Live by the sword, die by the sword

By now, many of you will have seen the text of Peter Daou’s email. The Confluence also received the email from Peter. There is no doubt in my mind that Peter is correct about the sources of the negativity launched at Hillary Clinton by Obama’s campaign. At the time that Obama became a serious contender late last fall, I wrote a series of posts at DailyKos remarking on the absurdity of the accusations hurled against her.

Pre-emptive Clinton Character Assassination

Quick! Get Barack the Smelling Salts

The Incomparable Mr. Obama

Obama is Not a WATB! Take it back!

In our society, a woman is forbidden by custom and social conditioning from firing back. So, Senator Obama’s campaign took advantage of this. The set up was quite neat: First, say how uncomfortable it is for a woman to go negative. It’s unseemly and unladylike. Heavens, we must all be living next to Jane Austen with all the tut-tutting about how truly awful it would be if Hillary went negative. Second, hit Hillary with some absolutely ridiculous charge, like, I dunno, playing the race card by bringing up Obama’s former drug abuse. Nevermind that she never said it, one of her surrogates floated the notion. Nevermind that Obama himself wrote about the subject. Clinton brought it up and that is not allowed.  Third, sit back and watch her twist herself into a pretzel trying to defend herself without looking abrasive.

In short, she has been not allowed to criticize, compare, chastise or get angry about anything with regard to Obama, while his campaign can float any dirty little thing they want against her. And it is all vaguely reminiscent of the Edwards attacks on Hillary in the late summer and THAT was strongly influenced by Newt Gingrich’s famous brochure on the manipulation of Language as a Key Mechanism of Control.

Now, I don’t know who started it or who picked up where the other left off but I find it very curious that John Edwards started this line of attack and when his star was fading, Obama took up the torch and made it burn even brighter. The Kossacks on DailyKos became one huge opposition research focus group where first Joe Trippi, then David Axelrod could test out various viral memes. Then they set up yahoo and google groups and coordinated diaries so they would make the rec list every day. It got to be so obvious that I called it the Rec List Hostage Crisis. The negative stuff on Hillary that flowed from the rec list was non-stop and still is. It has now reached a hyperbolic state of vitriol that is no longer believable. But when it first started, it was *very* believable, at least to the uncritical mind. And many jumped on the bandwagon and spread the memes from blog to blog. In fact, when I set up The Confluence, I made sure that it would not permeate this site if I could help it. The comments sections are set up to forward to the moderation queue any of the trigger words found most commonly in DailyKos Obamaphile threads. The comments are examined in context and any negative advertising is deleted.

Because that is what this is, folks, negative advertising. In essence, the Obama campaign is using the big name blogs as dissemination sites for negative advertisements. They don’t have to pay much to get this going. (What would a functioning FEC say?) They just have to drop some keywords into a few rec list diaries and repeat them ad nauseum until it takes. Then they play group dynamics to split the unwanted dross from the highjacked site. At that point, the meme just reproduces and spreads.

It’s very much like a virus behaves. It infiltrates the host, inserts its own DNA and the commandeers the cells reproduction facilities to make more copies of itself. And these copies break free of the cell and spread the infection. At this point, the infection on the left blogosphere is severe and chronic. There may not be time to turn this around but we are going to try. The first thing we did was not succumb to the infection. That’s why you are reading this blog right now. We are out here and we will not go away. But that is not enough. Now it is time to expose the GOP like tactics that the Obama campaign has borrowed. These tactics work because they divide the target and prevent power through a union. They pander to our base instincts, in this case, the feelings of superiority that comes from being at the top of the social hierarchy as an American male. They make one set of supporters sound like Sports Illustrated swimsuit models with PhDs and the others as tired and stupid old has-been hags.

If this is how Obama wants to win, then we will need to show who he is and why he is willing to tear our party apart to get what he wants. And if Hillary has to do some of this work herself, well, fighting adversity is what we are hiring her for. But Obama’s campaign of negativity is going to meet its Waterloo. Count on it. I have not yet *begun* to snark.