Saturday, June 19, 2010

Tea Party Black Ops

Some interesting weekend reading. Don't know quite what to make of this long piece in Playboy. It's by an anonymous author who claims to be a K Street Rouge doing black ops for the Tea Party. Some of it reads like a spoof to me, but it does have a ring of credibility for the most part. Couple of the more interesting quotes:
A good piece of mail gets its message across in 10 seconds. Television gives you 30 seconds, maybe. We’re playing to the reptilian brain rather than the logic centers, so we look for key words and images to leverage the intense rage and anxiety of white working-class conservatives. In other words, I talk to the same part of your brain that causes road rage. Ross Perot’s big mistake was his failure to connect his pie charts with the primordial brain. Two years after Perot’s first White House run the GOP figured this out, and thus was born the "angry white man" and with him a 54-seat swing in the House of Representatives. [...]

Causing mayhem is not limited to dealing with the press. We’ve quietly acquired Service Employees International Union shirts to wear at Tea Party rallies. For big labor, that’s like handing out TSA uniforms in Kabul. And at a rally in St. Louis this March, fake SEIU protesters joined the Tea Party protest.
Worth a read in full even if the narrative sort of plays to both sides. [hat tip Southern Beale]

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

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2 Comments:

Blogger Litzz11@yahoo.com said...

Yes, you hit on the hot spots I had flagged in that piece as well ... and then there was this one:

""The reality is the Tea Party as we know it will cease to exist within an election cycle. Its ideas won’t go away, but most of its leaders will. That’s because most self-appointed leaders in this world simply don’t know how to win.Mark my words: Without proper experienced guidance they will fuck it up. Rallies don’t win elections—votes do. Their egos are writing checks their organizations will never cash."

Hope he's right about that.

Never ceases to amaze me how a lunatic fringe could capture our media's attention while liberals have to beg and plead to get camera time.

8:12:00 PM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

Silly SoBeale. Did you forget liberals aren't *real* Murkicans?

Seriously though, I do hope he's right about that as well. It jibes with my take. The tea party is fractured and their "leaders" have always been about ego and squeezing some cash out of the rubes as far as I can see.

Also saw somewhere, the Tea Party brand is so tainted now that they're rebranding as Conservative constitutionalists or something like that.

11:00:00 AM  

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