Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was only able to survive the recall because he took over the airwaves with his propaganda machine, according to panelists at progressive Netroots Nation conference in Providence, Rhode Island.
“Imagine what Hitler could have done with Fox News,” said a Wisconsin activist and panelist. “The 1 percent have bought the media..Scott Walker’s billionaire backers have essentially bought Wisconsin.”
Despite President Obama’s impressive storehouse of campaign money and spectacular advertising team, the panelists agreed that this sort of “manipulating the message” through television advertising has, “never been seen before.”
The Democratic Party was a touchy subject for these panelists who were grassroots bloggers and activists from Wisconsin.
They said the reason Tom Barrett was not able to win the election was because the recall turned into a matter of party politics. “It became a Democrat/Republican race in the end which was detrimental,” said dane101.com editor and panelist Emily Mills. “It became about elections and about parties.”
The panelists stopped short of criticizing Obama’s lack of interest in the Wisconsin recall. Instead, they attributed it to a overall misunderstanding on the part of the National Democratic Party.
“The Democratic Party did not know what they were up against,” one panelist said.
But the conference attendees were not so easy on the current President. “That Obama tweeted one day before was an insult,” said one conference participant from Wisconsin.
According to these Wisconsin progressive activists, they had everything going for them except the Democratic Party in Washington, D.C. and money. They claim they were outspent 8-1 in the general election. But as RedAlertPolitics pointed out on Thursday, these numbers have been debunked by a number of news organizations which showed that Republicans outspent Democrats at most 2-1.
Even if the money disparity was as large as these panelists say, there is little evidence to support their claim that Scott Walker launched a advertising campaign with, “unparalleled power that we have never seen before,” as one panelist argued.
To claim that the Left trails the Right in advertising, videography skills and social media power is such an obvious misrepresentation of the facts that it hardly bears repeating. The Obama campaign has extraordinarily successful with their ads this election year, completely overshadowing the Romney campaign with every new video.
For now, progressive commentators are sticking with the line that they were out spent by a GOP propaganda machine filled with “dark money,” but sooner or later they are going to have to face the fact that the only thing Wisconsin was was a solid and fair loss, and that the majority of Wisconsin residents may actually have realized that supporting union giants may not be the solution to economic depression.
