Needlenose

Congratulations! You’ve just about survived the summer — which, politically speaking in this presidential election year, means the dreary interlude between the early-spring nominating contests and the fall cage match campaign.

And as your first reward for making it through, next week’s Republican National Convention offers a rare moment of almost-suspense:  What will happen when the proverbial irresistible force of the GOP’s money and obsession with image-making runs into the immovable object of Mitt Romney’s insincere, unlikable personality?

The campaign aides are determined to overcome perceptions that Mr. Romney is stiff, aloof and distant. So they have built one of the most intricate set pieces ever designed for a convention — a $2.5 million Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired theatrical stage. From its dark-wood finish to the brightly glowing high-resolution screens in the rafters that look like skylights, every aspect of the stage has been designed to convey warmth, approachability and openness. [...]

… The most ambitious element of stagecraft … will be the podium — which features 13 different video screens — the largest about 29 feet by 12 feet, the smallest about 8 feet by 8 feet and movable. All the screens will be framed in dark wood.

“Even the frames are designed to give it a sense that you’re not looking at a stage, you’re looking into someone’s living room,” said Russ Schriefer, one of Mr. Romney’s senior advisers who is running the convention planning for the campaign.

Wow… now if only they had something besides uptight, white male Republicans to put in those frames!  And since by now you’ve heard about Romney’s race-baiting “joke” on the campaign trail today — which Mitt thought was a big hit (“the crowd loved it and got a good laugh”) — you can bet that the GOP’s imagemeisters will do their best to make sure all this “approachability and openness” includes very little spontaneity, especially from their presidential candidate.

The timing of the conventions work against Romney as well.  The 2008 Republican gathering actually did an effective job of presenting John McCain and Sarah Palin as “mavericks,” rather than acolytes of the now-airbrushed-out George W. Bush — enough so that it boosted McCain to his only poll lead of the entire campaign.  But this year Mitt & Co. barely have a couple of days of owning the spotlight before the Democratic convention takes over the national conversation.

Not only that, but the “maverick” McCain brand soon evaporated even without the interruption of an opposing convention.  Romney’s campaign team has been even more flummoxed all year long about how to present a positive image of their guy, so it’s not exactly a sure bet that they’ll figure out a lasting (and winning) solution now… no matter how many commercial marketing gurus they drag in.

After all, the most crucial part of modern presidential campaigns are the televised, live debates in October.  And all the mythmakers’ magic will be stripped away then, with only Mitt Romney by his awkward, inauthentic, hamfisted self facing President Obama.

Maybe if they have him show up for the debates holding a frame of dark wood around his face…

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Over at Raw Story this past week, David Edwards has been documenting a rather impertinent — and surprisingly sustained — effort by CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien to speak truth, if not to power, at least to a series of GOP spokespuppets appearing on her show.

It began on Tuesday with O’Brien refusing to back down when faced with a sputtering John Sununu in a dispute over the Romney campaign’s false spin on Medicare cuts:

“I understand that this is a Republican talking point because I’ve heard it repeated over and over again,” O’Brien observed. “These numbers have been debunked, as you know, by the Congressional Budget Office. […]

“Soledad, stop this!” Sununu shouted. “All you’re doing is mimicking the stuff that comes out of the White House and gets repeated on the Democratic blog boards out there.”

“I’m telling you what Factcheck.com tells you, I’m telling you what the CBO tells you, I’m telling you what CNN’s independent analysis says,” the CNN host explained.

“Put an Obama bumper sticker on your forehead when you do this!” the frustrated surrogate shot back.

“You know, let me tell you something,” O’Brien said. “There is independent analysis that details what this is about. … And name calling to me and somehow by you repeating a number of $716 billion, that you can make that stick when [you say] that figure is being ‘stolen’ from Medicare, that’s not true. You can’t just repeat it and make it true, sir.”

In the days that followed, O’Brien had similar disagreements with Romney surrogates Tim Pawlenty and Jason Chaffetz — a dogged refusal to accept talking points that, if she keeps it up, might make the GOP Wurlitzer launch into a chorus calling for her to be fired.

It’d be laughable proof of the old saw about Republicans believing the truth having a liberal bias, if it weren’t so serious.  Because on the one hand, sure, the Romney team’s aggressive dishonesty about Medicare and other issues is just classic Rovian strategy: accuse your opponent of the same thing they’re charging you with, so low-information voters will just throw up their hands amid the crossfire and not bother sorting out the truth.

But on the other hand, the all-out devotion not just to telling lies, but to “repeat[ing] it and make it true,” is Orwell’s prediction in Nineteen Eighty-Four come true:

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.

It’s understandable, on one level, that news journalists would rather not put themselves in the position of refereeing what is “truth” during a political campaign, when aggressive spin from both sides is to be expected.  But when one party tries to take advantage of that reluctance by outright inventing its own reality — and expecting the media to stay neutral — then a stance like O’Brien’s becomes essential.

Because if the Romney-Ryan ticket gets to the White House (and the Republicans gain majorities in both houses of Congress) based on a strategy of converting demonstrably false statements into political “truth” by the sheer force of advertising dollars and media repetition… well, they’re not going to just switch to honesty because the election is over, are they?  Of course not; they’ll just aim their rhetorical fire directly at the press, rather than Obama and the Democrats.

As Soledad O’Brien is demonstrating, Orwell was right when he wrote that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”  And if the media doesn’t use that freedom while they can, they just might lose it.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)