Cafferty was correct, as were MANY OF US HERE - "they're selling our ports to the Arabs!" There you go. That's the winner straight there. Easy to say, easy to understand, quick off the tongue, gets a visceral reaction. EVERYTHING we want. And it makes an impact.
You just participated in a great field test that proved out what many of us here have been saying. This is a WINNER, folks. It gets 'em where they live. It wins their hearts and minds. Notice, btw, how that hackneyed phrase "winning their hearts and minds" lists "hearts" before "minds"? That's because they want the emotional bond. They want to get at the gut before the brains weigh in and start analyzing stuff. If you've won at gut-level, you've won the whole ballgame. That gut is what motivates people in the privacy of the ballot box when nobody's looking and they can truly "vote their conscience." Nobody'll know if they went for the racist, fascist bastard instead of the high-minded progressive, and they can say whatever they feel like about how they voted when they leave.
Kenneth Turan in the "LA Times" was postulating that same thing in the postmortems on the Oscars - as to why "Crash" beat "Brokeback Mountain" for best picture:
(snip)
I don't care how much trouble "Crash" had getting financing or getting people on board, the reality of this film, the reason it won the best picture Oscar, is that it is, at its core, a standard Hollywood movie, as manipulative and unrealistic as the day is long. And something more.
For "Crash's" biggest asset is its ability to give people a carload of those standard Hollywood satisfactions but make them think they are seeing something groundbreaking and daring. It is, in some ways, a feel-good film about racism, a film you could see and feel like a better person, a film that could make you believe that you had done your moral duty and examined your soul when in fact you were just getting your buttons pushed and your preconceptions reconfirmed.
So for people who were discomfited by "Brokeback Mountain" but wanted to be able to look themselves in the mirror and feel like they were good, productive liberals, "Crash" provided the perfect safe harbor. They could vote for it in good conscience, vote for it and feel they had made a progressive move, vote for it and not feel that there was any stain on their liberal credentials for shunning what "Brokeback" had to offer. And that's exactly what they did.
http://theenvelope.latimes.com/awards/oscars/env-turan5mar05,0,5359042.storyThis time, WE have the simple, easy-to-grasp, punch-in-the-gut, hurts-the-heart buzz phrase that's gonna win us back the House of Reps. Play that card whenever you're talking with some wrong-winger or bush-apologist. How does "they're selling our ports to the Arabs" square with your "but HE'S keeping us SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAFE..." or "everybody knows the republi-CONS are better on national security issues" shit? Answer? It DOESN'T. Not one bit. It doesn't make a bit of sense. It doesn't square with the rest of the picture. It's so off that it leaks over onto the entire rest of the picture and starts making it look off, too. This is a Gift from Our Dear God. And this will get us to the Promised Land in November, and move bush a little bit closer to his own fitting for an orange jumpsuit, come January '07.
Keep visualizing...
Visualize IMPEACHMENT!!!!!!!!!
Then go DO something about it.
Because this is NO time to get complacent!!!