Should Obama disappear?
That's the theory of Richard Rushfield, who's pushed a theory that there's no such thing as good exposure in the age of Twitter. Via Mickey Kaus, who's good at this shit (and cranky at everything else):
Has L.A. writer Richard Rushfield identified the key dynamic of the 2012 election: “there is no such thing as good attention”? Rushfield intends this to be a much broader theory, explaining everything, or at least everything cultural, including Girls. But politics is a subset of everything, as he acknowledges. The more Obama was out of the spotlight during the GOP primaries, the better he did. Now he’s energetically campaigning and drawing attention to himself–big mistake! Meanwhile Romney has been a passive or absentee target, and he’s rising in the polls. …
Rushfield identifies one mechanism behind the “no buzz is good buzz” phenomenon–New Media Backlash:
[I]t seems very clear that there is no such thing as positive attention in the Twitter age; that anyone who sticks there head up is going to just have it picked apart by 100,000,000 gnats. The internet has largely become a roving lynch mob and you can’t stop a lynch mob with comedy GIF’s.
Kaus has a point—when nobody was paying attention to Obama during the first quarter of this year, he was climbing in the polls, and now that the focus is back on him, he's getting fifteen kinds of bad press, and his lead is shrinking in individual states. Much of that, of course, is random correlation: we were getting good jobs reports through the first three months of the year, and that's certainly not the case now, which explains most of Obama's bad press.
Still, exposure hasn't helped Obama. Every appearance brings the threat of a gaffe ("the private sector is doing fine") and even carefully manicured campaign rollouts become the immediate subjects of severe Twitter scrutiny from the scores of both bored political reporters and right-wing trolls for whom politics is a blood sport. If you doubt me, read this.
I think this theory does a lot more to explain Romney's tepid rise in the polls. Romney was a gaffe a minute in the GOP primaries, when he was campaigning 37 hours a day; he only because survived thanks to an uncommonly weak field and suitcases full of money. But now that he's the GOP nominee, he's scaled back his campaign appearances, reduced his gaffes, and concentrated instead on positive campaign ads highlighting what he would do on day one of taking office (those nasty anti-Obama ads are the work of Super PACs).
This hasn't reversed Romney's favorability ratings, which remain unimpressive for the leader of a major party, but it's helped. Remember, Romney's not selling himself, he's selling not-Obama. He doesn't need to appear in flesh and blood to do that; in fact, the more he lets voters project their not-Obama fantasies onto himself, the better he does. It's not so much exposure that's bad for Romney as the specificity that exposure generates.
It's too early to tell if Obama's speech in the Cleve today helped or hurt (here's PoliticOlogy's breakdown of it). But Kaus applied Rushfield's theory and figured it probably wouldn't do anything but cost Obama:
More CowbellSpotlight: According to the Rushfield Theory of Buzzdeath–that in the New Media environment, generating "buzz" typically produces a counter-reaction that leaves you worse off than before–this is a mistake for Obama. … Actually, rushing out a "major" speech on the economy is a mistake even under the older theory that a President can seem desperate and overxposed. … Why does Obama have to win the week, or the month? It’s June! Obama doesn’t have to win June. … Let Romney take the lead and become the focus of press attention for a while. … But of course his campaign has a huge infrastructure of people who pay the rent by pursuing maximum attention 24/7. They are unlikely to recommend a zen jiu-jitsu campaign of strategic disappearance. …
Unlikely is right. If Obama doesn't "win" June, he runs the risk of Romney defining him in the meantime. But this theory suggests that Obama could spend June calling Romney out and making the man appear to defend himself. After all, Romney had barely opened his mouth following Obama's gaffe before making one of his own. And just like that, he was no longer not-Obama, but Mitt Awkwardstein Romney, who will have much harder time getting elected.
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