Washblog

Free media is the lifeblood of public opinion. In the free media people sell stories - narratives - to try and make their outlet more popular so that they can sell advertizing. To get on free media you have to give free media what it needs - stories.

This is why Hollywood professionals do everything they can to spin out narrative after narrative about the celebrities they are trying to promote. This is why the Republican party - desperate to break back into the free media - developed a strategy to take over talk radio and utilize televangelists - they were cheap media outlets, dying for content.

This is why the Internet is so important for Democrats who have lost the media access wars.

This is why that idiot Simon is so important to the success of "American Idol" - he is the villain who makes the contest-winners into heroes (the simplest narrative of all).

For some reason, Democrats think they can have a private conversation with voters via PAID media (political ads) and win. It's not possible. The number of media views a paid political advertisement gets is relatively minimal. This is why the Republicans create strawmen with their ads - like Willie Horton and Osama Bin Laden. That way they can make their candidates into heroes and get into free media.

In the absence of good stories from Democratic candidates, free media outlets are generally stuck with finding stories about how the Democratic party says a candidate is a good guy, but some scandal says different. Hence the success of the "swift boat" campaign.

Short of buying media outlets, you can't tell the free media what to say, but you can give them stories that they are more likely to run. A "buzz" is a story in and of itself - media outlets will report on trends they think their viewership ought to know about. That's why the blogosphere has worked - it is a place where a "buzz" is created that larger media outlets will, at some point, report on.

The best political stories for a candidate come when he makes a smart-ass remark about his opponent. This is gold. The worse come when he puts his foot in his mouth - this can be poison. But the important thing is to keep your name prominent in the free media - keep people discussing you. Democrats are so clueless, so lost, so lacking in even the most basic political accumen, that they are simply afraid of getting into any battle in the free media. They just run not to lose, saying nothing, hoping the other guy screws up in his effort to garner attention and he is cast as the villain in the media.  

That's fine if you have a majority, but you can't run not to lose when nobody has a reason to elect you in the first place - and that's where the Dems are headed. They have a PERFECT villain - George Bush - but they can't seem to use that narrative. God help us if they don't learn.