Just when Michelle Obama had the Base embracing Barack Obama the way she embraced the DNC hall last night, the Obama campaign pushes it away.
Last Monday, the California Democratic Chairman John Burton said this:
“They lie and they don’t care if people think they lie… Joseph Goebbels – it’s the big lie, you keep repeating it,” Burton said Monday before the Blake Hotel breakfast. He said Ryan told “a bold-faced lie and he doesn’t care that it was a lie. That was Goebbels, the big lie.”
He also added about the prospect of a Romney/Ryan White House: “That’s real danger. That’s not bullshit stuff.” He also said this about Paul Ryan: “What Paul Ryan said was a bold-faced lie to all the American people and he doesn’t care that it was a lie because it doesn’t matter because it sounds good.”
On September 23, 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said this:
“The opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad. Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler's book - and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan. According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature would make it more credible - if only you keep repeating it over and over and over again.”
Burton was just paraphrasing what Roosevelt said about 68 years ago (except the “bullshit stuff” and the Ryan assessment were pure Burton), but it is as true now as it was then. However, while this FDR passage is probably his second most quoted words, Burton has come under fire—BY HIS OWN PARTY, namely, the Obama campaign. Not only was Burton forced to apologize to the GOP, he was thrown under the bus by Obama campaign spokesman . Ben LaBolt said that Burton’s rhetoric “doesn’t have any place in the political discourse here in Charlotte.” It’s up in the air if Burton will be “requested” to resign as CalDem chair.
It seems like the only Democratic men with balls spoke at the DNC last night. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said last night “It is time for Democrats to grow a backbone.” This backbone growth needs to start from the top down, not the other way around.
Today’s GOP are most assuredly using the same playbook that was written by the GOP in 1944 and you expose this Nazi-inspired ploy by ripping the playbook from their hands and holding the pages up to TV cameras so that the American people can read them and realize that some of them are being duped—again. You don’t get all faux self-righteous while indignantly sniffing “This sort of thing just isn’t done” and dismissing Burton with a “we’ll deal with you later”.
In ineptly attempting to keep Obama above the partisan fray the Obama campaign runs the danger of alienating the portion of its base that desperately wants the campaign to grow a backbone and will sit out Election Day to wait four more years for a Democratic presidential candidate who has one. That’s exactly what a portion of the base did in 2010 and if they mistakenly think something works they will stick with it.