Ever since the "southern strategy", it seems like a large part of Republican electoral strategy consists of claiming to protect their supporters from the hordes of whoever threatening them. In the absence of actual hordes, we get promised protection against really questionable threats like monogamous gays and Muslims.
What's interesting about Muslims is that the fight against them started out as opposition to terrorism, with people like GWB being very careful to make the distinction. But now that terrorism has lost its threatening power, the focus has shifted to Muslims in general.
Legitimate issues for politicians to campaign on are:
- What are their spending priorities, how much do they want to spend on what?
- Where do they want to cut, how much?
- What new programs or policies do they support?
But political campaigns are almost never run on these issues. They may have some position papers 'available' for those few interested, heavily filtered by what helps get votes.
And why is this? It's voters' fault, in a way. Voters yawn and don't vote on those 'legitimate' issues.
Now, for the sake of argument, let's take a group of voters who are largely racists - think a lot of people in the 60's.
Now, politicians have a choice: 'stand up for right even when it's politically costly', or 'pander to the racists and exploit the issue for political gain'.
We'd all like to say we only support the former, as if that gets rid of the latter. It doesn't.
And all the 'racist' side of that issue has to do is be 'better' to the racists than the 'anti-racist' side.
So if the civil rights side wants to stick its neck out and really try to do something about racism 'because it's the right thing to do', all the racist side has to do is not do anything racist, but just promise the racist voters 'WE won't call you racist' to get their votes. And if the anti-racist side moved toward the middle, backing off its efforts, the racist side just stays ahead of them, always enough to get the racist vote, but no need to actually do much racist.
If the anti-racist side drops the issue altogther, the racist side can actively pledge to fight to prevent any such effort, still getting that vote.
It's all too effective - with whatever 'demon' in public opinion can be exploited - blacks, gays, commies, anything the public can be 'protected' from.
Indeed, they have been so good at it they demonized the whole side without any specifics - things like the Willie Horton ad were so politically risky to exploit race on, it's a lot easier to just get to demonize 'the far left' without anything specific, just as some crazy group who would destroy America. And you do love America and want to protect her from those crazies right?
It's so effective that it took years and years of terrible, harfmful policies to get the public to say 'enough is enough' and vote for the other side - a revolt that lasted 2 years.
If *voters* responded to the 'legitimate issues' instead of being so easily manipulated by people who run on these 'threats' like 'defense of marriage from gays', they'd get better government. How bad and corrupt an agenda can a politician have against the public interest, when most of what he talks about are things like 'protect marriage' and 'the other side is weak on protection from terrorists'? His corrupt agenda is ignored, while voters say 'I'm voting for him, not the terrorist friendly guy'.
It's not easy to rebut the attacks - they can say 'that's ridiculous', but voters who fall for it say 'of course he denies it, he would wouldn't he? You can't believe a word he says'.
Much of this is very scientifically done - focus group-tested phrases and themese honed by marketing people who find just the right nutty issue that pushes voters' buttons, and then spread by media-savvy people - with the right-wing side a huge machine at getting 'its message out'. Far more people know the 'Gore lied that he invented the internet' than say 'that was a lie', much less 'the corrupt interests had a huge machine that spread that lie very effectively, taking away Gore's deserved benefit for his leadership in being the top politician in supporting the funding of the development of the internet, which is just the sort of leadership we need'. They took an issue that should get him a ton of votes and turned it into an issue that lost him votes over a lie.
The thing is, it's a circular pattern - and a chicken and egg question about who started it. Did campaigners first ignore legitimate issues and get voters ignoring them, or did voters first not care about legitimate issues and get campaigners to pander to the bad ones - but it doesn't much matter, the result is a cycle of campaigns about phony issues and voters who vote based on them each pushing the other to continue the cycle.
As long as voters reward the behavior, campaigners who have the job to get people elected are not going to swim upriver against it.
So what would help? I'd like to say 'a good politician who points out the problem and gets voters to pay attention to the legitimate issues', but looking at a century of campaigns, I see that happening about zero. The only time it seems to happen much isn't based on the candidate making it work, but accidents, like McKinley's assassination putting Teddy Roosevelt in office, the great depression and FDR's license for change, or Watergate and Carter.
Is it any wonder politicians and their campaign teams are sick of this issue, voters who whine about the campaigns, but who also vote only based on the phony issues?
How much time are they expected to waste on this issue when the only choices are 'run on legitimate issues and get no votes' or 'run the phony campaign issues' and get votes?
Making it even worse is when the role of money is allowed to dominate, drowning out whatever people try to do something about this, allowing the phony issues to use 'the big lie' to be pushed in the slickest ads, played a thousand times for every one time any 'normal citizen' gets played.
The monied interests are happy with the issue, as it plays into their hands for money to dominate elections - they have no interest in 'legitimate issues' getting more attention.
"Legitimate issues" would expose the corruption of the special interests, who are the ones who really benefiit from having 'their people' able to win on fear of blacks/gays/Muslims.
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