Fallows: On 'Swiftboating' Mitt Romney [View all]

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By James Fallows

Jul 15 2012, 4:23 PM ET

Many readers are wroth about my having used the word "Swiftboating" yesterday, in an NPR conversation with Guy Raz, to describe the controversy over Mitt Romney's Bain background. (That same show, by the way, began with an outstanding "Cover Story" segment on the social, environmental, and economic ramifications of the recent tumult in the coal business.)

Here is why I used the word, including points there was not time to make in real time on the radio.

1) As I said, the Bain controversy is similar to " 'Swiftboating' without the falsehoods." You may think that is like saying "war without the violence," but please follow along.

1A) If I had thought of it at the time, i would have added the term I've since heard from another journalist: "self-Swiftboating."

2) The effect of this kind of 'Swiftboating' is, as I pointed out, to change a candidate's presumed strength into his weakness, or vulnerability. The term's origin is of course the 2004 general election campaign, when falsehood-filled accounts of John Kerry's record (as a Swift boat naval officer in Vietnam) turned what he presumed would be a strength, his military record, into something he had to defend and explain. Long before the Swift boat episode, this jiujutsu technique was a specialty of Karl Rove's.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/on-swiftboating-mitt-romney/259847/#