(Jeff Danziger’s website)
David Frum, professional Republican for hire, tweets his disappointment with the current nominee’s performance (via):
… (6) The problem isn’t the campaign leadership; it’s the party’s followership
(7) Over course of campaign, Romney has changed from a pragmatic, capable manager into a dog-whistling culture warrior.
(8) Candidate cd have and shd have resisted that pressure – but it’s rich for ppl who demanded the change to complain about consequences….
Professor Krugman, on the other hand, blames the leaders, not the followers:
… The “lucky ducky” trope is clearly, obviously nonsense; equally obviously, it was originally created in an effort to dupe people who didn’t know better. It was and is what Orwell called “prolefeed”, junk aimed at the ignorant masses (ignorant by design), the people who are ready to believe at a moment’s notice that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
In Orwell’s vision, however, the Party – and especially the Inner Party – wasn’t supposed to consume this same tripe. It was supposed to understand the true Party agenda and vision (a boot stomping on a human face forever).
So it actually is a revelation to see Romney and friends obviously swallowing the prolefeed whole. The news here isn’t really about their lack of empathy; it’s about their raw ignorance.
Historians will make sharper parallels, but the current crash’n’burn of both the Romney campaign and the GOP in general seems to confirm the old programmers’ truism: Garbage in, garbage out. Anyone so energetically churning out lies and swill to force-feed “the rubes” is going to end up losing their ability to differentiate between their febrile inventions and reality. Eventually, they’ll end up preferring poisonous fantasies to reality, even while congratulating themselves for being smarter than their marketing.