What struck me about that clip from old man Schieffer that mistermix put up wasn’t so much how offensive Reince’s comparison was but how obscure it was. How many viewers could possibly have known who Captain Schettino is? I had no idea. I had heard of the crash, but not to the point where I knew the captain’s name. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe Italian ship disasters are exactly what Real Murkins like to talk about it around the Applebees salad bar, but I doubt it.
In 2008, I was similarly struck by how often John McCain would yell “field mice” or “bear DNA” at odd moments, and by how Mark Halperin and Chuck Todd thought this was a killer tactic, even though there’s no way most Americans had any idea what he was talking about. This set of Republican debates has been even worse, with the constant references to Saul Alinsky and silver dimes. What Atrios wrote a few years ago is more true than ever:
I’ve written before that I think part of the problem that conservatives/Republicans face is that their mythology has become a bit too complex for mere mortals (people who don’t listen to Limbaugh and read The Corner obsessively) to comprehend. They reference rogues’ gallery of enemies and various “bad things” that most people have never heard of. Simply trying to navigate through the various wingnutty minefields while throwing out the appropriate red meat has become difficult to do, and the result is incomprehensible to most of the country.
Here’s another example of what I’m talking about, in the context of the Christian right’s response to Gingrich’s anti-media debate tirade a few weeks ago:
The way Land sees it, Gingrich’s answer went beyond merely nodding toward the anti-media spirit among conservative Christian voters and reached forward instead to what they imagined would be an apocalyptic, nearly eschatological campaign between Obama and Gingrich. “They would love to see a false smarty pants decapitated by a real intellectual,” Land told me. “He would tear Obama’s head off.”
Evidence in support of Land’s analysis can be found in a webcast on the Internet site of Don Wildmon’s American Family Association. On the site, Matt Barber, an aggressive promoter of a socially conservative agenda, voiced unalloyed joy over a video celebrating the Gingrich-King confrontation like a nature show. Barber describes
footage of a lion chasing down a zebra. And then after the lion kills the zebra and looks up with his fur bloody, they switched back to a picture of Newt Gingrich with blood over his face. He had just made a meal out of John King.
To most viewers, I’m sure Gingrich came across as a guy who was angry that his philandering ways were being discussed on tv, but to some on the right, Gingrich came across as an intellectual lion-eating zebra zebra-eating lion. It’s no wonder these debates are killing Republicans’ favorability with independent voters.
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