Republican Base Narrows as Desperation Sets In 
What the Republicans of the Steve Schmidt variety, the protégé of Karl Rove, do not recognize is that the only message they have had in years, that of attack and more attack while avoiding the real issues confronting Americans, is not working with the people they need to forge a majority.
While some mainstream media analysts shake their heads and comment about a strategy based on futility that is failing to show results, a focus on basic human psychology indicates why the same attacks are repeatedly used, even after their own Republican internal polling almost assuredly reveals that the efforts have been fruitless.
One of the hardest things to do is to teach a dog new tricks, and this is probably doubly so relating to attack dogs.
Currently Sarah Palin emerges as a role model Barbie Doll type mouthing clichés dealing with Joe Six Pack and Soccer Moms. Add that to her demagogic and thoroughly refuted charge about Obama "palling around with a terrorist" relative to Bill Ayers and the sum total is voter turnoff within all but one segment of voters.
Such comments have fired up what polls reveal as a severely diminished right wing base consisting of those who receive all their "news" from Rush Limbaugh and others of his stripe on radio and Roger Ailes' Fox News on television.
What Steve Schmidt and the candidates he manages, John McCain and Sarah Palin, do not realize is that the old formula will not work under these circumstances. The result is akin to pouting, spoiled children who were used to getting their way through temper tantrums, only to find that the national political culture has changed.
When people are feeling acute economic pain the thing they do not need is the Palin "dumbing down" tactic of using "gee whiz" and "golly" while dropping g's from her words to sound more folksy.
They want to hear the kind of sober discussion that Barack Obama and Joe Biden are providing. This does not mean that they have all the answers anymore than anyone else in a financial orbit where opinions are numerous and where errors can be so costly.
What it means is that Obama and Biden are offering concrete proposals to the important issues confronting America such as the economic meltdown and bringing an end to the Iraq War, which was launched on a tissue of provable lies.
Just think back to what seems now like an eternity considering how many important economic events have occurred during the intervening period.
At the time when financial meltdown approached the "message" that Steve Schmidt was conveying to America through its most recent ad was that Barack Obama, when he used an expression that John McCain had used pertaining to "lipstick on a pig" was referring to Sarah Palin when there was no evidence that the comment related to her.
Steve Schmidt should recognize that working up his own base will only mean that these voters will be more agitated when they vote. It does not add to the vote total. Calm and angry votes count the same.
With the Republicans stuck in a one-note vein, and with Palin scaling increasingly shriller, more strident levels while abandoning reason and appealing to emotion, the less intelligent, angrier, more vocal elements appear at rallies to shout out their frustrations as the vital center whose numbers control presidential elections turn off in greater numbers.
KEYWORDS: Steve Schmidt, John McCain, Sarah Palin
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