I bet Mitt is scared shitless of the three debates!

[sofa king]

52. Unfortunately, it isn't that simple.

In the debates, Romney gets to hide behind an annoying facet of American politics which is being called the "backfire effect."

If you don't wish to read the 2000 words about it in the link above, the nutshell is this: when a conservative politician lies and a liberal refutes the lie with facts, conservative voters are more likely to believe the lie.

Yes, you read that right. Providing conservatives with the correct information actually reinforces their stupid beliefs. So the President cannot simply point at Mitt and say, "you are a liar," without encouraging conservative voters to believe Romney is telling the truth.

God damn, that pisses me off. But there it is. Anyway....

I think this means that the President will have to take a more indirect and much more difficult path to sowing doubt in the minds of conservative voters. The President will have to have an internal library of the statements and positions of other conservative authorities which contradict whatever lie Romney is telling at the time. He will have to recite that conservative authority's quote back to Romney. "Karl Rove doesn't agree with you," might be a good retort, as infuriating as that is to me personally.

I'm not sure if the President can use Romney's own previous lies against him--but that's something the President definitely needs to run by the psychologists (I hope someone on his debate staff is reading this!).

Unfortunately, it is going to make viewing of the debates difficult for the lot of us, because we are all going to be shouting at the television for President Obama to call Romney out directly when that is exactly what he should not do in most cases. But we are in the bag for the Democrats and the objective is to lead conservatives to some semblance of the truth (which will depress their turnout and may even convert a few of the wiser ones), or at least doubt about their own unworkable positions.

Those of you who doubt me may wish to revisit the DU threads on the Cheney-Edwards debate of 2004. Cheney lied his ass off, and Edwards perhaps wisely let many of those lies go, but mistakenly went after him on some of the big ones. Then in November, a good proportion of stupid conservatives shambled into the booth still believing that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, in part because Edwards dared to refute that stupid belief before a large number of conservative viewers.

The backfire effect is the primary way that a cabal of very evil people have suborned the Republican Party and shackled it to the whims of the ultra-wealthy. But President Obama is a master of taking the advantages of his opponents and turning those advantages against them, so we can expect him to have a thoughtful, if not obvious, response.