A Cautionary Tale

The revelation on Thursday of the plan to cause the "demise" of President Obama with a $10 million smear campaign has obvious racial elements, and I do think the media is a bit naive thinking it wouldn't work.  It wouldn't work with everyone, but older white male voters who fancy themselves Independents are more than susceptible, with older men in general and older white women in the mix.  As I've pointed out before, racism is already coded into the GOPer campaign.

But even if this line of attack has been blunted by the Times story, the actual document the Times links to online shows the dangers ahead in detail: the kind of thorough, managed blitz in various forms through all the relevant media that ten million dollars can buy.  The purveyors were especially hot on using Twitter to start a firestorm, and the irony for the moment is that a Twitter firestorm is what got the whole thing collapsing within hours of the Times story hitting the wires and the streets.  But the danger remains---there are billionaires willing to pour millions into these efforts, and p.r. whores as well as ideologues ready and willing to put them into play, regardless of how lying, crazy and mutually assured destructive they are.

We can be grateful to whoever leaked this, and to the NY Times for breaking the story.  There's some hope in that.  But the money has just started to talk--or swear.