In response to my last post, The Undiscovered Country:  Obamaland, which was a snarky fisking of an American Spectator column by former Reagan White House political director Jeff Lord titled Freedom and the View from Obamaland,  I got the following comment from a reader calling him or herself "likelydemented":

An amusing post, Doc, but I think we all know that nobody actually pays any attention to this kind of loopy nonsense. Eric Hoffer has some interesting observations on true believers who base their personal identity on a cause. Hoffer believes that if you take away "conservatism" of someone like Jeff Lord, he ceases to exist. He vanishes. He becomes nothing.

It is always tempting to believe things like this.  But it is also extremely foolish, and dangerous, for liberal/progressives to comfort themselves with fatuous reassurances like "we all know that nobody actually pays any attention to this kind of loopy nonsense".

The particular rant by Lord that I spent most of yesterday morning ridiculing is part and parcel of a coordinated effort by conservative/Republican movers and shakers to get their base energized. Going into 2008, it has been the Rove and Co.'s greatest fear that Republican/conservative corruption, indecency, impropriety, and immorality (especially by accepted conservative standards) had become so brazenly commenplace in the last eight years or so, with so much of it manifesting in ways that the conservative base simply cannot and will not ignore (DeLay, Foley, Craig, etc, etc), that a significant percentage of the normally reliable base will simply stay home from the polls in disgust... or vote for some other candidate than the Republican (probably not the Democrat, no, but maybe some third party crank with a convincing "arrest all the goddam Mexicans and kill all the homos" stump speech).  

Rove has perfected the art of stealing close elections, but the popular vote has to be within 2-3 percentage points for all his tried and true jerrymandering techniques to work. The Republicans' worst nightmare this season is any national election with a 5% or higher spread. Even with everything they can do to keep Dem/progressive voters away from the polls (new ID laws, voter list caging, aggressive, knowingly fraudulent challenges, etc, etc) and everything else they will do to ensure that Dems who do show up either don't get to vote or their votes don't get counted (discarding provisional ballets and absentee ballots in predominantly Dem districts, making sure Dem precincts get too few voting machines, or broken voting machines, or ones that can be easily reprogrammed to show results entirely at odds with the exit polls), none of this will matter if Obama has a big enough lead going in.

So Rove goes to work for Fox News where he can continue to throw red meat to the base from his new vantage point as a 'political analyst' (never identified more accurately as a blatantlyl partisan Republican operative and close adviser to the McCain campaign), and everybody who has ever shilled for a Republican administration gets called on to write op eds and columns anywhere a conservative reader might see them screaming at the tops of their lungs about the horrors of an Obama Administration.

This is why McCain has reversed so many of his more progressive positions in the last several months. Most candidates moves to the center once they've secured the nomination, but McCain's right wing base doesn't like him, so he's had to move hard right to try and secure them, and the Republican noise machine is yapping yapping yapping, trying to get Cletus and Lurlene (and their upper middle class or wealthy analogues) up in arms about how there's a negra runnin for the White House and he's gonna take away yer guns and yer SUVs and let the libruls control yer thermostat, goddamit.

This is also why Obama has very cynically and very calculatedly taken so many positions recently which have offended the extreme left (like myself). He's doing what McCain can't -- moving to the center. In the end, Obama is pretty sure he can count on all of us, however disgruntled we may be about his selling out on FISA and his cheap shots at MoveOn, to vote for him, and if he can pick up a few million moderate and/or undecideds by appearing to be a centrist who is strong on national security concerns, well, that's the ballgame.

David Limbaugh has a column right now over at Townhall.com warning that Obama's recent right swing is a fraud, that he's still a far left progressive and liberal, and that conservatives should not allow themselves to be fooled... if Obama becomes President, he will purge Congress of conservative Democrats, marginalize Republicans and evangelicals for at least a generation, and stack the Supreme Court with liberal judges.

I wish to God I thought he was right... but this is what Republican operatives are going to be dancing and shaking and screaming about from now until November, in hopes they can make their base forget about Mark Foley and Larry Craig.

We liberals tend to want to think that no one is really stupid enough to fall for conservative bullshit like this, but that's our own particular brand of intellectual snobbery. Forty million people voted for Dubya despite the fact that his entire exterior appearance was a fraud, and he'd never managed to accomplish one single thing in his entire life... and in addition to being a weakling, a coward, a man of no character, a liar, a drunk, a doper, and a failure, he was also a cruelly cynical man who got marked pleasure out of executing women and the mentally retarded, childishly mocking such people's pleas to him for mercy.

The conservative/liberal dichotomy can be broken down many ways, but one of the most valid is to say that liberals think about issues, while conservatives feel about them. (That isn't entirely true; many liberals are just as knee jerk reflexive over their own core values as conservatives are about theirs, but at least left wing values tend to be somewhat intellectual, while right wing are always based entirely on emotion.) Conservatives vote their guts; they go for whichever candidate 'feels' best to them.

Right now, the right wing smear machine is working hard to undo all the damage it has done to McCain over the past ten years or so. They've put in a great deal of time and effort making conservatives feel that John McCain is not one of them and can't be trusted, and now they are reaping the whirlwind. So they aren't really focusing on McCain. Instead, they are simply trying to make this election be about which candidate conservative voters will trust less.

Don't ever let yourself think that horseshit like 'the view from Obamaland' doesn't matter. It's not targeted at you. They know YOU ain't gonna vote for McCain.

In fact, they know that very few of those who end up casting a ballot
with McCain's name will actually be voting FOR McCain.  McCain is an
empty suit, even more so than most Republican Presidential candidates.
There is little to recommend him to conservatives; none of the real
powers that be in the Republican Party are happy that McCain is their
representative... but they are much less happy with the idea of an
Obama Presidency, and this is the pitch they are making to conservative
voters:  Okay, You Don't Like McCain, But For Christ's Sake, You Better
Stop This Goddam Liberal Darkie!

The aforementioned Townhall.com column by David Limbaugh, entitled Obama's Leftist Armies, even opens with the old horror movie tagline -- "Be afraid; be very afraid."

Even Steve Benen of The Carpetbagger Report has repeatedly closed his recent blog posts with the question "Why would ANYone vote for McCain?"  But Karl Rove's strategy is not to convince people John McCain will make a good President, but simply to terrify them with the prospect that Barack Obama will be an effective liberal one -- which to conservatives translates as, one who will further erode the already intolerably diminished pre-eminence, power, privileges and prosperity of the upper class, the Caucasian,  the Christian, the heterosexual, and the dick-endowed.

A more viable strategy for the Obama campaign than simply attempting to out-Republican McCain on national security concerns might be to try and continually remind conservative voters that John McCain is not somebody they want to trust, or that they really feel good about voting for.  

If the Obama campaign can help the Republican base continually remember just how much they really dislike John McCain, and, for that matter, just how disappointed they have recently been in the party that has given them an unending parade of corruption and sex scandals for the past decade...well, they for damn aren't going to vote for the Magical Negro, but they just might sit the '08 elections out at home in disgust.

If Obama feels he needs to stay above the fray, that's fine.  But that doesn't mean the rest of us can't print up red white and blue McCain/Foley '08:  We Love Our Boys buttons, bumper stickers, and t-shirts and pass them around to our neighbors.  

It's tempting to ignore conservative hacks like Lord and Limbaugh; after all, who's going to listen to idiots like that?  We need to remember -- they aren't talking to us.  And the people they are talking to, are going to pay very close attention indeed.