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The most common standard for stickiness is whether it fits into a pre-existing impression. "Heck of a job, Brownie," stuck because it perfectly captured President Bush's failures during Hurricane Katrina. And Bill Clinton's finger-wagging always gets him in trouble because it reminds people of when he lied about Monica Lewinsky. But Joe Biden's stereotyping Indian-Americans at a convenience store or calling Obama "clean" and "articulate" did no lasting harm because no one ever accused Biden of being a racist. Stories don't grow in barren soil.

Of course, sometimes fertile soil—the congruent context—is itself a concoction. Dan Quayle's spelling "potato" with an "e" resonated because of superficial media judgments that he was somehow dumber than the average vice president. After Obama's gaffe about "bitter" voters "clinging" to guns and religion, McCain operatives worked overtime trying to tag the Democratic candidate as an elitist, down to the brand of iced tea he drinks. This despite the fact that Obama was raised by a single mother (who sometimes relied on food stamps) and attended top universities on scholarships and loans. The most persistent meme of this campaign season, that Obama is a Muslim, is a lie based on his foreign-sounding name and brief attendance at a public elementary school in Indonesia. In politics, like war, truth is the first casualty.

It's hard to predict what will stick. The "New Covenant" Bill Clinton offered in 1992 went nowhere, but a hand-scrawled sign that James Carville hung in the Little Rock war room that year, "It's the economy, stupid," entered the language. Campaigns spend vast amounts of time and money coming up with slogans ("Change We Can Believe In," "Country First") instead of finding the quirky expression or colorful figure of speech that someone might actually remember.

And all the efforts to fan the flames of the other guy's gaffe might be counterproductive. Flaps fade. The "story of the day" rarely lasts two. Truly harmful memes work more insidiously. Gore's Internet misquote was never a headline; it never sucked up all the media oxygen. But it ate away at his credibility because it played on an impression that he sometimes inflated his own importance.

The same might be true this year of McCain's "I'm [computer] illiterate and have to rely on my wife for assistance" line. When he said it to Yahoo News in January, hardly anyone took note. But the prospect of a 21st-century president largely unfamiliar with the dominant technology of our time has a way of lingering in the mind. It crystallizes the age issue without referencing it directly. Should McCain lose in November, that offhand admission could be one reason why. If it sticks.

© 2008

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  • Posted By: Krohn @ 10/09/2008 7:49:40 PM

    They harassed her until she registered to vote six times!:
    http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=3145562&maven_referralPlaylistId=&sRevUrl=http://www.foxnews.com/politics/

  • Posted By: Krohn @ 10/08/2008 11:55:16 PM

    "Not all Democrats agree with Mr. Frank that such policies are off-limits to criticism. Last week Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama said in a statement: 'Like a lot of my Democratic colleagues I was too slow to appreciate the recklessness of Fannie and Freddie. I defended their efforts to encourage affordable homeownership, when in retrospect, I should have heeded the concerns raised by their regulator in 2004. Frankly, I wish my Democratic colleagues would admit when it comes to Fannie and Freddie, we were wrong.'

    "Mr. Davis is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus."

    'Rank snobbery'

    Camille Paglia, who supports Sen. Barack Obama, has nothing but scorn for the way the media has treated Sarah Palin.

    "The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses," Miss Paglia writes at www.salon.com.

    "The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality."

  • Posted By: Krohn @ 10/06/2008 6:12:35 PM

    The Antichrist!:
    When George Soros failed to obtain the election of his candidate, John Kerry, in 2004, he brooded for a while, even said he might get out of politics altogether, but he just couldn???t stop himself. He has stated publicly that he wishes to burst the ???bubble of American supremacy,??? because he says our preeminence in the world is a detriment to global ???equilibrium.??? So far, he has failed, but he keeps on trying.

    And Mr. Soros has made no secret either of the fact that he sees the shortest way to effect political shake-ups, what he terms ???regime changes,??? is through very difficult economic conditions.

    America has not yet felt the full force of Soros style economic shock treatment. But others have.

    Soros made his first billion in 1992 by shorting the British pound with leveraged billions in financial bets, and became known as the man who broke the Bank of England. He broke it on the backs of hard-working British citizens who immediately saw their homes severely devalued and their life savings cut drastically in comparative worth almost overnight.

    When the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 threatened to spread globally, George Soros was right in the thick of it. Soros was accused by the Malaysian Prime Minister of causing the collapse with his monetary machinations, and he was branded in Thailand as an ???economic war criminal??? who ???sucks the blood from the people.??? Right in the middle of this crisis, Soros dashed off his book, The Crisis of Global Capitalism, which demanded a ???third way??? toward economic stability.

    Wake up, America, before it is too late!!!!

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