Republican Election Strategy 1 - Targeted Buy-Up

How many of us are still in shock that Obama, our most economically incompetent leader since Jimmy Carter, if not of all time, was able to win reelection. In a rational world, this guy wouldn't be elected to run a lemonade stand, and the whole ideology of the left, bankrupt, would be wallowing in the dustbin of history. Obama shouldn't have carried a single state. Bottom line, the 2012 election was the penultimate triumph of bullshit over rationality.

The most important questions to answer are why, how, and what new strategy we need to follow to cure the problem. So with that, I will be keeping a running list of all the good suggestions to come across the net. And there is no better place to begin than with a brilliant suggestion from Prof. Glenn Reynolds.

According to Prof. Reynolds, the hundreds of millions that big donors poured into Super Pacs for advertising was wasted. As Powerline frames it:

Republicans already do well with high-information voters, but we are getting killed among low-information voters–which is to say, the majority. When I was growing up, even the least well-informed voters knew that free enterprise is vastly superior to socialism. In those days, you had to go to graduate school to see the virtues of socialism. Today, there are many millions of Americans who can tell one Kardashian sister from another, but have no idea that Barack Obama has compiled the worst presidential record since Jimmy Carter. Seriously: they really don’t know. These are the voters we need to reach, and to reach them we need to go where they live. At TMZ, for example. Or The Frisky.

This from Prof. Reynolds writing in the NY Post:

. . . I think that rich people wanting to support the Republican Party might want to direct their money somewhere besides TV ads that copy, poorly, what Lee Atwater did decades ago.

My suggestion: Buy some women’s magazines. No, really. Or at least some women’s Web sites.

One of the groups with whom Romney did worst was female “low-information voters.” Those are women who don’t really follow politics, and vote based on a vague sense of who’s mean and who’s nice, who’s cool and who’s uncool.

Since, by definition, they don’t pay much attention to political news, they get this sense from what they do read. And for many, that’s traditional women’s magazines — Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, the Ladies Home Journal, etc. — and the newer women’s sites like YourTango, The Frisky, Yahoo! Shine, and the like.

The thing is, those magazines and Web sites see themselves, pretty consciously, as a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. So while nine out of 10 articles may be the usual stuff on sex, diet and shopping, the 10th will always be either soft p.r. for the Democrats or soft — or sometimes not-so-soft — hits on Republicans.

When a flier about getting away with rape was found in a college men’s bathroom, the women’s site YourTango (“Your Best Love Life”) led with the fact that the college was Paul Ryan’s alma materin a transparent effort to advance the Democrats’ War on Women claim that Republicans are somehow pro-rape. A companion article was “12 Hot Older Men Who Endorse President Obama.”

Similar p.r. abounded across the board: Sandra Fluke is a hero; Sarah Palin is a zero. Republicans are all old white men (women or minority Republicans get mocked or ignored).

This kind of thing adds up, especially among low-information voters. They may not know or care much about the specifics, but this theme, repeated over and over again, sends a message: Democrats are cool, and Republicans are uncool — and if you vote for them, you’re uncool, too.

There’s nothing new about this, of course. In her 2004 book, “Spin Sisters: How the Women of The Media Sell Unhappiness — and Liberalism — to the Women of America,” Myrna Blyth (a former Ladies Home Journal editor) explained in considerable detail the variety of “Mean Girls” feminism that the women’s media aim at their readers with every issue.

The message: There’s one way that women should think; people who don’t think that way are bad and stupid — and if you think the wrong way, women won’t like you.

For $150 million, you could buy or start a lot of women’s Web sites. And I’d hardly change a thing in the formula. The nine articles on sex, shopping and exercise could stay the same. The 10th would just be the reverse of what’s there now.

For the pro-Republican stuff, well, just visit the “Real Mitt Romney” page at snopes.com, or look up the time Mitt Romney rescued a 14-year-old kidnap victim, to see the kind of feel-good stories that could have been running. For the others, well, it would run articles on whether Bill Clinton should get a pass on his affairs, whether it’s right that the Obama White House pays women less than men, and reports on how the tax system punishes women.

This stuff writes itself, probably more easily than the Spin Sisters’ pabulum. And opening up a major beachhead in this section of the media is probably a lot cheaper than challenging major newspapers and TV networks head on. . . .

Brilliant.

Update: Linked at Larwyn's Linx: Hiding The Witnesses

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