Joe Scarborough thinks that cheering American defeat is not a good political strategy.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out. Books: Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken) When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993) Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989) UCLA Homepage Curriculum Vitae Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com View all posts by Mark Kleiman
Joe Scarborough says that middle Americans who swing elections will think that the Republicans have gone off the deep end. But that is not the Limbaugh audience. His audience is, to put it mildly, a non-random sample of the electorate. They eat this up. Limbaugh loses nothing. The people who, as Scarborough says, are "smarter than that" are not watching the program; they are not in the Limbaugh demographic. Unless this clip goes viral, they may not see the behavior that Paul Krugman rightly likened to that of "a bratty thirteen-year-old." It would be great to see Michael Steele confronted with this video clip and asked whether he supports Limbaugh now, in a forum that the swing voters would see in large numbers. That seems unlikely to happen.
What is important is that there is now a grown-up in the Oval Office. People want an adult for President of the United States. They will compare candidates with one another, not with overgrown adolescent talk show hosts. I am not saying that this clip is irrelevant to the political process, but is is rather close.
This morning's Denver Post has a cartoon that nicely sums up the situation.
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_13491665
I'm beginning to wonder whether this (apparently coordinated) push is really a sort of "No true Scotsman" campaign against media competitors. Scarborough and his ilk are still pretty crazy, and they stand to gain some amount of market share by pushing a few other crazy voices off the rightward edge of acceptability, even for a little while.