This is a strong piece from start to finish. There are a couple of messages we should put out into the mix a lot more often. Like this:

Now the people who have left the media stream are of two groups. One are those that inhabit the 1980’s and 1990’s world of micro-broadcast. These people are largely adjuncts of the ruling order, including religious radio and religious broadcast, and the marginal fox news viewer, and the right wing blogosphere, which is now merely a component of a verticly integrated system to pump out message. However, these people are self-selected because they are supporters of the Bush project.

The other group, however, represents a coming wave, not a passing one. Thus, when a powerful image occurs, they might be shocked, but they return to their previous political position rapidly. They have a narrative which is attacking, rather than being attacked. They recognize themselves as part of a growing future, rather than an ebbing past.

This combination is grinding Bush, who is the ultimate post-modern President. With each passing cycle through media image mania, he gains less, and it costs more. Bush’s power began with a climax, and has been dribbling its way down, because each time, the image delivers less juice. The reason for this is the combination of the two factors already listed - the image has power because there are people who think that it means the end is close. With each passing shock, the sense that there is an end grows less. The media public habituates, and gradually ignores the blare. At the same time, each shock convinces more and more people out of the mass media sphere that it is all fake and manipulated - they way there is a growing belief in the wake of the AFP report yesterday that the timing of the most recent round of arrests was politically motivated.

Thus it is time for the 1972 of legend to die. The lesson’s drawn from it are ersatz, and the result of a media ecosystem which no longer prevails in any event. The levers of power are different - even if this does not assure better outcomes, it does assure different ones. Bush is not Nixon, even though he is clearly the most Nixonian President since Nixon.

The Age of Nixon is ending, though not yet completely over, and with it the mechanisms that were used to prop in place a reactionary movement that wanted to appropriate the liberal state for illiberal ends. It never quite managed to run that state well, but instead dug itself a deeper and deeper hole economically and politically. It is time to lay to rest the fears that seethed beneath it. In part, because this new age faces new challenges, and with them, new fears.

It’s essential we remind people at every turn, there are two political blogospheres. One, almost entirely made up of right-wing sites, does little more than parrot whatever official line the powers behind it want out there. The other, made up of not just liberal sites but a great number of them, engages the issues with a combination of critical analysis, facts and peer reviewed references, debate in the form of comments and between major writers who riff and carry stories from each other, and of course snark. Newbies to the political blogging world don’t always know this, as I’ve found many times talking to moderate friends and neighbors as I try to get them into blogging. It’s not that hard to prove, but it is a kind of breaking of conditioning- newbies don’t understand that the freedom of the Intertubes has utterly changed how “consent is manufactured.”

The other important point about the shock value of Bush’s use of images is one we should all keep in mind. I’d have put it this way: Americans are consumers, first and to the last. They have been successfully conditioned, by an increasingly sophisticated visual media, to have increasingly fickle, deep-seated, and above all not lasting tastes. The product doesn’t matter: cars are the same thing in the consumer mind as political leaders. What Americans want is the New, the fresh, something different than last week. The infantilization of the consumer mind also plays into this- like teenagers, the consumer isn’t happy until she’s got something her BFF doesn’t have. Hence the 400 million variations of the bathroom wastebasket, available in every big box store in the nation.

I have said for a long time, as I don’t trust most polls and I certainly know for a fact that the Beltway pundits have no clue about what people think in Flyoverland, that people are truly sick and tired of Bush’s product of fear and hate. Not only because only the most twisted can sustain themselves this way, but also because we are conditioned to want something else, even if it’s a slightly different kind of fear and hate. That’s why Bush got a slight bounce from the Lebanon bombing campaign- they were slightly different brown people and the consumer had for a moment a feeling of a new narrative. But of course, that narrative is turning into exactly the same one that they saw in Iraq. And that’s bo-ring.

We really are constructing the future out here, and as much as it pains me to say it, I know it’s true: one way to win is to play upon the consumerist nature of the American population. We need to “rebrand” the Democratic Party as much as we need to mock and sneer at the stale, tired, Party of Your Crotchety Old Grandpa Who Smells Funny, also known as the Republicans. We’re lucky that Bush is so much like Nixon, because there’s really no way to rehabilitate the man in his decline.