◼ The Great Media Noise Machine - Daniel Greenfield/Sultan Knish
In the real world, Romney is still running neck and neck with Obama among registered voters, the non-stop gaffe express exists only in the minds of the media, which manufactures stories that fit the narrative, then reports on the narrative and discusses the narrative to death until enough people confuse it with reality.
The Romney campaign is not flailing and it is not guilty of missteps; what it is, is under constant attack by a massive leftist bloc composed of think-tanks, campaign operatives and the media who then use their own attacks to manufacture a narrative of incompetence. Each attack is then called a "gaffe" and used as evidence that the campaign is flailing.
This isn't a new technique, what is the new is the complete and shameless integration of the media into the spin corps and attack poodle ranks of a political campaign so that there is hardly any difference between an anchorman, a reporter and a campaign spokesman. What is new is the level of intense coordination that allows one campaign total airtime and allows the other campaign a chance to pay for ads and be attacked all the rest of the time...
Romney's path to winning this is to keep calm and carry on, to laugh off the media's predictions of doom and to keep talking about ObamaCare's taxes and their impact on medicine, about what the national debt will mean to our grandchildren, about how an entire generation is lost without work, about how the economy has to be regenerated by giving it some breathing room instead of trying to control it and about how it's time for a change. And he has to do it all despite every distraction that the media throws at him and there will be many more before the election is through.
The consistent message has to be that things can keep on going the way they have or they can get better and the ability to move that message to enough people will determine whether Romney wins or loses. And he will have to do that while running not against the media, but despite the media, around the media and beyond the media. He will have to talk to the people even when he's talking to the media.
This isn't easy, but what it really requires is not perfection but perseverance.
