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Breaking the code "Stay the -- Never Mind"By Rick Horowitz When things get dull at our house, we reach for a good book. (Or even a not-so-good book.) We grab a snack. We put on some music. But that's only most of the week. When things get dull on a Sunday morning, we play a little game we call "Decoding Mehlman." That would be Ken Mehlman, the chairman and chief cheerleader of the Republican National Committee. There's nothing like a few minutes of Mehlman on the Sunday-morning chatfests to shine a bright light on the latest in Republican thinking. Or at least the latest in Republican rhetoric. It's Mehlman who gets first crack at the new red-meat lines and the fresh-from-the-focus-group flammable phrases. It was Mehlman, for instance, who got to launch "Defeatocrats" when the Great GOP Pre-November Pushback started a week or two ago. (Memo to Demos: With the Katrina anniversary just around the corner, is it time to start talking about the "Reflublicans"?) And it's Mehlman who gives the rest of us the best peek at what the GOP thinks is working for them strategically. Or isn't.
That was definitely the biggest headline in our house. I mean, there were the usual Mehlman flourishes -- calling the Democrats "the party of Pelosi," constantly referring to the Democratic party's head as "Chairman Dean," with its faintly sinister echo of "Chairman Mao." Then there were all those carefully chosen verbs: "I don't believe Americans, in the middle of a tough war, as they see these plots, want to weaken the tools -- surrender the tools that are critical to keeping Americans safe. I don't think they want to weaken how we interrogate potential terrorists. I don't think they want to weaken the surveillance. I don't think they want to kill the Patriot Act, and I certainly don't want to think that they give the enemy the kind of victory that the 9/11 Commission had said they would have if we cut and run from Iraq." But none of that was the headline, the canary in the spin mine. Here it is, straight from Mehlman's mouth: "Look, we're not coming in and saying 'Stay the course.' The choice in this election is not between 'Stay the course' and 'Cut and run,' it's between 'Win by adapting' and 'Cut and run.'" And just seconds later: "The fact is, before the successful Iraqi elections, the number of troops went up from 137,000 to 167,000. That's adapting to win. Recently, the increased troops in Baghdad, adapting to win. We changed how the training of Iraqi forces occurred to involve more Iraqis. That's adapting to win." And just seconds after that: "I acknowledge that when you're facing any war, the enemy is smart, the enemy thinks, and particularly in this kind of war, it requires you to adapt to win. We're going to adapt to win." Got the message? Actually, when you decode Mehlman, there are two messages: the message the Republicans want you to hear, and the message hidden behind that message. The one they want you to hear is that they're willing to shift strategies in Iraq to adjust to shifting circumstances. The hidden message is: "Stay the course" must be getting clobbered in their polls. For months -- for years? -- they've been trying to frame the choice as "Stay the course" or "Cut and run." Suddenly, they're dropping "Stay the course" like it's an unexploded IED. I'm guessing they've discovered that the public isn't buying "Stay the course" anymore, that "the course" in Iraq makes less and less sense to more and more people every day. So what do they do? They trot out a new slogan! "Adapt to win." You wonder how long they massaged that one before they let it out into the world. "'Adapt,' not 'Change,' right? 'Change' sounds too much like 'Flip-Flop.' 'Flip-Flop' is weak." "'Adjust'?'" "Too dull." "'Evolve'?" "And lose the fundamentalists?" "'Adapt' it is." "'To win.' Not just 'Adapt' -- 'Adapt to win.'" "That'll work." At our house, we're not so sure. Posted 8/17/06. Make
sure you catch those hidden messages - click to "Rick's"! And tell your
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Rick Horowitz
