Politics: lies and the lying liars
Anyone who studies history and humanity knows about the technique of the Big Lie. The summary version of the idea of the Big Lie is that propaganda works, and truth has little to do with its efficacy. In fact, the bigger the lie, the more likely it might be to work, because its very audaciousness makes people doubt that someone would be so bold as to concoct something that preposterous and expect people to believe it.
Most people also know that the Nazis were probably the first to use the phrase. Hitler wrote about it in Mein Kampf. But my guess is that few people know how he used it: to refer to the Jews. It is instructive to look at the full passage on the subject from his book (see also this):
But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall [of Germany in WWI] precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice.
All this was inspired by the principle–which is quite true within itself–that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation…From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, where as in reality they are a race? And what a race! One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for all time with a statement which is profoundly and exactly true. Schopenhauer called the Jew “The Great Master of Lies”. Those who do not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it, will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth to prevail.
So here we have an almost beautiful (in the diabolical sense of the world) symmetry: Hitler describes the technique accurately, and then falsely accuses his supposed enemies of using it, and in that very act he promulgates a Big Lie.
Hitler was probably not the first to do this. But he was one of the first to do it so boldly, so frequently, and so successfully (for a while, at least). Never, however, did he own up to doing it. And in fact, he probably believed at least some of his own Big Lies. He was still actively promulgating one of his most famously destructive ones the day before he killed himself, when he wrote his Political Testament in contemplation of that death:
It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted the war in 1939. It was desired and instigated exclusively by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish descent or worked for Jewish interests…Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.
To be especially convincing in telling a lie, it helps to believe it’s true.
Why am I talking about all of this? I’ve been contemplating the back and forth allegations of lying in political ads in the 2012 campaign—the latest being Romney and whether Obama has reduced the work requirement for welfare, and Obama’s charge that Romney and Bain helped to kill a woman of cancer. There have been various attempts to assess the veracity of said ads. And so on and so forth—including the question of whether the polls that currently show Obama pulling ahead are valid, or instead feature skewed and misleading sampling in order to rally the Obama troops.
Not all of these things, even if they are lies, would constitute a Big Lie. But some are Bigger than others. Whether or not Romney is completely correct about the effect of the recent Obama memo on welfare and work (see this for the arguments that he’s incorrect), a very convincing case can certainly be made that he’s telling the truth, as Mickey Kaus (not a conservative) pointed out a month ago.* That would make Romney’s ad more of a difference of opinion rather than a lie, or at worst an exaggeration. However, the PAC ad about Bain, Romney, and the woman dying of cancer contains so many actual lies (lies in the conventional sense, that is) that it’s safe to say it’s a pack of lies.
Politicians exaggerating, distorting, and even lying is hardly new. But there is something different about the Obama campaign. To a greater extent than any campaign I can remember in my lifetime, it uses these techniques relentlessly, and its lies are not only more frequent, they are more dramatic, more flagrant, more shameless, and thus more akin to the Big Lie.
What’s more, Obama follows the following rules as well, elucidated in a US intelligence profile of Hitler written during the war:
[Hitler’s] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
That is the technique in a nutshell—and what’s more it’s Obama’s only technique in his campaign against Romney. Is it working? Maybe; hard to tell—because of that aforementioned difficulty in knowing whether the polls are telling the truth or not. But unless human nature has changed a good deal in the seventy or so years since WWII, it probably has been and will be effective. The only question is whether it will be effective enough to grant Obama a victory.
[*NOTE: Here are some of Kaus’s arguments that favor Romney’s position:
1. The guts of the 1996 welfare reform were a) welfare was ended as an “entitlement” (controlled by the feds) and transferred to the states, as a “block grant” subject to certain requirements; and b) one of those requirements was that a certain percentage of each state’s welfare caseload had to be working or preparing for work. A great deal of effort was put into defining what qualified as work, and making sure that work actually meant work and not the various BS activities (including BS training activities) the welfare bureaucracies often preferred to substitute for work.
2. As of several years ago, the details of these work requirements turned out to matter less than the general signal they sent, that no-strings welfare was over and even low-income single moms were supposed to work. As a result, the welfare rolls shrank so rapidly (roughly by half) that many states never faced the detailed work requirements (since they got credit for everyone who left welfare).
3. But of course the work requirements were part of what sent that general “signal.”
4. To the extent the administration’s action erodes the actual and perceived toughness of the work requirements, which it does, it sends the opposite and wrong signal.
5. The Democrat’s 2009 stimulus bill changed the incentives of the 1996 reform by once again rewarding states that expanded their welfare rolls. If you worry about Obama reestablishing the bad old pre-reform welfare system, though, this is worse.
6. Rector and Bradley of Heritage (among the first to attack Obama’s action) make the case that the law’s work requirements were specifically designed to not be waivable, and that Obama is using HHS’s authority to waive state reporting requirements as a tricky way of voiding the underlying substantive requirements that are to be reported about.
There’s more, much much more, in his article. It would be a good idea to read the whole thing, and then compare it to cursory analyses such as the one at Politifact. As usual, one of the problems is that understanding something like this requires arguments and thinking of some complexity, rather than sound bites. But sound bites are what ads are all about.]
[ADDENDUM: Roger Simon reflects on the role of the MSM in all this.
And Bryan Preston is on the same page as me:
The ad is out there. The uninformed are seeing it in their facebook feeds, twinned up with the latest from MoveOn or whichever smear group is running in parallel today. People will see the ad, and most of them will not see the CNN, PolitiFact or Washington Post fact-checks that declare the ad a total fraud. Out in the wild, the ad is intended do its job of toxifying Romney just enough to peel off a few of his voters and ramp up hate for him among Obama’s voters. That’s the point of the ad, not to tell anything that’s true, but just to stir the pot, sully Romney and depress his potential vote.
As I wrote yesterday, we’re dealing with something in the Obama campaign that we haven’t seen much at the top of American life, except in the worst moments of the Clinton era. We’re dealing with a president who is entirely without any sense of ethics, honor or morals. He has lived a lie for most if not all of his life, hiding his true political convictions in gauzy language that makes him appear reasonable and moderate. Having lived a lie, what’s one more lie, in the service of keeping himself in power? What’s one more lie if, in Obama’s mind, it accomplishes the “good” of keeping Romney out of power?…
The Obama campaign has gone from accusing Romney of boyhood bullying to adulthood felony, to being a murderer in all but name. What accusation is left to throw at him? There aren’t many, but rest assured that the Obama campaign and its allies will find one.]
Excellent post, neo. I appreciate the way you show that even though both sides may be resorting to negative attacks, the Dems are taking the much lower road in doing so.
Romney needs to discover the best strategy to cut through all the distracting b.s., and get undecided voters to focus on the current administrations pathetic handling of the ongoing economic crisis, and its deliberate efforts to pay off and strengthen its own cronies and todies, to the detriment of the public at large.
In the 1930’s, Hitler linked the German people’s misery to the Jews by using the big lie technique which allowed him to continue to gain Reichstag seats, but it’s debatable to state his lies were popular and resonated with a majority. It is encouraging to know that his final solution required an apparatus of terror and control and secrecy. Still, one recoils from the awful truth of how many people did believe the big lie.
Segue to today, and can Obama have any traction in linking people’s misery to Romney? Some, I believe, but not enough as Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, and Chick-fil-a show. In fact, can it be possible that the bid lie technique fail and the American people show their revulsion for such manipulation and evil.
I suppose the campaign ads we’ve seen the last few months are worse than what we’ve all gotten used to in recent years, but they aren’t that bad by historic standards. No one’s trying to accuse Mitt of wanting to start a nuclear war for example.
The other reason I don’t worry much about them, is that anything that depends on shock value ends up being self defeating in the long run.
And speaking of things that have lost their shock value; why does everyone have to compare their political opponents to Nazis?
Baltimoron: you ask, “why does everyone have to compare their political opponents to Nazis?”
My answer: the Nazis were a powerful and fascinating historical movement. Their rise to power and their actions while in power, although unique is some ways, were instructive in others and resemble many other tyrannies, as well as providing cautionary lessons. People wanting to gain power and to keep it have certain things in common, and often use similar techniques, and those who are wary of them would do well to study the Nazis and note parallels whenever they see them.
The same is true, by the way, of Communists and Communism.
That doesn’t mean that every analogy or observation of similarity of technique is the same as saying “so and so is a Nazi”—although sometimes that is explicitly said, as well.
The only solace I can take from the election of an amoral man like Obama is that the poor, the blacks, and the young people who put him there are getting what they deserve, good and hard. I wonder if they will figure it out before November. I’m hoping for $4.00 gas and another recession before the election. It’s our only hope.
As for what proportion of Germans knew of, saw nothing wrong with, went along with, or actively aided and abetted the Nazis in their attempts to exterminate the Jews, two interesting books that might be consulted–arguing that most/many average German citizens were OK with, saw nothing major wrong with, and that many hundreds of thousands actively aided in “The final Solution,” are the 1997 book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, ” and the older, 1966 book (first published in 1955 by the University of Chicago Press) , “They Thought They Were Free; The Germans, 1933-1945” in which an interviewer (who concealed his Jewishness) sat down for very in depth interviews in post WWII Kronenberg with a number of ordinary German citizens, about the War and the Nazis, about how things looked to the average citizen on the ground, about how the Nazis gradually and systematically took over, and what these citizen’s mind-sets were during the War.
After finishing with Marx’s corpus in college, I thought that I’d get a little additional perspective on the field of world-historical nutcases by getting a feel for what the Nazis supposedly wanted people to believe about their worldview.
We were trained to seek out the original sources, and as my German is more than rusty, I picked up a translation of Der Fuhrer’s magnum opus.
But trying to slog through even a few pages of Mein Kampf in translation proved almost impossible.
It makes the Economic and Philosophical Manuscript translations seem like models of style and clarity.
The translator’s notes indicated that he saw Hitler as a third rate intellect addicted to popular press locutions, and a peculiar kind of passive voice favored by German pseudo-intellectuals striving for gravitas.
I found the text disjointed, borderline incoherent, and exhausting to read for even a few pages.
In any event, the mysteries of Naziism still remain mysteries as far as I am concerned.
Neo: You asked “What accusation is left to throw at him? (Romney) There aren’t many, but rest assured that the Obama campaign and its allies will find one.”
Well, as of this morning the “Huffington Post” is accusing Romney of having “”Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads” in El Salvador. http://tinyurl.com/99xvv6r
As the Romney campaign confronts this technique of ever-escalating baseless accusations, their choice essentially is between trying to get facts and policy past the noise machine or to counterattack in the same fashion against Obama and every member of his administration and campaign team. The decision IMO should be based on pure expediency. It is futile, even dangerous, to exercise moral restraint toward those who acknowledge no restraints.
David L.:
That bears repeating, and emphasizing. When Communists say “by any means necessary”, they really mean it.
David L.: actually, it wasn’t I who asked that question. It’s part of a long (indented) quote from Bryan Preston.
That’s not even worth wasting time on. The whole purpose of these sensational, outrageous lies is to appeal to voters who are idiots and morons. Sadly, that’s a not-insignificant percentage.
Lately I find myself taking some comfort in the extremes to which the Obama camp will go in the interest of their Leader’s re-election. Comfort, because it’s plain that they’re flailing.
(Of course, we the good guys still have to overcome their habitual propensity to stuff ballot boxes and so on, but it’s still comforting to see them flailing.)
President Obama is such an incredibly despicable little man — and I choke as I write the word “man”.
McCain made the fatal error of running a decent campaign. So far Romney is following in his footsteps. He had better start talking about Obama growing up in Indonesia and being mentored by a communist. He needs to talk about Chicago corruption that Obama was immersed in. How hard can it be for smart rich guys to come up with a dirty, below the belt campaign?
As the Talmud puts it:
“Those Who Are Kind To The Cruel, In The End Will Be Cruel To The Kind.”
As I see it, Romney can either adopt a reactive mode, and try to set the record straight, to refute each and every new lie by Obama & Co., and to see his campaign degenerate into a daily attempt to refute the latest Ad/Smear and Accusation from Obama & Co. or, he can adopt a pro-active, fight back approach, go on the offensive, and “hit back twice as hard” at Obama & Co. and inundate Obama with a daily, even hourly, litany of charges and, if need be, go nuclear on Obama & Co. with everything that stinks about Obama’s past, about his actions as President and their results, and thereby put Obama & Co. on the defensive.
Those are, it seems to me, Romney’s only two choices, there is no real middle course that will result in Romney winning the election.
rickl: “The whole purpose of these sensational, outrageous lies is to appeal to voters who are idiots and morons. Sadly, that’s a not-insignificant percentage.”
I for one am not sure of the exact percentage, but it’s probably between 10-20%. That is where the election will be won or lost – among the so-called independents. It’s frustrating that 80-90% of the voters know who they will vote for right now and why they will vote that way. It’s those “undecideds,” those paragons of bipartisanship, those who are too lazy to pay attention, and those who may not even know who they’ll vote for on November 6th that hold the nations fate in their hands. And they are very susceptible to the BIG LIE. The MSM will trumpet any attack on Romney while soft peddling or ignoring attacks on Obama. And the independents will take notice of what the MSM tells them, like good little Germans. The only saving grace is, as Mr. Frank says, that gas prices are rising and the economy is softening. That probably means a low turnout among dems and independents. Romney backers are, I believe, going to show up in great numbers. That may be the difference.
P.S.–this is actually a very good–if perilous–test for Romney.
Too timid, too tired, a fool, or too much of a “gentleman” –and/or any or all of the above–McCain failed this test, to the detriment of our country, and of us all.
Let’s see if Romney has enough guts and moxie to get in the ring, get bloody, take some punches, but deliver even more, and win.
Of course, if Romney “goes Medieval” on Obama as I am proposing, the left’s wholly owned MSM will set up shrieks of outrage at how ungentlemanly, how crudely and unmercifully Romney has “racially profiled,” “insulted,” pilloried and vilified our glorious, post-racial, extraordinary, brilliant, unifying, “light bringer”–full in any other gag-worthy adjectives you care to–President.
Which caterwauling Romney ought to ignore, not play into the MSM’s specious “outrage” and synthetic drama, and simply reply to Obama & Co. and their agents, sympathizers, and enablers, “grow up, ” “grow a pair,” “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,” and “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” or words to that effect.
Neo: missed the indentation, sorry. Bryan Preston is asking the right question though, and thank you for bringing it to your readers’ attention. The answer comes down to whether more votes are to be had by trying to preserve the decencies or retaliating in kind, and if the decision is to retaliate in kind whether Romney should do so personally or through surrogates. McCain attempted to preserve the decencies and demanded that his campaign and supporters do likewise. It gained him nothing.
Bryan Preston’s article is very good. I heard Michael Medved reading from it on his radio show on my way home from work. I thought I also saw it linked somewhere else, but I can’t remember where.
Exhaustion, finally, of an all pervasive politicization of American life is setting in and producing less results for the Alinskyites. When all political races everywhere exhibit only personal attacks, something’s got to register with the American public, doesn’t it?
David L,
Speaking of the Puffington Host:
http://www.gocomics.com/brevity/2012/06/26
There’s a disadvantage of being Romney, of being the not-MSM candidate. I don’t know whether it makes a difference what strategy is used: whether to fight in the gutter or to maintain “it’s the economy, stupid.” The former will keep attention off the economy and defeat the Republican campaign strategy. The latter will get no attention and, likewise, defeat campain strategy. So, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
However, it ma be the whole thing is a distraction. Patience, grasshopper. Either the dilemma is a distraction or the dilemma is solved by changing the battlefield. In both cases, there is a battle behind the battle and the hysterics of the Obama camp suggest it believes it is losing.
The Amercian way is to never give up and to fire when you see the whites of their eyes.
http://military.discovery.com/history/revolutionary-war/bunker-hill/bunker-hill-2.html
I really must protest at the careless labeling of hard-hitting TRUTHFUL ads as “negative attacks” as if they were the same as the LIBELOUS attacks practiced by the Left.
Just one more example out of hundreds of the Left’s evil genius for “branding.” They slap a label on everything they want us to have an opinion about, and we usually go along with it, unthinking: hence legitimate hard-hitting truths become as slimy, somehow, as their lies and slanders.
Because they’re all “negative attacks,” you see. (They pull this “tu quoque” crap all the time.)
As I see it, Romney can either adopt a reactive mode, and try to set the record straight, to refute each and every new lie by Obama & Co., and to see his campaign degenerate into a daily attempt to refute the latest Ad/Smear and Accusation from Obama & Co. or, he can adopt a pro-active, fight back approach, go on the offensive, and “hit back twice as hard” at Obama & Co. and inundate Obama with a daily, even hourly, litany of charges and, if need be, go nuclear on Obama & Co. with everything that stinks about Obama’s past, about his actions as President and their results, and thereby put Obama & Co. on the defensive.
Those are, it seems to me, Romney’s only two choices, there is no real middle course that will result in Romney winning the election.
What Wolla said! They’re playing “rope a dope” with us. Keeping control of what subjects get talked about. “When did you stop beating your wife?”
SRSLY, the Republican strategists must know this. Why don’t they start telling some REAL inconvenient truths?
Romney’s money is tied up till he becomes the official nominee. I hope what we are seeing is him giving Obama enough rope to hang himself for now. Even MSNBC found the Romney killed my wife ad obnoxious. Then after the VEEP is selected, the whole team can go on a major offensive. Obama’s screwups are so numerous, from Keystone to Solyndra to Fast and Furious to “You didn’t build that,” but it is probably better not to dribble out responses that are ignored by the MSM. Save your ammo for an offensive that no one can ignore. That’s what I’m hoping anyway.
I think Romney’s best bet is to disarm the big lies of democrats with humor. He’s actually pretty good at it. Something like…
“This week you’ve learned i kill women with cancer and funded my financial success with monies from El Salvador hit squads. I just wish my opponents had been half this creative at putting Americans back to work in these last 4 years.”
I have two thoughts that seem not to have been treated in previous comments.
1. The emergence of the Big Lie is partly a function of media technology. The Big Lie won’t readily spread by rumor, because telephone-game style revision will tend to dilute the message. In particular, note the appearance of the Big Lie about 20 years after the advent of motion pictures and 10 years after radio, when the Big Lie could reach the less literate segments of the population.
This leads me to wonder: How does the emergence of the internet and social media affect the Big Lie? This takes us back to the days of rumor mongering, only the rumors go around the world instead of across the back fence. Do modern media counter the Big Lie, or do they fissure society into opposing camps that accept and reject the Lie?
2. Theologically, the Big Lie is not a new idea. The conception of Lucifer, the light bringer, includes the idea that nothing Lucifer says may be trusted, and even the true statements lead in false directions. Thus, good people should shun Lucifer and all his works and ways.
The Big Lie in its modern form comes into existence after popular piety had receded somewhat. But everybody who ever watched television (late night infomercials, anyone?) or used e-mail (My father was the finance minister of Nigeria…) has seen plenty of Middle-Sized Lies. Is is possible that Lucifer will make a come-back, and the public at large will start to shun and reject individuals or groups who the public believes are fundamentally untrustworthy?
neo-neocon –
My problem with using the term “Nazi” is that, in modern political discourse, it is a word bereft of meaning. People of every political persuasion throw it around to describe any politician they don’t like from town councilmen to president.
In any case, you can find many perfectly good examples of nasty political rhetoric from our nation’s own history.
On your second post about the daisy ad, the difference between then and now may simply be the amount of exposure the ad got. The daisy ad ran on a major network during prime time, back when that meant something. Everyone saw it. This latest ad was only supposed to run on cable in a few swing states (I believe they started talking about it on blogs and in cable news before it even aired, and I don’t know if/where they actually did run the ad). So this is something that a lot fewer people have seen and the discussion about it is mostly among the political junkies rather than the general public.
In my opinion, the biggest take away from the Romney-killed-my-wife controversy is that is shows how incompetent (or desperate) the folks running this PAC are.
I note that Saul Alinsky dedicated “Rules for Radicals,” his amoral, bare-knuckled, Marxist agitation manual to “Lucifer” (see http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/07/31/The-Community-Organizer-In-Chief-Part-One-The-Alinsky-Ethics) .
Obama learned and taught and used these amoral/immoral principles, designed to agitate groups of people–to quote Alinsky by “rubbing raw the wounds of discontent”–and aimed at getting them to hand their power over to an “organizer” who made promises that he would ameliorate their situation (but who was actually seeking power to further his Marxist agenda), and “community organizer” Obama and his odious crew are using them right now.
Reportedly–for obvious reasons the MSM doesn’t want to dwell on or to explore this, or any other part for that matter, of Obama’s life–Obama’s big community organizing project was to get the poor black residents of Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens housing project asbestos removal and other necessary repairs, and from the little reporting that was done by bloggers, nothing was ever done.
Hillary Clinton wrote her undergraduate thesis at Wellesley on Alinsky and his methods, met with and interviewed Alinsky, and so impressed him that he offered her a job working for him, presumably as another Marxist propagandist and agitator.
I agree with SteveH. Humor. Use that.
Since the primaries, this is the second time people have worried Romney is losing the campaign battle. He’s not.
First, there was Romney and Solyendra. Then a seeming lull which prompted near panic. Then there’s been “you didn’t build that” with the overwhelming big lie response and again, near panic.
Plus, eveyday we have dishonest and misleading polls, not only because it is too soon for polls to be of value but because they are designed to not test the waters but trouble the waters. Current polls are pseude evidence for the big lies.
Further, the idea that McCain lost because he didn’t fight dirty enough doesn’t speak to the facts of the race. It wasn’t until the fiscal crisis presented that the tide turned against him.
I find myself suprised to not enthusiastically joining in a call for a close in no quarters fight. But I think I know Romney’s strategy because he appears to be sticking by it:
Focus on the failed policies of the man, not the man. Keep away from social/cultural issues. Raise lots of money. Don’t make any big mistakes. Let the economy and fear of same be your biggest supporter. This isn’t a blitzkrieg but more of a seige type of strategy, one that tests the will of the opponent and leads to infighting. We have already seen how that occurred once over Bain. Wait until real panic sets in and the rats begin to look for their own survival.
Crap, Neo, that’s been The Left’s entire modus operandi for the last 15-20 years or so.
It started around the time of the faux “supermarket scanner” meme w/ Bush I
I don’t know but I think this ad about the woman dying of cancer might well be a bridge too far even for Obama…whether people hear a lot of pushback in the media or not, the ad is on its face ridiculous. It really is.
Curtis,
I agree with you. The birther issue is a big lie on the other side, and it has taken away a lot of steam of his past associations because they do not seem real. The president is trying to create a feeling that these accusations feel true.
As far as Germany, it is important to realize that people in general are more educated today, and the press was significantly less free.
I think Mitt will be fine. He ran a lot of negative adds in the primaries. The race is tied. The president is making mistakes due to over confidence. Plus, I think he is making the mistake believing Americans are dumber than they are. The negative adds do work, but the debates will be when the truly undecided will make their decision. The adds now are to set the tone so one can believe the lies.