‘Galt – Gekko 2012’ campaign wants to avoid a ‘great debate’

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Great post today from Greg Sargent on the "Galt – Gekko 2012" Big Lie propaganda campaign. No Romney and Ryan really don't want a great debate:

Ever since Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan, it’s been widely claimed
that this ensures a “great debate” pitting two starkly different
ideological visions over the future against one another. But it’s now
clear that the GOP ticket doesn’t want a great debate at all. Their
entire strategy is designed to obscure the true ideological differences
between both sides.

Many media figures have pointed out that Romney has refused to detail
his positions on issue after issue. What’s less appreciated is the real
reason he’s doing this. The GOP candidates don’t really want that
much-ballyhooed “great debate.” If they did want a contest between two
grand visions, they wouldn’t be shying away from discussing the true
nature and implications of their own vision. Yet they are doing just
that.

This explains why the Romney campaign has been campaigning so heavily
on two falsehoods about Obama’s policies: That he gutted welfare
reform’s work requirement and raided Medicare to pay for Obamacare. The
former claim is a distraction; the latter is about muddying the two
sides’ actual differences over what to do about the popular entitlement.
The muddying is necessary because the actual Ryan vision for Medicare’s
future is deeply unpopular. Same on taxes: Romney won’t detail how he’d
pay for his deep tax cuts — which would disproportionately benefit the
rich — because paying for them with middle class tax hikes would be
politically unacceptable. Must-read from Mike Tomasky:

These guys may not be able to count, but they can read
polls, and so they know very well that if they gave the county the
honest debate we were told we were going to have about Medicare, and for
that matter about taxation, they’d wake up Nov. 7 with about 120
electoral votes in their pockets and conservatism in tatters.

They know this. They know that the truth would crush them
electorally. And so it follows that they know they must lie. They must
lie about their Medicare plans. They must lie about the effects of their
tax plans on average people and rich people. And they must tell a
number of lies about Obama, all the better if they involve race, as the
welfare lie does.

So this will be the entire point of the Romney-Ryan
campaign. Lie lie lie. Muddy the waters. Turn day to night, fire to
water, champagne to piss. Peddle themselves as the precise opposite of
what they actually are. That is clearly the m.o.

This really explains everything. It explains what Ezra Klein has called the “policy gap” between the campaigns, in which only one side is proposing actual policies. . .

* * *

How on earth is this a great debate? It’s actually an effort to avoid
one. Anyone who continues to grant Romney and Ryan the presumption of
being serious about engaging in a great clash of visions is only helping
them avoid accountability for the true nature of their actual vision.

Ed Kilgore chimes in at the Political Animal blog, “Big Debate” Versus “Big Lies”:

But to conservative ideologues who have wanted a “choice” election as
badly as have Obama supporters, these lies are “true” on some “deeper
level,” in that they would fall down and start bleeding from the ears if
they lost the unshakable belief that Barack Obama is a sinister Alinsky
disciple determined to make the federal government a vast machine of
redistribution from good people to bad people. I mean, seriously,
folks: a large proportion of conservative “base” activists think or at
least suspect that people like me and thee are savages who want to
legalize infanticide, outlaw religion, and take away their guns, all in
the pursuit of stealing their hard-earned money and sharing it with
deadbeats whose votes we are buying. In the context of that belief
system, how much “evidence” do you need that Obama is gutting welfare
reform? Not a lot.

So you can very accurately say the Romney/Ryan campaign is serving up
plate after plate of deliberate, despicable lies, and also say they are
giving the troops whose precise turnout rate is critical to the outcome
what they want to hear and “honestly” believe. It helps that if
deployed cleverly, such lies are also persuasive to low-information
undecided voters, particularly non-college-educated white folk who
assume all politicians are lying most of the time.

We can expect nothing but empty platitudes, bumper sticker slogans, jingoism and ad hominem attacks from the "Galt – Gekko 2012" campaign. They do not want to provide voters with an honest discussion of any details of substantive policies, because they know that a majority of Americans reject their radical and extremist agenda. It is disrepsectful of the voters.