Are Democrats capable of helping themselves?

“A public unusually resistant to typical GOP bullshit and scare tactics”

Daily Kos says this is what we would need if for some reason – an Edwards choice of public funding, followed by an Edwards nomination – the Democratic nominee would not be able to match the money spent by the GOP’s candidate in the general election.

What bothers me about statements like this is the implicit passivity – that, woe is me, nothing can be done about it. Sometimes it seems like there is a tacit agreement between the consultants and media moguls for both sides not to expose these tactics – like, hey, if we do that, we might not be able to launch our own unfair character assault, either.

No, the media is not going to educate the public on the crap the GOP will use, and, in fact, will most likely reinforce it because it is now the Republican media, considering that Robert Welch, and Disney and even Sumner Redstone (calls himself a liberal Democrat, but endorsed Bush in 2004) are calling the shots at the major networks, and Fox and MSNBC are leading the parade of cable news outlets. Basically, only Keith Olbermann and Stewart/Colbert are providing some liberal perspective in the television medium today. There is no longer a liberal media. Even the main figures, like Broder, Russert, Matthews, Gregory, Rich, Dowd, Kurtz, know where their bread is buttered and can be relied on to trash, sometimes subtly or cleverly to maintain a fig leaf of independence, the Democratic candidate.

So where is the self-help, the massive, relentless advertising campaign by MoveOn or Democracy Corps, by anyone funded by the Buffetts, the Gateses and the Soroses, or by the National Democratic Committee, inoculating the American people against the virus of GOP character-assassination methodology? Showing people how the “Swiftboat” campaign of lies worked and to look for something like that again? Or how they (with their mainstream media accomplices) undermined public views of Gore in 2000 with relentlessly concocted stories of lies and exaggerations that presented him as a phony? How Limbaugh and all of them lie through their teeth? How the Republicans think the American public is really stupid running campaigns this way. How they do these phony character attacks to distract from attention to the policies and decisions that Democrats will adopt to help the American people and Republicans will not. How they should not be allowed to get away with this kind of campaigning any longer, and should be punished for it.

Judo is the art of turning the opponent’s strength back against it. Karl Rove got that. Democrats can do it, too, by showing the Karl Rove tactics in action. It’s time for the Democratic powers-that-be to show us they can learn a lesson. If there isn’t a tacit agreement not to call out the Republicans’ tactics, as suggested above, there certainly seems to be a reluctance of somebody’s making to go for the jugular against right wing Republicanism. It is ripe for being destroyed now, it deserves to be destroyed, on the now unassailable premise (after Katrina, Iraq, dead miners, lead-poisoned toys) that a party that hates government will do a terrible job governing. I see no such effort on the part of the Democratic money people. Why the hell not?