On Tue, 30 Mar 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >I think the Clarke stuff will matter in the long run. It's knocking
> >out Bush's main plank.
>
> According to the NY Post version of a Newsweek poll, large numbers of
> people are dismissing Clarke as "partisan" and "self-interested."
Well the emphasis here is on long run. I think it's reasonable to picture the present electorate as strongly polarized, with 40% in each camp not moving and 20% in play. Those 20% are by definition the least political voters in the country.
So I think it's fair to assume these are not people that are watching Sunday news programs 7 months before the election, nor watching C-Span, nor reading online pundits rehash C-Span. It also follows that this quintile isn't affected by crucial details when they come out. They're affected when -- and if -- the frame of reference of changes, if the basic narrative changes.
So if Clarke affects them, it will be indirectly in the long run. But I think that could happen. Clarke has suddenly made it perfectly respectable to say on mainstream TV that
1) the war in Iraq was a mistake because it undermined the war on terrorism;
2) that 9/11 could have been stopped; and
3) that we are unsafer now than we were before.
If those points are taken up and become tropes, they'll matter. When they've been repeated over and over and over as simple declarative statements and the reaction person nods as if Yeah, that's true. Or when it causes reporters start asking follow up questions, which there's been a plague of this week in the oddest places. (I even saw someone do it on Fox, to Rumsfeld.) And this administration, so good at being on script, is unbelievably clumsy when they're forced to improvise.
There's enough time to establish a new mainstream common sense by the time of the Repug convention. It's by no means guaranteed. But the initial polls would have little bearing on the question of whether that will happen.
Also its true when people say Clarke is self-interested and partisan. He's partisan in the everyday sense of the word, meaning he criticizes one side much more than the other. What he is saying (as opposed to how) will take a bit more time to filter in. It's something that most people in that middle quintile will find it hard to conceive of: the entire Iraq war had *nothing* to do with terrorism? So *every* time they said it did, they . . . . ? For people who don't already think like this, something like this requires a gestalt shift. Which takes time.
Michael