Here the markleting department of the Bush administration is grossly out of touch with “market research”; the assum[ption that you don’t market something without knowing or understanding something of the perspective of your “audience”:

The question vexing the foreign-policy establishment in Washington is how you market freedom. Is the establishment of a single, functioning democracy in the Middle East enough to win the ”hearts and minds” of ordinary Muslims, by convincing them that America is in fact the model for a free, more open society? Or do you need to somehow strike at the underlying conditions — despotism, hopelessness, economic and social repression — that breed fundamentalism and violence in the first place?

Kerry:
Kerry, too, envisions a freer and more democratic Middle East. But he flatly rejects the premise of viral democracy, particularly when the virus is introduced at gunpoint. ”In this administration, the approach is that democracy is the automatic, easily embraced alternative to every ill in the region,” he told me. Kerry disagreed. ”You can’t impose it on people,” he said. ”You have to bring them to it. You have to invite them to it. You have to nurture the process.”

Excellent parallel on today and Vietnam, and a lesson not learned:

The people of Vietnam, Kerry found, were susceptible neither to the dogma of communism nor the persuasiveness of American ”liberation.” As the young Kerry said during his 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: ”We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace.”

As I read these things, I am filled with frustration that our national discourse has become so “infected” with the simplistic and amoral bile that the neoconservatives (and aided and supported by the Christian Right) have introduced and “marketed”. In this marketing, they seem to have been dead on. They have amassed a scary clump of followers, adherents, pundits, and media channels. To have the kind of experience and thinking of a John Kerry (and a Howard Dean for that matter) that is NOT just pummeling the simplistic, anti-intellectual –and proud of it — constantly deceiving and distorting —- the mmainstream “liberal media” failed here—- is an astounding feat of manipulative PR.