18.6.09

Rhetorical Attacks: Do they work?

The unhinged rhetoric of present day Republicans and conservative public figures generally may represent a fairly simple misunderstanding on their part. The last couple of elections have seen the convincing rebuke of Republicans and conservative ideas and rhetoric. I suspect the present conservative rhetorical offensive against the Obama Administration and Democratic congressional leaders is based on the assumption that the electoral decline of Republicans was the result of overheated liberal and Democratic rhetoric during the Bush Administration, rather than the perception of voters that Republican policies have failed.

What if the overheated attacks against Bush and Republicans merely coincided with the public’s rejection of Republican policies based on perceived failure? What if the political decline of Republicans would have happened (maybe more gradually) even if liberals had not employed crazy, over the top, rhetorical attacks? If this is the case, then the present administration will not be damaged by extremist rhetoric, at least until there is credible evidence that its policies are not succeeding. Staying with this assumption, the present conservative approach may only be succeeding in damaging the credibility of conservatives, who are not savaging a president with 30% approval ratings, but rather are savaging a president with approval ratings consistently in the 60s whose programs are not (at least not yet) perceived as failures.

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