Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
On the heels of HongPong's eminently successful revelation of government brainwashing, I want to briefly discuss a few of the issues he raises.
I start from the assumption that the purpose of PSYOPs in America is to mould public opinion enough that the White House can carry on its military operations unhindered. Personally, I feel that this is a low bar, since many "Joe Six Pack's" would need some significant negative revelations in order to dislodge his opinion enough to make it unpleasant for Bush - after all, responding negatively on an approval rating takes almost no effort, demonstrations, letters, etc. all take significantly more effort. This administration has shown us that feedback and accountability impose very little restrictions on the activities of the executive - that is, until voting season (hopefully, unfortunately we can't be confident about this either).
All of this brings me to my real point, which is to discuss the issue of "What the fuck are we supposed to do?" Of course I do not know the answer to that question, so instead I'll tackle the question of what WILL people do.
Awhile ago I wrote a paper in which I developed a statistical model for forecasting the results of presidential elections, which ended up having pretty good statistical power (r-squared > .97, std. dev. approx. 1 percentage point). It predicted that Bush would win 2004, though it predicted about one percent of the vote more than he got (popular vote, not electoral). Anyhow the model involved predictors like per capita GDP, inflation, approval rating, unemployment and changes in the size of the armed forces.
I haven't adapted it for senate or house races, simply because I don't want to gather the data (especially for the house districts), but I can make some general predictions. First of all, GDP and general economic health were big indicators, which fits nicely with a common sense evaluation of government. These indicators have been slowly taking off since the mini-recession of 2000, which does not bode well for Dems. However, inflation remains higher than in the recent years likely to weigh most heavily on voters' minds.
The only social indicators for which I was able to find appropriate variables were overall approval rating and armed forces shifts. In order to sweep the republicans out of the leglislature, the Dems will have to rely on the effects of these "psychological" variables. Approval rating is obviously working in their favor. The only comparably low rating was posted by Jimmy Carter just before getting his clock cleaned by Reagan.
I originally thought to include the armed forces variable in order to measure the effects of popular or unpopular wars and foreign policy in general - Vietnam and Johnson vs. WW2 and FDR. Given that we fight wars so differently now and that foreign policy figures to be a big part of approval rating, this won't have an effect unless there is a really big change. Incidentally, the model predicts a negative reaction for small positive changes, and a positive reaction for huge changes (no doubt the pull of WW2 on the data).
So, what implications for strategy - particulary PSY OPS on both sides? The right clearly needs some form of norming in order to counteract the many failures represented by their abysmal approval ratings. For them, this "norming" amounts to manipulation ala Zarqawi. I think the Dems will embarrass themselves yet again if they neglect to negate the effects of a strong economy - especially given that they haven't really found anything approaching a viable alternative on the foreign policy front. Inasmuch as the Zarqawi campaign is successful it will garner tacit support for the conservative platform - especially because the flip side of the "we need 'Publicans to defeat evil" ideal is the "Democrats are girly-men (sp?) and will give terrorists your home, job, and convert you to Islam" argument. Dems really need to highlight what a failure Bush has been on the domestic front - social security what? corporate malfeasance who? His stance on environment, energy, global warming, education etc. has been that of an ostrich with his head in the sand.
The essence of the conservative platform is that it appeals to self-interest. Any media manipulation is designed with this in mind. The Zarqawi story fits this because it attempts to force a decision between clear alternatives in a life or death situation. In addition to showing that a Democratic choice is a self-interested (and therefore rational) choice by emphasizing advantages in close-to-home, objective characteristics, some attempt needs to be made to show that their vote doesn't represent a binary, life or death decision, because the public has shown what choice it will make in that situation, and they would like to ask them to do the same this fall and in 2008. This is difficult to for a number of reasons, some rather obvious, that I will not go in to.
Basically, the left needs to get on the same playing field as the right if they want to compete. Base manipulation of public opinion through unethical means has become par for the course. Unfortunately, the moral high ground is reserved for the losers.