Defining Failure Before the Next Election

Republicans and Conservatives are realizing immense and unpleasant truths: the critical issues of the Obama Presidency do not and will not sell themselves, while the media available to move opinion are biased and shifting.

• Moreover, the decisive votes cast in 2008 - and those that will be cast in 2010 and 2012 - were cast by Gen-X'ers and Gen-Y'ers whose educations were purged of context - civics, ethics, history and geography. Jon Stewart's television show is "teaching" these folks what they didn't get in school - unless someone provides a countervailing point of view in acceptable and comprehensible terms.

Gen-X and Gen-Y do not know what failure looks like. They know only what a loser looks like. *

• What the Right should do is establish "The Of-Course Task Force" to promulgate the certainty that Obama will be a one-term failure. A cottage network must be built to describe endless reasons, rationales, scenarios and speculation to prepare people to believe it.

The Of-Course Task Force should be writing ubiquitously not just about how Obama will fail but also about what Hillary will do and how the Dixie Chicks will feel. In order to prepare Gen-X and Gen-Y, the strengths and weaknesses of those demographics must be accepted and utilized - the obsession with entertainment and celebrity, as well as the confusion and hunger for something that makes sense.

• There are only two scenarios for the preservation of the American Republic - swing voters are prepared or panicked. Unless our republic is going to be wagered on the likelihood of panicking swing voters with war or terror or economic disaster, the task of the Right now is to define (but not illustrate) failure. The present reality is that internet propaganda, counter-intelligence and counter-propaganda have been and are handled much more deftly by the Democrats.

The face of failure must be presented in a hundred ways, so that voters will expect to see it, will know to look for it and will recognize that failure when they see it. Issues and events must be made obvious (the "of course!"). The preaching of a campaign (even an extended campaign like 2008) will not affect those not already prepared to change their minds.

• A long, patient and focused program is called for to alter the context of the coming campaigns - by making what is now unthinkable into what is expected and, thereby, self-evident and obvious. Somewhere in-between unthinkable and obvious is the point where things become "edgy" where late-night comedians and pundits think they are clever. Jon Stewart suggesting that Democratic appointees might pay their taxes is an illustrative and constructive step.

Three years is enough time to accomplish these changes; 18 months is probably not. The 2010 election will turn on panic or it will not turn.

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*for a demonstration of how Gen-X and Gen-Y can recognize a loser, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z0h1NNk1Ik&feature=related