering to the most radical portion of the Republican party. He is trying desperately to make his song seductive. If some people believe him, I can understand that.
Since he is not really expressing his true feelings when he makes racist statements, he could feel free to go further along that path than a more honest racist would. I don’t think that he’ll advocate violence but he’s likely to get down and dirty.
Fasten your seat belts.
Dennis G.
@Linda Featheringill: Thanks
rachel
Looks more like two days, thanks to Isaac. I wonder if scheduling the RNC in Florida during hurricane season was a gamble that Mother Nature would pitch in to limit the damage they were undoubtedly going to do to themselves.
ponce
Maybe we should start with this blog refusing to run ads from Mitt Romney?
It’s hard to take your call to action seriously when there’s a giant Vote Romney/Ryan ad next to it…
Tokyokie
@Linda Featheringill: I, too, was briefly enamored with Edwards. But I like to think he was offering such an attractive package that people like us went into a swoon and really wanted it to be true. I see nothing about Romney that isn’t deeply ugly, and he’s now decided that’s his best selling point.
Tokyokie
@ponce: I know it’s a pittance, but I enjoy seeing the GOP piss away its money. I hope they buy every available minute of ad time between now and November on BET.
arguingwithsignposts
@rachel:
@Dennis G.:
I am as cynical as the next person wrt the GOP. But you are both giving them way too much credit for advance planning, at least.
The days of gavel-to-gavel coverage of the conventions have been over for a while. I suppose I’m just not squinting hard enough to see the puppet-masters willing to kill off 25 percent of their own convention. Maybe I’m more naive than I think.
Emerald
@rachel: I keep flashing back to Pat Buchanan’s “culture war” speech that managed to turn off huge swaths of the electorate and help to re-elect Clinton. I don’t think they can control their crazies, and they know they can’t. Yeah, they’ll be thrilled with their hurricane.
(edited for clarity)
Just Some Fuckhead
Why would they? They aren’t the refs in a political football game. They are players and fans and disinterested observers. But mostly, they are just concession workers, selling their product with no regard for the outcome of the game.
Brachiator
Rachel Maddow anticipated some of this in her Friday show, which people can still watch or download.
She noted that not only is Romney losing the black vote, but he is also losing the Latino vote, 67 percent to 33 percent, the same margin that Obama won over McCain. And now, they are in danger of losing women’s vote by a significant margin.
So all they have left is appeal to fearful whites, insecure seniors, and a fallback on voter suppression laws.
So yeah, getting out the vote is vitally important.
BTW, Maddow also astutely pointed out that the ongoing Big Story that is being ignored, even though it is right in front of everyone’s face, is Mitten’s insistence on secrecy not just with respect to his tax returns, but also with his refusal to identify the big money bundlers funding his campaign. We know about Trump and Adelson and the Koch brothers. But there are many others.
And it is astounding to see the degree to which the GOP convention is going to be a carnival for oligarchs. The Koch brothers are getting a special tribute and a pavilion or something is being named in honor of Sheldon Adelson’s wife. That should get the women vote.
cathyx
Are there enough white bigots in the country to win the election?
Davis X. Machina
@ponce: You should see what turns up on my RSS reader on DailyKos posts.
The algorithms that push ads onto a particular webpage aren’t all that sophisticated…. and not usually fine-tunable by the actual owner of the page.
You take the King’s shilling, you fight the King’s war. Pecunia non olet
Davis X. Machina
@cathyx: Depends on who else turns out…
ponce
I was only following the algorithm’s orders?
Dennis G.
@ponce: I don’t think all the ads are the same for every viewer. What appears in some spaces would be based on browsing history.
I had a large Obama ad next to the post this morning, but on those days when I’ve been researching on wingnut blogs and news outlets it may change to a Romney ad because I’ve recently been to sites where his supports go.
I’m not sure what kind of control John has over this, but I’m glad revenue comes in to support the site.
Omnes Omnibus
@ponce: You don’t get any amusement out of the Romney campaign throwing away by advertising here? I do.
SiubhanDuinne
@mamayaga:
Charlie Pierce’s last several posts have been fking poetry. And while you’re reading his “on the road” pieces, don’t miss his beautiful paean to Neil Armstrong.
quannlace
Most definitely take a look. His essay at Gettysburg is wonderful.
Trentrunner
Romney/Ryan 2012: Yes We Klan!
Linda Featheringill
@Brachiator: #30
It’s my unscientific observation that most older voters make up their minds early in the game and then don’t change that decision. A small number, maybe 10%, may be undecided.
In the end, older voters tend to break about 60-40 for the Republicans.
As I said, this isn’t a scientific measure, just my observation.
ETA:
Forgot to include my conclusion: I don’t think the relative security of the older voter is going to influence the vote much.
SiubhanDuinne
@Ben Franklin:
If I ran this blog, I would make “SOP to the GOP” a rotating tag, just cuz it looks cool and is amusing to say out loud.
jwb
@Dennis G.: When I was out of the country a couple of weeks ago, almost every ad on the site changed to reflect the fact. So, yes, it appears that most if not all the ads on the site are contextually determined.
Frankensteinbeck
Yes, Romney. This time you’ll hit back hard. Look, Romney is incompetent and the PACs are run by crazies. They are not CAPABLE of running a smooth Reagan style welfare queen campaign. They will stumble horribly over and over, drive undecideds to the hills, make less-than-insane Republicans too embarrassed to vote, and piss off every single minority. Thanks to the Baby Boom elderly white males are a massive demographic that votes more reliably than any other, but they’re only ONE demographic and getting only two thirds of them is not going to cut it.
NancyDarling
@Linda Featheringill: I fell for Edwards as well Linda and gave him a whole lot more $ than I could afford. To atone for that, I’m cutting a check to Obama’s campaign for one third more than I gave Edwards. I still can’t afford it. My children’s inheritance has some to spare, and it is for them that I do it.
@mamayaga: I couldn’t agree more.Pierce is on fire this week. I especially liked the one about the convoys of men and equipment headed to the gulf to clean up the mess and get the power back up. Even if repub knuckledraggers/delegates have to be personally rescued because of the hurricane, I have no faith that they will see the irony in one of their convention themes—We Built This.
Davis X. Machina
Re-tweeted by Brad DeLong:
irincarmon: Romney “was cleaning his dog whistle and it just went off.” love you @jsmooth995 #uppers
Yutsano
@Dennis G.: OT but just for my brain: did you mean Lead or Lede for the post title?
trollhattan
You’re being far too kind here, not to mention debasing minks and ferrets everywhere.
Willard barely qualifies as a mammal, if at all. It’s hard to articulate how far my estimation of him has plummeted throughout the campaign–he was once a vaguely pleasant, nonthreatening cypher, especially in comparison to the cardboard box of lunatics he ran against, and now he’s shed several skins to reveal the vile charlatan he seems to be.
“But, he understands business.”
And I understand exotic parasites.
jwb
@Linda Featheringill: Evidence from the polls suggest that this year’s race is more set than usual—that is, there are far fewer undecideds. From what I’ve been reading it seems like the biggest variable pollsters have been having trouble pinning down is what the actual electorate will look like: more like 2008 or more like 2010?
SiubhanDuinne
@Yutsano: For my brain, too. Thanks for posing the question.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Mittens is a fool, he has to offer an alternative to Obama, not just scream Obama is bad. Obama has already shown he has more crap to dump on Mittens than Mittens has to dump back.
CarolDuhart2
The fact that Romney even has to go there is a sign of fundamental weakness. He should have long ago wrapped up the “anybody but Obama” vote.
Republicans are still under the delusion that there’s a whole host of “Silent Majority” and “Republican Democrats” still who resent racial integration and who would normally vote Democrat. Sorry, Mitt, that generation is under the ground for the most part, and Rush Limbaugh already got the rest. Demographics have changed in the last 40 years since “Nixonland”. Minorities of all kinds are already at 30-40% of the voting population. There’s two generations of folks that grew up in an integrated world and don’t even understand the dog whistle. I haven’t even gotten to the growing urban vote, the growing college-educated vote, or the woman vote. And Nixon, for all his faults, was seen as experienced and competent and at times even a bit moderate, and was running against a Democratic Party torn apart by change. And barely won the first time.
Obama isn’t Hubert Humphrey or George McGovern, but the first black sitting President, leading a party that’s united. He’s proven that he’s competent and moderate and intelligent. He’s no pushover. To beat him takes qualities that you simply don’t have and won’t buy because you resent anybody being better than you in anything.
Just Some Fuckhead
Remember the racist and lying campaign Ronald Reagan ran against Carter? He currently polls as the Greatest President Ever.
Remember the racist and lying campaign George H.W. Bush ran against Dukakis? The left generally looks back on the elder Bush fondly now as one of the “good” Republicans.
There is no stigma in politics. There is winning and losing. That’s it.
scav
I read it first as “Sawp to the Gawp” which is also fun to say as it leads to Bunny Hop to the Sop to the Gop, Bop Bop Bop and Bop around the Sop to Gop, we’re gonna Sock the Gop til . . . Be Bop a Sop Gop, she’s my Baybe and, well, basically, I’m a little odd like that.
Roger Moore
@ponce:
Hey, if Romney wants to waste his money trying to win votes here, I say let him try.
Ann Rynd
Not to fear, dear ones. This week will end with millions more who never knew him, hating him. It’s axiomatic, to know him is to not like him. He is smarmy. That shows on the television thingy and the white racists in their trailer park palaces who don’t know how to work the computer box will see that loud and clear. This will be a big Eh???!? moment for the party of Ayn and will result in a negative bounce (??) for His Mittness.
I know this. No fear!
Garbo
@Trentrunner: All the Internets for you. Excellent!
Linda Featheringill
BTW, McCaskill, in talking to a group of potential voters, pulled out a list of all of Akin’s votes on bills that were closely related to the interests of the audience. Then she read that list.
Just the facts, Ma’am.
trollhattan
@Ann Rynd:
Am hoping he gets the chance to quip, “I love it here in Florida, the trees are all knocked over at just the right height.”
Willard, off-script, is my sole source of joy from the entire campaign.
jwb
@Ann Rynd: Yes, which is why the best thing that could happen to the Rmoney campaign is for Hurricane Isaac to take an appropriate right turn and stall over Tampa for the next week, wiping out the convention.
Dennis G.
@Yutsano: I have seen it used both ways. I can never remember what the style books say to use…
GregB
Romney is going to have a Mortimer Duke moment and will drop the N-bomb in public. It’s coming.
Amir Khalid
@scav:
You may have an undiscovered talent for hip-hop. Or maybe singing scat.
Brachiator
@Spaghetti Lee:
Romney is also still in this race because the economy continues to be weak. And even though the Republicans have done everything they can to keep the economy crippled, the plain fact is that voters are desperately looking for help.
I agree with you, though, that Romney is happy to exploit racism. However, I find it especially troubling that some of Romney’s people, as well as outlets such as the National Review, have so overtly sought to revive the despicable belief that only white people (especially certified Anglo Saxons) should govern the country and rule the world.
BTW, I have been away from the Internets for a while. Has there been any comments here about the relatively strong box office of the anti Obama film “2016 Obama’s America?”
Alison
@GregB: Nah, not Romney himself – even he isn’t stupid or evil enough to do that. But I wouldn’t be shocked if one of his surrogates did, and then they would loudly oust the person and say SEE WE DON’T LIKE RACISM SO NYAH NYAH – just like they think tut-tutting at Akin is all they have to do to prove they don’t hate women.
jwb
@Dennis G.: For whatever reason, none of my dictionaries recognize “lede.” The wikipedia article, though essentially a stub, has the basics.
Mr Stagger Lee
If Romney wins, he may have to do a whole lot of ass-kissing to the racial minorities, otherwise he may have a rebellion in his term of president,(I would not want to be a White Mormon Missionary in some of those communities for all the whiskey in Ireland). Of course he probably does not care because he and other wealthy people can afford an escape route,good luck to all of the rest of the peasants. Either way this country will be fracked. I thought the Republican Party would resemble the Nationalist Party of South Africa, but I was ten years too late.
Mnemosyne
@Spaghetti Lee:
To be fair, these tend to be the same guys who think that racist jokes that were tired when Henny Youngman used them are “cutting edge.”
I realize that retro is cool, but most people who go retro realize that they’re looking at the past, not the future.
Also, too, I’m hoping Caz will stop by to explain for all of us stoopid liberals how claiming that Barack Obama is not an American citizen is totally non-racist. He keeps promising to explain it and then mysteriously disappears.
WaterGirl
@Dennis SGMM: The networks had only planned to cover 3 days for each convention. Romney tried to get them to cover 4 when they were going to move the big nomination thing to monday, but the networks declined.
jp7505a
Start the drinking game and it would add a percent or two to the GDP due to the increased sale of booze!!!!!!!!!!
Brachiator
@Linda Featheringill:
A lot of older voters are women. The Republicans seem intent on losing the women vote this year And I am not sure that older voters believe or trust what the GOP says about issues important to them, such as Medicare or Social Security.
Hill Dweller
I see where Willard was touting his healthcare bill to Chris Wallace in a desperate attempt to insulate himself from the ‘War on Women’ charges. But then he stuck his foot in his mouth by saying he wanted to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood.
Willard is an awful candidate running an inept campaign.
Yutsano
@Dennis G.: Both work, so it wasn’t worth any pedantry over.
@Mr Stagger Lee: Willard will do exactly zero outreach to anyone but his constituents: white wealthy males. Basically for him no one else exists except to make his life comfortable then to conveniently disappear. If he gets elected my prediction is he checks out after realizing how much WORK being President is, after pissing off virtually all our allies and crashing the economy.
Roger Moore
@Yutsano:
“Lede” is an alternative spelling of “Lead”, so either form is correct. Call me a fogey, but I prefer the old spelling.
kay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
If Mittens is a fool, then so is every paid analyst on television, because every single one of them said this was going to be a referendum on Obama.
Romney and Obama are running two entirely different campaigns, with two different basic assumptions. Romney thinks it’s a referendum on Obama and Obama thinks it’s a choice. The only difference between now and a month ago is most of the pundits now think it’s a choice, not a referendum.
Romney hasn’t really changed anything he does. “Blackety-black” is just Phase Two of referendum on Obama, because the original referendum on Obama script didn’t get him anywhere.
Romney refuses to accept “choice”. IMO, I think that’s partly because Romney thinks Obama is not worthy of competing with him. Romney simply has to show up for his clear superiority to be evident. That hasn’t happened yet, but they’re betting it will.
I’m just enjoying this brief moment of glee because if they’re admitting they have to re-introduce the candidate that means something went terribly wrong for the last 6 months:)
They have to do more than re-introduce him. They have to create an entirely different person.
NancyDarling
@Yutsano: Do you mean he will resign to spend more time with his family? Or his money?
quannlace
“Hurricanes are people, my friend”
Ben Franklin
@Hill Dweller:
You watch the other half? Don’t let it get out….oops. *>)
Chris
@Spaghetti Lee:
That’s the entire Republican Party.
The Southern Strategy was brilliant in its day, and I continue to consider Nixon a genius (an evil genius, but still a genius) for having invented it. The only problem is – it’s a one trick pony. Now that their “appeal to Angry White Conservatives, no one else matters” strategy is starting to fray at the edges a little, they have no idea what to do next.
Suppressing the vote is their last fallback, but in terms of connecting with voters, “look! Scary darkies!” was literally the only card they had to play.
WaterGirl
@Dennis G.: I just used the trusty “look it up” that’s built into my operating system.
Lede says:
Lead paragraph
A lead paragraph in literature refers to the opening paragraph of an article, essay, news story or book chapter. Often called just “the lead,” it usually occurs together with the headline or title. It precedes the main body of the article, and it gives the reader the main idea of the story. The word “lead” is pronounced to rhyme with “need”.
Lead says it’s either a verb or chemical element.
Ben Franklin
@SiubhanDuinne:
With my vote, that counts as two :)
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
True. But by fairly large margins, voters continue to blame Bush and Congress for the sorry state of the economy rather than Obama. Apparently people have been paying some attention, and bragging about how you’re going to hold the economy hostage to force the NClang! out of the White House is not an effective strategy to convince voters that you’re the right choice on the economy.
Brachiator
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Romney doesn’t have it in him to ass kiss nonwhites. He’s too busy doing his own step and fetch it routine for wingnut Republicans.
And if any rebellion comes, it will be surprisingly wide spread. And leading the charge may be all those stupid white people who believed the lie that Obama was giving all their stuff to lazy, undeserving blacks and Latinos, only to find that Romney has given all their stuff to his fellow, lazy undeserving oligarchs.
And it will be fun listening to Limbaugh explaining that increasingly impoverished whites are just lazy bums who need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
jp7505a
@Just Some Fuckhead: I would call Bush 41 one of the ‘least worst’ of the recent Republicans, not a ‘good’ republican
Chris
@Linda Featheringill:
The last Captain America comic I read had a scene that reminded me of the whole “are you REALLY a racist or just pretending to be?” debate –
Doctor Erskine: “You work with the Nazis, even though you don’t share their ideology? Am I supposed to think that makes you less despicable than them, or so much more?”
Red Skull: “Forgive me for answering your question with a questin, Doctor. If I kill your family because of their Jewish blood… or if I kill them because they refuse to work for me… will they not be dead all the same?”
Hill Dweller
@Ben Franklin: Sadly, I didn’t watch it on Fox. The story is up at Think Progress.
Roger Moore
@jp7505a:
And remove a few points from all the people who have to stay home from work with killer hangovers.
Chris
@Brachiator:
I think that might be a double edged sword, actually. Sure, the bad economy means people are blaming Obama, but I also think people are more scared of insanity like the Ryan Plan or the rest of Mittens’ nonsense in the middle of an economic crisis. In good economic times, it’s a little easier to delude yourself that “everything’s going to be alright.”
Roger Moore
@kay:
I think you’re missing the bigger point. Romney wants it to be a referendum on Obama because that’s the only election he can win; Obama wants it to be about a choice because that’s the election he can win. The Republicans are having a lot of trouble for two reasons. One is that Obama is too good a campaigner to go down easily. The other is that the referendum approach only works if the alternative is bland and conventional, and the Republicans are anything but. They’re trying to project an image of bland and conventional, but they have too much of a record for it to be effective.
Chris
@Just Some Fuckhead:
I think you’d have to go all the way back to Abraham Lincoln for me to label someone an unequivocally “good Republican.” Maybe Grant.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Chris: I tend to think of Eisenhower. Keep in mind that doesn’t mean I hold him on a pedestal. It just means that within the context of a guy who I am ideologically opposed to, he wanted what was good for this country over what was good for him, and he oversaw at least some good things (interstates for example). Also, I respect the man at least a little bit for his speech on the MIC.
Persia
@Brachiator: Older voters tend to vote to protect Social Security, full stop. The ‘don’t worry, we can settle it on the backs of your grandkids’ works for some seniors, but every group has its sociopaths.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Linda Featheringill Umm, if you employ racism for gain, regardless of your feelings about race, that would make you a racist. This is precisely what Romney is doing, and that makes him every bit a racist. What he believes privately is irrelevant.
@Chris: Precisely. Racism isn’t about what is in your heart, or about your motivations. It’s about your actions. If you cynically employ racism to get votes (even if you don’t believe in racism) you are very much a racist.
rikyrah
@kay:
you are on point, kay
Chris
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
I don’t even see him Ike as being ideologically opposed to me, on the U.S. spectrum, I see him as being mostly on my side (if not in my party). What I mostly object to with him is foreign policy (same with Teddy Roosevelt). Overthrowing Mossadegh, Arbenz and Lumumba, setting up friendly dictatorships, basically costing us the third world, that was all him. Instead of blaming Carter for the Iranian Revolution, people should’ve blamed Eisenhower.
I don’t, actually. It’s a great speech, needed to be said. But he said it as he was leaving office, after he’d ridden the Red Scare hysteria into the White House, after he’d turned over foreign policy to the Dulles brothers and allowed them to go totally berserk, after eight years during which the “military industrial complex” had grown without any objection from him.
It’s kind of like George Washington freeing his slaves upon his death. Yeah, it’s great that you did that. Why didn’t you do it earlier? Why couldn’t you be bothered to take a moral stand until the very end, once it was no longer your problem and wasn’t a moral stand so much as a “hi, yeah, it’s me, I’ve been part of the problem my entire life, and, uh, I just hope you people can solve it! Bye now.”
Brachiator
@Persia:
I really tire of the sociopath nonsense that people throw around. It is useless and really should be retired.
Most older people love their grand kids. They would die for them. And a lot of older people, even those comfortably retired, have watched the economy crumble around their children. They have had to have their children and grandchildren move in with them. These older people are as concerned about their children’s future as they are about their own lives.
People live in families, not discrete demographic groups or voting blocs. And yeah, older voters vote to protect Social Security, but if the economy continues to collapse and there ain’t no jobs, there will not be anything to protect.
AHH onna Droid
@NancyDarling: am I the only one who thought John Edwards was a gay-or-cheating-haired phoney whose rhetoric was too good to be true?
The only surprise for me has been the attempt to demonize his wife after her death. Seriously, wtf?
Chris
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
I see we share the “it’s not who you are on the inside, it’s what you do that defines you” outlook. I think most liberals do. A lot of conservatives don’t, though, especially the religious kind – the whole logic of “faith, not acts” is that it doesn’t matter what you do with your life because all humans are scum anyway, so the only thing that matters is if you’ve gone over to the right team.
I wonder if that’s where a lot of the “you’re not a REAL racist, right?” thing in our culture comes from – people reassuring themselves that, well, they may be partnering up with mean racists, but as long as they themselves, in their heart of hearts, aren’t racist, then it’s okay, right?
Tonal Crow
My God! NYT’s committed journalism!
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
RE: Romney is also still in this race because the economy continues to be weak.
But it is not about who people blame. It is about who you think can fix things. And this is one of the reasons why this election may be closer than it should be. You see this with Republicans who want to brand Obama as being ineffectual. Sadly, you also see this with some Democrats, who think that Obama should have been magically adept at defeating Republicans in the Congress.
This is why Romney keeps trying to sell himself as the uber competent Businessman In Chief, who has Ryan and a secret plan to save the economy. Kinda like how McCain had a secret plan to win in Iraq.
The increasingly blatant racism is poisonus icing on the political cake. The Tea Party and the Republicans found it to be an effective rallying point and just cannot let it go, even if it ends up destroying the country.
McJulie
@Brachiator:
I fail to see how “most older people love their grandkids” negates “every group has its sociopaths.” Most people aren’t sociopaths, but the ones who are do a lot of damage, especially when they aren’t recognized as such.
JGabriel
__
__
Brachiator:
You should read The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer, a University of Manitoba professor who has studied Right-Wing Authoritarianism in society, and as a personality type, for 40-50 years now. The entire book is available as a free PDF at the linked site.
John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience is based on Altemeyer’s work. Altemeyer wrote The Authoritarians as a layperson’s summary of that work at Dean’s urging
Among Altemeyer’s other findings is that Right-Wing Authoritarian leaders are, in fact, pretty much sociopaths.
.
Professor
@jwb: Go to Dictionary.com and you’ll find the usage of ‘lede’. It means a lead into a story. It is a word principally used in Journalism!
Persia
@Brachiator: Yeah…that was pretty much what I just said.
@AHH onna Droid: I would love to know how they came up with the brilliant PR strategy of ‘it’s okay, Elizabeth Edwards was a bitch.’
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Chris: I was ideologically opposed to Ike BECAUSE of his beliefs in foreign policy. On domestic issues we shared a lot of common ground.
I said “a little respect” because like you rightly say – it needed to be said. You are right to ask why he didn’t say it sooner. I’d say that can arguably be placed in my ideological disagreements with him over foreign policy. I give him a pass on the opportunism WRT to the timing of that speech because he’s a politician. We pay him to be that way – such is the nature of democratic politics. We tend to elect people that will say whatever they need to say in order to get elected. I’m not excusing it from a moral perspective, but I feel my political pragmatism restrains me from holding that against him as much as I would otherwise like to. And I am glad that we have that documented rebuttal of the MIC on record. Arguably we are better for it.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Chris: On the racism bit, I’ll paraphrase a quote I very much like:
“The
modern conservativeracist is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moraljustificationexcuse forselfishnesshate.”with apologies to John Kenneth Galbraith
I think it speaks to the “real racist” nonsense.
JGabriel
@Dennis G.:
For general writing, particularly on the internet, lead is fine, though lede is okay too.
Lede developed as typesetting/mark-up term in journalism to distinguish it from lead, as in lead-type. There’s not really much need to make the distinction outside of type-setting mark-ups, so it’s acceptable general writing to refer to the lead/lede paragraph of a story with either spelling.
.
karen marie
@mamayaga: He’s been making me swoon.
clayton
@Brachiator: Here’s a nice chart of the weekend box office.
D’nesh D’Sousa or however you spell his name was all over wingnut radio Friday claiming it would do better than #3. He was wrong. I’m not really surprised that it did as well as it did, given the markets it was in. A fool and his money — all that. I’ll never understand why people go to see something like this. The NY Times review was pretty brutal.
BC
@JGabriel: I think the reason that Biden’s comment about chains to a 50% black audience was so roundly condemned by MSM is meant by the MSM to mitigate Romney’s lies about welfare. So now we get Romney’s white dog whistle vs Obama’s black dog whistle, so sure both sides do it. The Denver Post was irate about Biden’s comment and has been silent about Romney’s lies, and they are pretty good bellwether about what is happening in conventional wisdom.
John M. Burt
@Chris: No President, no politician, is ever entirely admirable. How could s/he be? We’re all only human.
Eisenhower was good on some things, bad on others. So was Theodore Roosevelt.
Lincoln? He issued orders for the systematic extermination of all remaining free Native American tribes, and his surviving notes about plans for reconstruction of the South are very dubious. We may actually have lucked out that he died when he did.
Hill Dweller
@BC: The MSM never seems to mention that Biden was riffing off the Republicans accusing the Obama administration of shackling business and Wall Street.
It is one of the more egregious examples of the MSM’s lazy ‘balance’.
jwb
@Professor: I know what “lede” means, and the link I gave gives the same definition. But the fact that it is not in most dictionaries means that it is not yet generally accepted outside of journalism. Indeed, the copyeditor changed “lede” to “lead” for this very reason in a recent article I wrote.
Chris
@John M. Burt:
That, I didn’t know. Either of these things.
I generally put Lincoln on my side of the aisle not only because of the Civil War/opposition to slavery thing, but also because of his opposition to the Mexican War (the Iraq War of its day) and because what he had to say about capital and labor was decidedly not pro-capitalist. That adds up to being almost recognizably liberal in the modern sense of the word. Didn’t know about the Indian thing, though… or the Reconstruction plans. What was Lincoln rooting for?
karen marie
@kay:
Romney refuses to accept “choice” because that is the clearest road to losing for him. I disagree that Romney thinks Obama is not a worthy competitor. Disrespect is just another weapon for Romney to use to attempt to weaken the president.
Brachiator
@McJulie:
People who toss around the term sociopath are either speaking metaphorically, but being imprecise, or attempting to practice medicine without a license.
@JGabriel:
Read a good chunk of it, and a lot of commentary on it, and don’t agree with it. It kinda reminds me of that book about birth order which was all the rage and which people thought explained everything, until people thought about it more and realized that it didn’t explain much of anything.
Sammi
And yet it’s the people of color who get accused of playing the race card all the time.
The GOP *has* to do this; it’s all they’ve got. Those rats aren’t going to fuck themselves, after all.
WereBear
Spoken like someone who thinks they have never met one. They aren’t all serial killers, you know.
HRA
Last week I had the news on while my daughter who was touting Willard’s business/economy virtues weeks before on our vacation became shocked at the Akin statement on rape. Now it was my time to explain to her about the R platform on women’s rights and I was successful. Whew -1 more vote straight D.
I really would like to see older people not targeted as unable to have the knowledge of being able to vote and support the best candidate in this election. I know a fair number of them from both genders plus some Rs who are voting for President Obama.
trollhattan
Tone-deaf and irony-challenged as ever, Willard on the “attack.”
Oh, snap. Somehow I don’t think he’s going to flip this back on the president.
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/08/26/4757985/storm-forces-gop-to-scrap-first.html#storylink=cpy
Kane
The only question now is how far is Romney and the Republican party willing to go? If the pre-tea Republican party is willing to wear band-aids at their 2004 convention to mock the war wounds of John Kerry, and they are willing to accuse Barack Obama in 2008 of palling around with terrorists, then what line is left to cross for the tea-party-infused GOP?
Yutsano
@trollhattan:
What were you saying about tone deafness? Oh yeah…
Kane
Three days of convention, and Romney has no actual accomplishments to highlight.
arguingwithsignposts
@Brachiator:
Well, I guess that settles it then.
Ash Can
Like hell, three days of dog whistles. They’ll be locomotive horns and civil-defense sirens, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear at least one n-bomb.
jp7505a
@Roger Moore: I hate the law of unintended consequences
kay
@Yutsano:
It’s hilarious. He’s monitoring Florida from New Hampshire.
Here’s another thing I’ve noticed about Romney. Isn’t he sort of low-energy to
be President? I don’t get any feel of long
days and boundless energy out of that campaign.
Sammi
Is it a dog whistle if everyone can hear it?
WaterGirl
@kay: “It’s hilarious. He’s monitoring Florida from New Hampshire.”
That’s what minions are for, right? I also think he’s a coward – I’ll bet he doesn’t want to be anywhere near Florida if there’s a storm coming. If he actually got elected, Romney would have a nervous breakdown his first week in office.
That’s where my mind went as soon as they said he was taking a day off – I thought he must be “exhausted” again.
@Sammi: By being so blatant, they are training all of us to catch the dog whistles that we might not have caught otherwise.
Brachiator
@WereBear:
I don’t wish to presume. From which school did you get your medical degree?
But all of this is a side issue. The question isn’t how many falsely labelled conservatives can fit on the head of a pin. It’s about how to best beat Romney, and the malignant consequences of a Republican convention in November.
Some Loser
@Sammi:
A fine question, my dear. The answer is yes because there’ll always be a subset of people who pretend they don’t hear. I think the main point of the dog whistle is to give plausible deniability rather than being straight code speak. And well, lets of Republicans and racist leftists are going to pretend this isn’t racist.
Chuck Butcher
@Roger Moore:
OED has “lede” primarily relating to a group, nation, or population – nowhere used as a news term.
They are fogies over there…
Until fairly recently I’d always seen the meaning expressed here using “lead”.
karen
@Dennis SGMM:
2 seconds. Oh and since during the DNC convention, the GOP will have bought up every second of commercial time, they will demand that their infomercials be shown because they have the right to buy whatever commercials they want at any time they want. In other words, if they buy wall to wall infomercials on the night of the DNC convention, can they demand that only their infomercials be shown? It’s already been established that TV stations can’t refuse to show political ads, is there a law saying that networks have to show the convention?
And while we’re on the subject of ads and fucking GOP assholes, I just realized why Romney did the Birther dog whistle. He did it purposely to get Obama to react and if you notice it’s been ratcheted up rapidly…their goal is the whole “cried wolf” thing. If they just dump the racist bilgewater all over the place, and just continue to hurl the mud, after a while, it will make Obama look like a whiner if he reacts.
Just tell me, why the Dems who are millionaires won’t help? Is it the whole purity thing? Where they don’t want to go into the mud? Or is their millionaireness more important than their Demness?
karen
@kay:
He’ll outsource of course!
Dennis G.
@JGabriel: I hadn’t heard the hot type connection to the term, but it makes sense…
LanceThruster
@JGabriel:
Thank you for this.
Cacti
I guess I’m not understanding what the end game is for the GOP here. Sure, there are plenty of racist white dudes in ‘Murrica, but they aren’t a voting majority.
In the election that Dubya actually won without a SCOTUS assist (2004), he carried 40% of the hispanic vote, and 48% of the women’s vote. Hell, even his 11% of the black vote is looking unattainable for Willard.
Mittens isn’t going to come within shouting distance of any of those numbers.
maureen murphy
four years ago, when barack obama was elected, i shook my head. i thought to myself, who would want to pooper scoop the pile that george bush had left behind. george bush brought this country and this world to the eve of destruction. i thought long and hard about who would want to be president of the united states. no person could fix this colossal mess. i do not think the republicans really wanted to win this election. my thinking was they would let barack obama win this election that no republican wanted to fix the unholy mess that george w. bush created. i predicted that obama would win the presidency, the republicans in the house and the senate would do everything they could to obstruct bills that would help the citizens of the united states. mitch mcconnell, a truly repulsive senator, who said our party’s top priority would be to make president obama a one term president. i knew that obama,, as hard as he tried to make policy that would help the 99% struggling americans who could not help themselves would be blocked by a wall of republican, and then i said to myself, they will succeed in blocking obama because those useless white males, in the us congress, were not going to let a black man succeed where they could not. i knew that at the end of four years, they would “blame the black kid,” and that is exactly what they planned all along, this is what they will do at the republican national convention. THEY WILL BLAME THE BLACK KID.