A couple days back I characterized the campaign of Barack Obama as one that could be described as a number of buzzwords slickly produced and selected after extensive focus-group testing. So it is with the term “smear” apparently.
Doing some good marketing himself, fellow blogger Bob McCarty clued me into the new Obama campaign site dedicated to spreading the “truth” about him, and how he managed to turn the tables a little bit. (It’s there, you just have to scroll down a little bit.) This “fight the smears” site was also extensively discussed on Rush’s show today.
With Obama’s campaign moving several legitimate points of discussion into the category of “off limits”, I’m not too certain what his campaign is going to accomplish by creating such a site except for portraying himself as a victim of those racist Republican bloggers who spread lies about his religious background and took Rev. Jeremiah Wright out of context, at least until Barack himself threw the good pastor under the bus. Victim my ass.
However, it does bring up a point that, at least as far as focus-grouped and tested buzzwords are concerned, the meaning of a smear is pretty well known and understood to be one of spreading untrue rumor and innuendo to give the opponent of a particular political candidate an advantage. Perhaps the best known smear attempt was during the 2004 Presidential campaign, where forged documents were hyped as proof President Bush avoided military service. Of course, the attempt backfired once bloggers noted that particular fonts were not in use yet when the note was supposedly written in the early 1970’s. In that case, it was bloggers who revealed the truth; but in other cases bloggers obfuscate matters with rumor and innuendo to gain advantage for themselves or their group. Many times it’s a partisan effort but other times what may pass as news is later found to be simply an effort to gain advantage for other reasons like competitive advantage or as a way to get back at others. It’s one reason why blogs are slow to gain traction as news sources unless they’re affiliated with a legitimate print or media outfit.
This is actually leading me into tomorrow’s post, and in the entertainment business it’s called a tease. But I have some thoughts on recent events that can shed some light on a particular item of interest and possibly a motivation behind that which was said.
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