Katherine Kersten has been wildly successful as a newspaper columnist compared to her stint with the think tank, Center of the American Experiment.
A think tank, no matter how ideologically driven, aims at a different, more discerning reader, and will take pains to ground its point of view in the facts, place it in context and dress it up with a bit nuance before serving it to an audience capable of picking it apart.
A newspaper columnist labors under no such restrictions, unless you count insulting emails from idiots as qualifying under the final clause above.
You can probably see why I spent my career writing for the financial and business-to-business markets instead of consumer advertising. Not only was I tempermentally unsuited, I had the quaint belief you should not deliberately mislead people just because it was easier to persuade more of them to do what you wanted.
This is also one reason why conservatives are better at political messaging than liberals. It's not that liberals aren't capable of misleading; it's just they'd rather not sound ignorant when they do it, so they're not as clear. Their opponents oblige by dumbing their message down. And conveniently distorting it in the process.
Kersten's latest column illustrates how it works. No longer required to show even a semblance of new research or original thought, she condenses and recirculates the conservative talking points purporting to show how the DFL majority is out of control. For months, the GOP foot soldiers have been compling long lists of proposed bills and adding them up to an ever-mounting total that is supposed to scare everyone to death: "the DFL has proposed a jaw-dropping $5 billion in tax increases, according to House Republican caucus calculations."
Well, of course those are Republican calculations. But the proposals represent everything that's in the store, not what's going to go through the checkout.
On the one hand, they are lecturing the DFL on the need to prioritize, and then scream when the DFL puts everything on the table and says, here's how much this will cost and here's how to pay for it. How else can you prioritize spending if you don't make a list and talk honestly about what that would mean?
As we know, a Republican majority would do it differently. At the national level, it under-budgets for misbegotten wars it can't manage, cuts funds for things it doesn't personally like, and loads bills with recordbreaking ear marks that can't be debated. Then it borrows to pay for it all.
Simple.
The state GOP can't wage foreign wars or borrow money except for capital projects, so it attacks DFLers and shifts spending for needed services to local governments.
Even simpler.
