The Romney Oppo Book
By coincidence, it appears that the McCain campaign's oppo book on Romney has been released to the web. Given our ongoing discussion, it might serve as a useful source of information. While it is, of course, an opposition book -- and therefore designed to be harmful rather than sympathetic -- a good oppo book must be tight enough that the candidate relying on it won't look foolish.
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3 comments:
... a good oppo book must be tight enough that the candidate relying on it won't look foolish.
Not really. Voters are swayed by misinformation and emotion all the time.
True; but in a debate, the opponent will have a chance to make you look stupid if you don't know what you're talking about. If you pull one of these little factoids out and it's a blatant misreading of the facts, you'll likely get schooled in front of the voting public.
As the Perry campaign shows, voters do pay attention to those who make themselves look stupid in public.
True; but in a debate, the opponent will have a chance to make you look stupid if you don't know what you're talking about.
Sometimes that's true, but more often what happens (and there have been innumerable studies that show this) is that once a lie gets out there, subsequent rebuttals have little effect.
Moreover, most voters don't watch the debates but they read newspapers, log onto Twitter or Facebook, read blogs, etc. The vectors for misinformation are so numerous that lies can go viral, but since the truth is rarely as interesting as an inflammatory accusation, it almost never goes viral.
There's even an old saying about this: A lie can go around there world before the truth even gets its pants on in the morning.
Think of the infamous "16 words" meme. To this day, it is synonymous with "lied us into war". If you Google it, you'll see hundreds and thousands of inaccurate references and almost no truthful ones.
I don't think much of "accidentally" releasing opposition research myself. It seems a low thing to do. If you think biased information sources are reliable, I suppose they can be quite useful.
I've been doing research for years - long before I started blogging. You can do research to try and discover the truth (in which case you will tend to look at both sides). Or you can do research to prove something you already think or to find evidence that supports a goal.
Such research is biased and distorted from the get go because it will ignore anything that doesn't support the goal. And presented with a large collection of negative claims, no reader will spend time examining each claim fairly to see if it holds up.
If you enjoy that sort of thing,
Grim, have at it. But don't fool yourself about the nature of what you're reading.
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