“Perception is everything” appears to be the organizing paradigm of modern political campaigns in the US.  Technology and capital have combined into the perfect storm for managing perception.  Perceptions thrust into the early years of technology kept the Republicans largely out of office for decades after FDR and the Great Depression.  Republicans were portrayed as the elitist party of the rich.  They were opposed to the plight of the average working guy.  In the seventies with the economy worsening and gas lines growing long the Republicans saw the chance to grab the reins of perception.  Instead of the perception of concern for the working man in a time of economic affluence the Republicans saw that the economic reality of a weakening economy was a perfect moment to launch their perception of tax and spend.  The Democrats were not the party of the working man.  They opposed the working man by spending frivolously and even selfishly.  The Democrats were the true elitists.  However, the underlying necessary condition that allowed this perception its oxygen was a changing economic reality.  In a time of affluence, social programs are a plus in political marketing.  When money is not a concern it is easy to spend, to create images of ourselves as holy, caring, giving.   However, when economic needs start dominating the day to day experience of voters, the time is ripe for creating the perception that tax and spend liberals are to blame, leftist elitists bent on nothing other than benefiting themselves at the cost of the common Joe.   The Republicans seized the perceptional opportunity with Ronald Reagan and controlled the perceptions and dialogs for decades.  They cloaked their conservative ideology in the modern garbs of egalitarianism and the working Joe’s fight against the liberal elite.  Liberal, the “L” word was profane. 

Now, the managed perception of Republican ideology has become fat and ripe for takeover.  Economic realities have again given an occasion ripe for perception’s paradigm shift.  The elite have now become the ones in power, the ones to blame, the party of the elite.  The true Republican believers have fled into the concaves of their historical, conservative ideology and left the neo-cons to fend for themselves.  The righteous indignation of the true conservatives is set to blast the folks that enabled their political domination.  While Republicans were all too happy to get votes and cater to their perceptual electorate, they also discovered that managing perception came with a cost.  It cost them their conservative soul.  Now that they appear soulless, bereft of new ideas, bearing the burden of the image of fault and elitism they have retreated.  Those that are the party faithful have hunkered down into their ideological roots to regroup and try to re-forge an image for another day, an opportunist day.  Conservatives are looking at perhaps decades in the perceptual doldrums.  The smart ones know it.  The last desperate screams of the dying McCain campaign are shrill and are now working to dismantle the last bastions of their credibility.  As many Joe’s are saying, “If a Republican’s lips are moving they are lying”.

What shows itself in this spectacle is that “perception is not everything”, perception is an opportunistic infection of economic reality.  When reality happens the managers of perception lose.  They are ripe for takeover.  When “management” begins to believe its own propaganda it loses touch with the shifting sands of reality beneath their feet.  However, necessity requires that “Joes” keep a healthy stand in underlying realties, that they do not take the manufactured perceptions too seriously and, when perceptions grow thin, the perceptual power brokers find they are touch with their own economic realities.