I’ve always liked chess.
Can’t say I ever totally mastered it, but I do know that it’s a battle of minds and wills and strategies, and that it doesn’t REALLY get going until some disposable pawns are taken out like so much cannon fodder.
I believe that many online political activists have been reduced to pawns; manipulated, sacrificed, and used to further the agenda of some knights, bishops, kings and queens in the MSM and major league blogosphere.
I’m not a Romney fan… but how did my personal uneasiness about his recent social conservative conversion, become a full blown case of Romney derangement syndrome? I mean, at it’s height I was practically frothing at the mouth in my passionate ‘hatred’ for the man.
I see the same thing from the other side about Mike Huckabee. Sometimes it seems like Romney supporters would love the opportunity to make Mike in effigy and burn him at the stake. The intensity of vitriol is potent, but I doubt at the beginning of January most of them even knew who Huckabee was.
So, the question becomes, how did we the party faithful end up where we are; full of this unneccessary poison that may end up tainting our ability to reason clearly come November?
The answer I believe, is that we were played as pawns by the conservative and mainstream media and blogosphere both, in their attempts to influence this electoral process in the direction they saw fit.
Lets begin in Iowa … with the unexpected boom in earned media coverage of Huckabee.
The MSM’s experiment with the ‘preacher who would be president’ went through a roller coaster of agendas.
First he was covered for electoral ‘entertainment,’ not taken at all seriously and not allowed into the hallowed atmosphere of the 1st tier. But Mike is a skilled communicator, and used those apearances to drive up his name recognition and poll numbers, right before the critical first in the nation primary, making him a threat to the then front runner Romney.
This is the critical point at which the general voting public becomes aware of Huckabee and begin to tune in to information about the dark horse candidate.
It is also the first time that many voters become aware that Mitt was running well in Iowa and that there was a contest going on between the two men.
It became the point when the chess masters started manouvring their pawns to get their favorites into a position for checkmate.
The conservative media were already in mid Rudy/Fred propoganda strategy when it became clear that these two would not be players in Iowa, and of the two remaining players, Mitt was clearly more ‘presidential’ in their eyes.
Thus began weeks of intensive interrogation interviews on Fox and the sunday shows, as ’scandal after scandal’ and contorversy were dug up and ’analyzed’ in a constant news cycle in attempts to take the shine off Huckabee’s appeal. Many of the far right giants in the poIitical blogosphere followed suit. Sometimes they even broke the ‘latest scandal’ and fed it into the MSM.
It didn’t help that in the chase for a scoop, reporters cherry picked questions and statements made by both candidates and blew them into days worth of ‘negative’ coverage further inflaming the partisans on both sides of the divide… the now infamous Mormon question by Mike, or the marching with Martin Luther King Jr. comments from Mitt. These were probably not the best comments to make when your every word is going to be dissected, but the damage they did was mainly because of the spin put on the comments by ‘commentators’ and not the comments themselves.
Now, in the minds of Romney supporters Huckabee was a soft on crime, pro-life liberal, knuckle dragging corrupt, bigoted, bible thimping hick. And in the minds of Huckabee supporters, Mitt was a slick opportunist, an empty suit, an elitist who would say or do anything to get elected.
This maybe wouldn’t have been an unsurmountable problem if the two candidates were covered equally by the one set of commentators that REALLY mattered to the conservative voting public.. but they weren’t.
Because of the clear and OBVIOUS bias of the Hannity’s Ingrams and Malkins against the Huckabee candidacy, Huckabee supporters became livid with the unfair and unbalanced coverage of their candidate in favor of Romney.
We had no problem with Mike being held accountable for the ’squishy’ areas of his record, but when the conservative media refused to ‘analyze’ the squishiness in Romney’s record, and in effect whitewashed him into Reagan reincarnated, it was very hard to swallow.
Unfortunately, I believe that the steaming frustration we had with the conservative leaders we had trusted to be objective, became directed, unfairly or not, on the object of their affection. Romney.
I began to destest him because he was in my opinion, receiving unfair and perhaps undeserved support from the very people who were doing evrything in their power to negate the candidacy of someone who was a reflection of what mattered most to ME.
It really didn’t help when supporters of both candidates themselves began to spout the media talking points in blog comments, and even went beyond ‘facts’ to the visceral personal character attacks in those comments. I began to percieve Romney’s character as being the same as the ‘worst’ of his supporters own, and ‘hated’ him even more. I am probably not too far off the mark to say that Romney supporters probably had a visceral reaction to the more extreme presonal attacks on Romney that some Huckabee supporters made as well, and likewise made the leap to attributing those qualities to Mike.
By being unfair in their coverage, the conservative media shot themselves in the foot. They managed to alienate the very voters that they were trying to convince to buy what Mitt was selling. A better strategy would have been to say, Huckabee is good.. but Mitt is better..
Saying Huckabee was a liberal was like telling me and others like me, that I was a liberal too… “voting bloc overboard!” Not the best way to woo us. It instead created a vicious circle of poisonous dislike that began with the media, but was continued and perpetuated by inflamed supporters.
While the Huckabee supporters waged their war with the conservative media elite, the MSM was still playing with their new ‘preacher Huckabee’ toy, enjoying that it was bothering the GOP elite that they were playing with a ‘pastor,’ and that their apparently unwarranted attention was driving the Romney supporters crazy in their own rights.
In the end, nobody realized that the only winners were the ‘media’ in all its forms, and that the only losers were we the people who cared enough to be actually engage in the political process in action.
Almost all of our ‘frenzy’ is rooted in published and broadcasted material that is written with the intent of being provocative and stirring up hostility between camps. We moved beyond calm and logical opposition on principle, to rabid rival steet gangs, each intent on the destruction of the other.
There are always those extreme, (and immature) characters who will detest and reject a candidate out of hand because of something as personal as their religion.. (on both sides of the divide) But by and large, most of us are just very impressionable, and inclined to believe whatever ‘fits’ with our personal take on a particular issue. If you were inclined to like Mitt, you were more likely to believe and embrace information that reduced Huck’s viability, and vice versa.
Nothing gives these writers and reporters more validation than having 300 comments of Huckabee vs. Romney hysteria posted after their articles. Some bloggers will go so far as to create provocative websites, and then blog about them in a way that provokes controversy.
(I will not go so far as to accuse, but I find it highly suspicious that the huckabee4america.com website was created the same day that it was blogged about on Townhall, in a way designed to inflame Romney supporters against Huck. Further, a google search of the website yeilded only 2 hits, the website and the townhall article. Now, that TH article is being cited as a source by other pro-Romney bloggers in an anti-Huck light.)
Then there is the most recent commentary on Mike’s campaign spin with McCain in Arkansas.
Reported objectively in multiple sources, you come away with a sense that Huckabee and McCain are good friends able to campaign together comfortably because they had a civil campaign.
The exact same conversation reported with an agenda, included the comment, “In a dig at Romney…”
Excuse me.. is that reporter psychic? Can she read minds… how dare she assume that a comment about ‘negative campaigning’ had to be about Romney… did not Fred play dirty, and perhaps hurt Mike even worse that Mitt ever did in SC?
People are playing with our heads… and we’re letting them!
Look, we all have to get to the point where we can say I like my guy more than your guy… but I don’t hate your guy, and I could see some benifits that he could bring to the table.
Neither of these candidates were angels… they are human, and politicians after all. We need to take them down off of their pedestals and accept them for the flawed representatives of our world views that they are.
I’m so tired of being the entertainment or validation pawn for ‘reporters’ or bloggers trying to make their mark on the world with unprofessional provocation.
I’m just not going to play anymore.
His Handmaiden
