INOCULATIONS

It has been a week of strange bedfellows. The pairing that got the most ink was Repub front-runner, and sometimes cross-dresser, Rudy Giuliani cozying up to 700 Club host the right reverend Pat Robinson. It is a daring move on Giuliani’s part.

Joe Biden got the biggest laugh of the night at the recent Democratic Debate when he said that Rudy’s every sentence “consists of a noun and verb and 9/11.” Cheap shot? Maybe, but it is certainly true that Giuliani’s hero status is powerfully linked to his performance on the day the twin towers fell. So when Rudy, a pro-choice Republican who during his third divorce roomed with an openly gay couple publicly embraces the man who blamed that terrorist attack on America’s moral failings – in particular gay marriage and abortion – it released enough cognitive dissonance to power all the lights on Broadway.

But Rudy had no choice. He is trying to inoculate himself from the type of viral attack that destroyed John McCain in 2000. We dealt with that campaign extensively in Elements of Persuasion. The key to any viral attack is that people already have the components of the story you want to tell floating around in their heads somewhere, all you do is activate the illness. It is all about AWARENESS. The video you linked to if you clicked “cross-dresser” has been shown almost half a million times on Youtube. That is a lot of people already primed to catch whatever nastiness Rudy’s opponents are planning to dish out.

Meanwhile legitimate war hero John McCain is negotiating a 3 million dollar bank loan to tide his cash-strapped campaign over, and some of the Swift Boat crew are already running ads in his support – ads which McCain has quickly, and strategically, disavowed. It looks like South Carolina’s primary will be a lot like professional wrestling – not filled with truthiness, but very, very manly.

Comments

[Cam Beck]

Correction: Rudy is not pro-life.

[Max]

Thanks Cam, you are right he is pro-choice (at least he was, has he shifted that?) and I was just wrong. I've change it in the post now - so if someone is reading the post then these comments it might be a little confusing - but I appreciate you setting me straight.

Max