The Republican Party's strategy in the 2012 presidential campaign might best be described with the motto of the ancient Alchemists:  Solve et Coagula, Latin for "Dissolve and Coagulate."

In Alchemy, this term refers to the process of breaking down compounds and mixtures into their constituent elements and, once the materials have been broken down into their elements, concentrating them into the purest essences of those elements.

In 2012, the Republican party is going through this process with the too-numerous aspirants for the Republican nomination, dissolving them in the glare of the public limelight, and then coagulating them in the heat of the debate process to create a uniquely synthetic candidate. By the end of this process, the electorate will no longer remember which candidate said what but, instead, will attribute all of those individual statements to the eventual nominee.

The Republican Party's strategy for 2012 is basically the same Southern Strategy (one is tempted to call it the Confederate Strategy) that catapulted the Republicans from the verge of extinction in 1974, in the wake of the Nixon Disaster,  into the triumphant return to power under Ronald Reagan's presidential banner in 1981.

In 1964, after signing the Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson told his press secretary, Bill Moyers, that he had just lost the South for the Democratic Party for a generation. 

He was right.  The Solid South, which had been solidly Democratic since the end of Reconstruction, turned almost overnight into the Solid Republican South....and the overlap between the new Republican South and the Old Confederacy is obvious, in both geographic and political terms. 

Even the so-called border states, which never joined the Confederacy but sympathized with it, are clearly now part of the Republican Southern Strategy.   And, when you boil down the Republican rhetoric to its most basic elemental form, what you find left in the crucible is a rock hard residue of states' rights as the rationale for their obstructionist behavior which, of course, was the philosophical foundation of the Confederate Secessionist movement.

In 2012, the Republican leadership - the money people who are pulling the strings behind the scenes under the Supreme Court's supremely stupid Citizens United decision - decreed that each of the TWENTY-SEVEN would-be candidates would have their 15 minutes of fame in the full-glare of public scrutiny.

The Power That Be also decided which candidates would fall by the wayside and which ones would continue toward the ultimate goal of the Republication party's nomination through the simple expedient of turning their financial support on and off again. 

(If you doubt whether this is a matter of a concerted strategy rather than happenstance, consider that - if one candidate's supporters didn't allow another candidate's supporters to outspend them - all of the Republican manipulators would find themselves in a financial "mutually assured destruction" scenario in which they would spend each other into oblivion well before Election Day.  That hasn't happened, which argues strongly for collusion between them.)

Contrary to their well-manicured myth, the Republican Money People don't have endless resources.  They have a lot of money, but even that may not be enough. 

In fact, collectively, the Democratic Money People can probably outspend them  because the very richest of the rich tend to be Democrats rather than Republicans - and because they haven't exhausted their resources on the primaries as the Republicans are doing...but that may not be much help in the long run if the Republicans are successful at implanting their myths into the American consciousness

Each time a candidate "surged" in the polls, it was a direct result of a sudden influx of additional funds into that candidate's campaign.  Whenever a candidate faltered, it was because that financial support had been withdrawn again.

Whenever one of those 27 hopefuls withdrew from the process it was because they either couldn't get that financial support, or lost in during the process.

 (There were three significant exceptions to this rule:  Michael Bloomberg and Donald Trump, who could have run on their own funds if they had wanted to, and Buddy Roemer, who refused PAC money from the outset but hasn't been given a seat at the table - or a podium at the debate - because he refuses to play ball with them.)

The net result of this strategy has been to circulate a succession of candidates to the forefront of the Republican pack (pun intended), each one of whom arose to bespeak the same campaign theme:  "Obama is a bad president and our goal is to make Obama a one term president."

Amidst this strum und drang (storm and stress) of the Republican rhetoric, we heard the same words coming out of  a succession of mouths, each one belonging to a different potential Republican candidate, using the same set of code words to impugn the current president's goals, objectives, methods, and results.

The goal behind this strategy is a highly sophisticated effort designed to squelch Democratic efforts to rebut the Republican talking points as long as possible by prolonging public interest in the Republican primary process right down to the floor of the Republican National Convention, which convenes in Tampa on August 27th, leaving the Obama administration just over two months to combat two years' worth of distortions.

The back room Republican leadership has spent the past 20 years building a propaganda machine that takes Hitler's Big Lie  (Goebbels merely implemented Hitler's concept; he didn't invent it) method to a whole new level by creating an apparatus consisting of television networks, radio stations, newspapers, magazines and web sites all dedicated to disseminating the same exact talking points over and over again until even staunch Democrats and committed liberals begin find themselves thinking, "Where there's smoke there must be fire."

Well, that's not necessarily so, and the 2012 campaign has been a case study of how you can - without justification - metaphorically "tar and feather" a sitting president with innuendo and outright fabrications while that president is unable to respond.

Until the Republicans actually nominate a candidate, the incumbent President's hands are tied.

He can't respond categorically to any given Republican hopeful's recitation of innuendo, exaggeration and outright lies without responding to all of them.  By responding to each one, in turn, the incumbent lays himself open to charges of campaigning instead of governing, because he's spending all his time campaigning against people who aren't even candidates yet.

He also risks elevating the wrong candidate to a position of pre-eminence simply by responding to his or her ad hominem attacks on the incumbent's parentage, personality and policies.

There's no doubt, by the way, that President Obama has been getting very bad advice about how to handle the Republican onslaught. 

From all appearances, he is allowing the Republicans to devour each other in the limelight of public scrutiny while he makes occasional comments rebutting some of the more egregious exaggerations.

It's not working.  While he's waiting for them to digest each other, they are sowing the seeds of a succession of falsehoods that continue to grow like weeds under the surface of the public debates.

The only effective defense against the Big Lie is the Big Truth:  facts and figures that rebut the vague accusations that contradict the public record, repeated early and often, never allowing a single false statement to go unchallenged.

The super-sophisticated Harvard-educated advisors who surround Obama believe in the narrative, rather than facts and figure...but the truth is to be found only in the facts and figures rather than the narrative.

The late Patrick David Moynihan once quipped, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

The Republicans have been retailing opinions as facts for the past twenty years but it is only since the Citizens United decision that they have been able to disseminate their opinions as facts on the wholesale level...and that's what's happening now.

Factual rebuttals would eventually even up the now over-balanced preponderance of Republican utterances with an equalizing outburst of truth from "truth-sayers" deputized by the President to demand equal time from the media under the Equal Time rule....but that hasn't happened, to the President's discomfort, despite the fact that the Republican Debates have been conducted in direct violation the Federal Communications Commission's Equal Time rule.

The Equal Time rule, an FCC regulation that requires the media to give equal time to the opposing candidate, has been effectively abridged by the Republican strategy of offering the media a super-abundance of candidate "debates."

The Equal Time rule has numerous exemptions.  Documentaries, bona fide "news" interviews, scheduled newscasts, and debates not hosted by the media station carrying the debate are all exempted from the Equal Time rule.*

However, in this campaign season, the Republican primary debates have ALL been hosted by one media outlet or another.

These closely choreographed debates have been designed around a series of softball questions prefabricated to allow each candidate a successful turn at bat.  

The opening question to Newt Gingrich from John King was a perfect examples of such disingenuously prefabricated queries and responses. Asking Gingrich about his marital perfidy right off the bat was clearly a set-up designed to throw the debate to Gingrich and, thus, keep the ball rolling for another month.  Next month, something will happen to boost one of the other candidates over the bar to frontrunner status.

The fact that these debates have not been followed up with Democratic Rebuttals, perhaps because no Democrat has asked for the time, is indicative of the extent of the disarray within the Democratic party.

Under the Equal Time Rule, the Democratic party is entitled to equal amount of free air time to rebut the Republican talking points....which probably would have encouraged the Republicans to cut back on the number of debates for fear that they would inadvertently be exposing the American electorate to equal doses of Democratic opinions to offset the Republicans' own rhetoric.

The people who control the media probably would have brought the matter to the Supreme Court because Equal time is also FREE TIME.  The Court has already ruled affirmatively that the FCC has the right to enforce the Equal Time rule, but there's a good chance that this Court would overrule the previous finding because such an action would fall right into line with the Citizens United decision. * *

When President Obama delivers his State of the Union address on January 24th , his speech will set the theme, tenor, and tone for his campaign, the opening salvo of his Presidential Defense...and it will be followed, almost immediately, by a Republican rebuttal justified under the  Equal Time rule despite the fact that, as a bona fide news event, the State of the Union Address is exempt from the Equal Time Rule.

Just as the Republicans running for the nomination are effectively surrogates for the puppet masters who control the Republican party, Mr. Obama should have a team of "truth-sayers" following in the footsteps of each and every Republican wannabe armed with facts and figures that rebut the falsehoods being injected into the collective consciousness of the American people.

In point of fact, those Democratic truth-sayers are out there, but they aren't getting any coverage.   The Republican debates are being carried nationally, but the rebuttals are only being carried locally in the communities where the debates have taken place...a circumstance that argues against combating wholesale politics with retail rebuttals.

This election will be won or lost long before election day finally rolls around.  By ineffectually combating the Republican onslaught of deliberate lies and misinformation, the Democrats are offering the 2012 presidential election up on a silver platter.

Footnotes:

*The Equal Time Rule should not be confused with the Fairness Doctrine.  The Equal Time Rule applies only to candidates for political office; it doesn't cover biased discussions of public affairs. That was covered by the Fairness Doctrine, which decreed that parties who took exception to news stories on matters of public policy were entitled to equal time or space to discuss their opinions.  Under the old rule, if you, your organization, or a cause you espoused, was mentioned in news coverage, you had a right to rebut that coverage and the news outlet had an obligation to carry the rebuttal.

The FCC stopped enforcing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, but the rule remained on the books until August of 2011.  What is significant about this is that, as long as the rule remained on the books, the FCC could have been sued for its failure to implement its own regulations, a strategy that could have been used to obtain free airtime to contradict statements on public policy made by Citizens United enabled third party groups in their paid advertising. 

Interestingly, the Equal Time Rule exempts paid advertising from the equal time provision, but the Fairness Doctrine did not.

Removing the rule from the FCC regulations in 2011, in the wake of the Citizens United decision, smacks of further political interference by the FCC, which has been dominated by Republicans for decades.

**In 1985, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the FCC could enforce the Fairness Doctrine but wasn't obligated to do so.  In effect, Justices Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia created a doctrine under which Federal agencies could decide whether or not to enforce their own regulations, which is a prescription for anarchy.  Scalia later championed the Citizens United cause which led directly to the present situation.