The World after the SBVT II

If you are a conservative or other supporter and you want to rile up a Democrat, just say these four words, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. It's clear the SBVT will continue to dominate the way in which Democrats determine political strategy for years to come. The manner in which any Democratic candidate counters any attack, including ones from members of their own party, will for years be determined by the way in which said candidate analyzes SBVT.

It's clear that Barack Obama determined that John Kerry didn't meet their attacks head on. Determined to meet each and every attack head on, Barack Obama may have gone too far the other way. Obama started to counter attacks with a wise and proactive approach, he created a website to counter any and all smears. This was very proper and proactive. It's important for any campaign to counter scurrilous attacks like many that have made their way to the darkest corners of the internet against Obama: he's a Muslim, he wasn't born in the U.S., the "Whitey" tape, etc.

The problem, as I see it, is that Obama didn't end things there. Over the last couple months, Barack Obama has attempted to counter each and every attack, real or perceived, that has surfaced anywhere. When a candidate refuses to counter an attack, they allow the attacker to drive the narrative. When a candidate counters each and every attack against them, they raise the profile of many attacks that would have faded away on their own.

Barack Obama's first mistake, in my opinion, was his furious counter to Jerome Corsi's book, Obama Nation. They countered the book with a forty page website. They have referenced the book on several campaign stops. They even referenced the book in attacking Fox News.. To me, this is a rather dubious strategy. First, the book is several hundred pages. The response is forty pages. Anyone that has read the whole book isn't going to be impressed with the response. Anyone that hasn't will only be more intrigued by the book. Second, by making the book such an issue he's only raised it's profile. It's ironic because the Conservative establishment has actually gotten behind the book by David Fredesso. What is clear is that Obama's aggressive counter to Corsi's book has put lots of money into Corsi's pocket since his book has spent several weeks on the NYT best seller list.

Following the debate at Saddleback, Barack Obama sat down with David Brody of the Christian Broadcast Network. He addressed the growing controversy over his vote on the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. Here is how he responded to the controversy.

Brody: Real quick, the born alive infant protection act. I gotta tell you that's the one thing I get a lot of emails about and it's just not just from Evangelicals, it about Catholics, Protestants, main -- they're trying to understand it because there was some literature put out by the National Right to Life Committee. And they're basically saying they felt like you misrepresented your position on that bill.

Obama: Let me clarify this right now.

Brody: Because it's getting a lot of play.

Obama: Well and because they have not been telling the truth. And I hate to say that people are lying, but here's a situation where folks are lying. I have said repeatedly that I would have been completely in, fully in support of the federal bill that everybody supported - which was to say --that you should provide assistance to any infant that was born - even if it was as a consequence of an induced abortion. That was not the bill that was presented at the state level. What that bill also was doing was trying to undermine Roe vs. Wade. By the way, we also had a bill, a law already in place in Illinois that insured life saving treatment was given to infants.

So for people to suggest that I and the Illinois medical society, so Illinois doctors were somehow in favor of withholding life saving support from an infant born alive is ridiculous. It defies commonsense and it defies imagination and for people to keep on pushing this is offensive and it's an example of the kind of politics that we have to get beyond. It's one thing for people to disagree with me about the issue of choice, it's another thing for people to out and out misrepresent my positions repeatedly, even after they know that they're wrong. And that's what's been happening.

Here Obama didn't merely explain his vote. He attacked his opponents on the issue as liars. Of course, by doing it, he raised the issue to a new profile and allowed for questions to be asked about which of the two groups is in fact lying. Well, without accusing either side of lying, it turns out that it was the Obama campaign who's information was inaccurate. Furthermore, his aggressive counter raised the issue to a profile it wouldn't have reached if he had merely explained the reasoning behind his vote.

Most recently, a Conservative advocacy group released this ad.



The group behind this ad, American Issues Project, is an obscure group who's biggest accomplishment is said ad. They have spent only a few million to put the ad out and it would have come and gone had Obama not done what he did.

Instead, he immediately put out this ad in response...

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1444170147/bclid1747275855/bctid1753200798

Furthermore, he began a systematic heavy handed tactics against any station that dared to air the ad. His supporters began an orchestrated email campaign to stations that aired complaining. Furthermore, he even contacted the Justice Department. Well, by countering so aggressively, he also raised the profile of the issue. As such, the U.S. News and World Report and the USA Today each have columns on the controversy. Would these two papers have had these columns if Obama hadn't made the controversy such an issue? In my opinion, I doubt it. In fact, Michael Barone, of USNWR, makes an interesting point in the beginning of his piece.

It doesn't help the Obama campaign that William Ayers is back in the news. Ayers, you'll recall, was the Weather Underground terrorist in the late 1960s and '70s whose radical group set bombs at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol. During the April 16 Democratic debate, Barack Obama explained his past association with Ayers by saying he was just a guy "in my neighborhood," meaning the University of Chicago enclave known as Hyde Park. But is that end of it? This is, after all, Chicago we're talking about; where political patronage and nepotism are the only ways one moves up the power ladder.

Barone is absolutely correct in his initial analysis and yet it was the Obama campaign that forced this issue back into the foreground.

It appears to me that Barack Obama is so concerned not to be "Swiftboated" that he appears to take things the other way, and he will raise the profile of each and every attack and give many of them a higher profile then they would have ever had if he wasn't so aggressive in challenging them.