Why the Ayers Attacks Won’t Work
by tgirschOctober 9th, 2008
So as I’m sure you’ve read elsewhere, it seems that McCain’s latest tactic is to try to hit Obama for his past association with William Ayers. I can understand why McCain wants to attack Obama, but I really don’t expect this to work. To explain, I’m going to crib heavily off Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book The Tipping Point.
In order for the Ayers allegations to “tip” and become widely accepted and talked about, according to Gladwell, there are three aspects that need to be met:
- The Law of the Few: Ideas and other social phenomena are largely spread by a very few people.
- The Stickiness Factor: Whether or not something like this takes off depends on how “sticky” it is.
- The Power of Context: Any idea won’t “tip” unless the context — social, political, geographic, or otherwise — is ripe for it to do so.
I think the Ayers allegations will fail to “tip” because they fail to meet at least the last two of those three criteria.
For starters, the idea just plain isn’t sticky. Despite the McCain camp’s attempts to paint Obama as an unknown commodity, he’s been in the news almost constantly for the last two years, and he showed up on the public’s radar as early as 2004. Thus, he’s pretty well known by the general public, at least as well as dozens of other political household names. By now, most people — even undecideds — have already formed a lot of opinions about him, so attempts to redefine him in the eyes of the general public are going to be very difficult to pull off, unless they fit in with those already-formed opinions. Along that vein, even if the association with Ayers were deeper than appears to be on the surface, to the casual observer it just won’t make sense. When Obama gives speeches in public or appears in debates, he just doesn’t come across to most people as some kind of anti-American radical. If there’s a problem with Obama’s demeanor, it’s that he’s level to the point of being almost boring. The context just isn’t there. To convince the general public that Obama “pals around with domestic terrorists,” they’re going to need a hell of a lot more evidence than what they have right now, and/or a serious assist (e.g., misstep) by Obama. I don’t expect they’re going to get either one. And almost as importantly, raise your hand if you had even heard of William Ayers before this hubbub hit the first time around. I know I didn’t (I was only vaguely aware of the Weather Underground), and I suspect that’s true of most Americans.
And that “first time around” bit brings up another, even simpler way to know that the Ayers ploy isn’t going to work. It’s been tried already, by Hillary Clinton, and it has already failed. So in addition to not having much traction, it’s already yesterday’s news.
Now contrast that against some of the allegations made against John Kerry in 2004: that he was a “flip flopper” and a “war criminal.” Those smears stuck, because the context was already there for them to stick, and because Kerry himself helped make them stick. With respect to the “war criminal” allegation, there was already a good deal of resentment against Kerry, particularly among veterans, left over from his Winter Soldiers testimony and his activities with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. You had a ready-made army of foot soldiers out there willing to spread the message. And, of course, on the flip-flopper side, there was the infamous “I actually did vote for [it] before I voted against it” gaffe. Serious people, and anyone who knows how Congress works, knew what he meant, but he gave his detractors the perfect ammunition to make that attack stick. I just don’t see Obama making a similar mistake, and I don’t see that the context is already there among undecideds to make these attacks against him stick.
I expect that attacks over Reverend Wright would gain a bit more traction, but still would ultimately prove unsuccessful because, as mentioned above, it just doesn’t “fit.” To anybody who’s heard Obama’s speeches and seen him in the debates, he just doesn’t come across as a racist, anti-American radical. Guilt-by-associaton attacks really only work when the associations make sense to people, and to most, Obama seems nothing at all like the type of person who ascribes to the more fiery sermons of Rev. Wright.
Now that’s not to say that nobody’s going to buy into this stuff. Of course some will. But the overwhelming majority of those already weren’t going to vote for Obama under any circumstances anyway. So I just don’t see how this is going to help McCain. At this point, among the majority of Americans, he’s not going to be able to make it stick, and he’s just going to look desperate.
Categories: Politics |
Yeah it won’t work for the majority of American voters, but will it do the real crazies (think of the Tim McVeighs)? Has the Republican party fallen so far that they are whipping up the truly devoted in the hopes that one of them tries to take matters into their own hands and save this country from a crypto-Muslim president? It looks that way to me.
Yup. ACORN, on the other hand, is the time bomb under Obama’s campaign. It’s sticky because people are very protective of their franchise, and get pissed off when they think people are tampering with it. Eight years of “selected not elected” talk is the context, along with all the Diebold talk. The People will not stand for the idea that the ballot box is being tampered with.
The problem is that if it reaches critical mass and Obama still wins, then there will be quite a few people who think that the entire election was illegitimate (and in a much more significant way than 2000.)
Phelps - I think you have it. This election will be a mess because folks will buy into the fraud argument.
I hit on it on my blog
http://tekmagej.blogspot.com/2008/10/how-this-election-will-split-country.html
Yeah, ACORN is a huge shitpile. They can’t do voter fraud, but they pay their employees but how many voters get registered, which means employees turn in in a ton of bogus registrations. On it’s own that doesn’t equal voter fraud, but it is a shitty shitty organization.
You’ve certainly got a point on ACORN, but I wonder how many times the GOP can keep going back to the voter fraud well? It seems that this has been coming up every election for the last few cycles, and every detailed investigation winds up turning up next to nothing. And attempts to “fix” voter fraud generally have the effect of disenfranchising a lot more legitimate voters than illegitimate ones.
And that’s why I don’t think the voter fraud stuff will really sell, even ACORN’s BS isn’t voter fraud. It’s registration fraud. The Republicans have had eight years to dig up real voter fraud and they haven’t found any. The voter fraud stuff isn’t aimed at the mass audience, just the true believers. It is, again, why I am afraid of the real lunatics. I don’t really care about Fox talking heads, and the blowhards. I’m afraid of the clinic-bomber/Tim McVeigh types. It wouldn’t take too many of them to do some real harm, and McCain/Palin are coming periously close to the “Who will rid me of this troublesome knight” line.
Doh! I meant Priest, not Knight.
I also think you meant “meddlesome,” not “troublesome.” But I’m not certain on that one…
And what’s more I may be full of shit myself on ACORN…
http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/10/acorn_rallies_its_troops.php
This is an interesting take on what moves political campaigns, but I see it from a different perspective. I think it’s all too obvious how big a role the “selective evidence” fallacy plays in people’s political choices (and in so many others). That particular failure of critical thinking ensures that, almost, no matter what is revealed about Ayers or how surprising it is, it will only solidify, not change, the existing distribution of votes.
People tend to selectively accept or reject information on the basis of how well it conforms to what they already believe (like the male chauvinist who thinks women are bad drivers, and keeps pointing out every bad female driver as confirmation while ignoring every other driver on the road). They have leanings a certain way, and, beyond some minimum degree of allegiance, there is little that will turn them against their chosen candidate. Once they’ve made their choice, everything that is brought out just confirms their opinion one way or the other.
For those who oppose Obama, the fact that he crossed paths with someone who broke the law 40 years ago is proof that he’s secretly a terrorist radical anti-American - not because it means anything by itself but because it fits with the narrative they’ve built up for themselves already. For those who support him, it’s meaningless because it doesn’t fit with the description they have of him in their minds. (Except, of course, for those who support him because he’s a terrorist radical anti-American, but I’m guessing they’re few in number.)
Add to that the general dispositions of the two groups - I would bet a lot that, whatever the truth is about Obama’s association with Ayers, Obama voters just don’t care about it that much, and Obama opponents care about it a lot more - and there is very little impact that any further information about Ayers is going to have on the voting decisions of the large majority of the population. Whichever way they’re leaning, the Ayers stuff just confirms what they already “knew”.
Of course, it’s the undecideds that are in question here. This analysis may not hold as well for them, and they’re the ones whose votes matter at this point. But I’ve never been undecided in any major election, and I can’t imagine what goes through their heads. (Who could not have an opinion between Obama and McCain at this date? And if you didn’t have an opinion already, why would the Ayers thing be the tipping-point trigger?)