TWIP – Survey SAYS!

Thanks so much to everyone who answered my question last week! Of course it was not enough of a sampling to be anything scientific or official, but it did confirm my suspicion that there are more anti-Obama viral emails out there than any others. Note that a check over at Snopes or FactCheck.org wasn’t also an indication of that! At Snopes, Obama is #1 on their ranking and McCain is #11. Click on his – the claims are actually rather pathetic and are ones I’ve never heard of. Now click on the Obama link there and just keep on scrolling folks! Amazing really. You see a similar pattern over at FactCheck. That site is particularly usefull as it goes about checking out the claims in the campaign advertisements. Wonderful tool. There are corrections of ads form both sides, though again, a much higher percentage of McCains are found to be false and/or misleading.

For lilymae123 – I am not quite inclined to get into an email war with that pastor, but you can use the fact check site and also this chart which is right off of CNN.com to send a debunking response yourself:

(click on the above for a larger image)

All of this goes back to one of THE huge issues I’ve had with the GOP since Clinton was in the White House – their main campaign strategy is to spread smears and heighten fears. IOW – all negative.  And it has worked so well partially because of the way they have so skillfully manipulated the media. As this post details, it does not take much and the truly sad thing is how quickly the so called main stream media picks it up and runs with it without any fact checking of their own. In 2000 and 2004, Al Gore and John Kerry made the fatal assumption that the media would not cover unproven stories or smear campaigns. Or that, if they did, they would do it to expose the lies. This time around, the Obama campaign is not making the same mistake, and to some extent I have witnessed a few times when the MSM has actually done it’s fact checking job. OTOH, considering how many people asked had not received ANY forwarded smear mails (that includes me), it is interesting how much they are talked about on the tv. You have to wonder if it is the actual emails, or the coverage of them, that still has a percentage of the population convinced that Obama is a Muslim (apparently this problem even exists in Canada – crazy!) Oh, and for the record, he’s not *sigh*.

So why haven’t the Democrats learned how to play this same game? They are criticized frequently for being “whimpy” “spineless” and other words that are not very indicitive of a fighting spirit – and that’s by their own supporters 😉 But, do I want them to win that way? By being bullies? I don’t personally. I hate it. I am thrilled to see Obama fighting back and defending himself much more strongly than Gore and Kerry did. I am also thrilled to see, for instance, that his ad buy during the Olympics has so far been just a positive one about what he offers vs the attack ad that McCain ran for the first few days. But, I know I am not necessarily in the majority. Clearly the negative tactics have worked. People do respond to it. It’s a Catch22. Personally though, I *hope* Obama can *change* this. I believe that his policies will be better for the country at this time and I believe that he can go a long way to change the tone of political discourse.