Meme Watch: Teleprompter[tm]Gate!

I originally planned to ignore it, hoping it would go away. But in an era when GOP budget proposals without numbers get laughed out of court within hours, Teleprompter^[tm]Gate has shown a surprising amount of staying power.

Enough substance to keep it going for over six weeks, in fact.

By all rights, this--or something equivalent--should have put the whole thing down, like a horse with a broken leg, 'way back in February:

It makes me wonder: Could this campaign by the Obama-Fail Forces be an attempt at payback for this? They say elephants never forget . . . .

(H/t to Doctor TV.)

p3 Memetic Market Watch: "Fred Thompson is too lazy to run for president."

Here's one I predict you're going to see a lot more of in the coming weeks (until, if I"m right, it--and Thompson--will both drop off the radar screen in a heartbeat).

The Post's Richard Cohen isn't someone I go to for glimpses of reality much any more, but if you're looking for someone who can hop on the Beltway conventional wisdom and make it sound like he just invented the light bulb, he's your man.

Here he is a couple of days ago:

Some years ago I ran into Fred Thompson at Washington's Reagan National Airport and had a chat with him as we waited for a (very) delayed flight. I found him to be affable and nice -- good company, if you want to know -- but I cannot remember a single thing he said. Alas, it is about the same with his Senate career.

If Thompson's name came up in some sort of free-association game, he would be a genuine stumper: Thompson and what? There is no Thompson Act, Thompson Compromise, Thompson Hearing, Thompson Speech or Thompson Anything that comes to mind. No living man can call himself a Thompsonite. Instead, Thompson came and went from the Senate as if he were never there, leaving only the faint scent of ennui. "I don't want to spend the rest of my life up here," he once said. "I don't like spending 14- and 16-hour days voting on 'sense of the Senate' resolutions on irrelevant matters." As a call to action, this lacks a certain something.

And here's one of the many self-replications of this meme you're going to see in days to come:

MR. RUSSERT: [Thompson] was asked last night what would he do as president. He said, “Well, I’d do lots of things.” And asked, what if—“Are you prepared to talk about those?” He said, “No.”

The current strains of the meme are that he's just doing it because he enjoys the spotlight, that he doesn't have any serious ideas (and isn't in a hurry to formulate any), and that he doesn't have a fire in his belly for anything in particular.

Note that these things can be said with some degree of plausibility about other candidates (or even current office holders). Memes aren't about truth, they're about truthiness, and their survival factor depends on their ability to perpetuate themselves within the conceptual and communicative ecosystem where they appear. I think this one's got potential.

Meme: Thompson: Too lazy to run for President.

Value: High, especially in the hands of any second-tier GOP presidential wannabe who'd like to keep Thompson from sucking up the limelight.

Recommendation: Buy early, sell quick. You're going to hear a lot of variations on this theme--it doesn't require much thought (making it a big-name pundit favorite) and Thompson himself isn't doing much to prevent its spread. And when Thompson's novelty act is eventually shoved aside by more serious Republican candidates (hard to believe there are candidates less serious than the ones the GOP is currently fielding, but that's the state we've arrived at), expect him to sink back into TV Land.

Memetic Marketplace Watch

Two very interesting showings by political memes this week. Neither is an IPO; both have been around for some time.

Meme: "The Bubble"

Value: For those on the left, "bubble" has been a mimetic warhorse almost since the day Bush took the oath of office in 2001. One of the hallmarks of the Bush administration is the largely successful effort by his team to keep him insulated from exposure to disagreeable ideas. The bubble meme carries several ideas that stick when tossed at Bush: Someone young--a preemie?--left by genetics or upbringing without the ability to resist things that most of us--of hardier, mongrel stock?--simply shrug off without thinking. Isolated in a bubble, for his own protection, the "bubble boy" depends on family and helpers to mediate between him and a hostile world. Lacking resistance to ideas--critical thinking as immunity mechanisms? ideas as viruses?--he tends to be infected by whoever he talked to last.

Forecast: Bullish. "Bubble" has enjoyed quite a surge in the last week--including at Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times, plus an enthusiastic piling-on by Keith Olbermann--owing mainly to Bush's diffident reaction toward the Iraq Study Group Report. As the Democrats start flexing their congressional muscles, the carnage in Iraq continues, and more Republicans start jumping ship, expect to see more and more of this meme in its many varieties.

(As an aside: The terror of White House staffers at being caught uttering a discouraging word within earshot of the POTUS reminds me of the old Monty Python "Oscar Wilde" sketch:

OSCAR: Your Majesty is like a big jam doughnut with cream on the top.
PRINCE: I beg your pardon?
OSCAR: Um... it was one of Whistler's.
WHISTLER: I never said that.
OSCAR: You did, James, you did.
(The PRINCE OF WALES stares expectantly at WHISTLER)
WHISTLER: ... Well, You Highness, what I meant was that, like a doughnut, um, your arrival gives us pleasure... and your departure only makes us hungry for more.
(Laughter)
Your Highness, you are also like a stream of bat's piss.
PRINCE: What?!?
WHISTLER: It was one of Wilde's. One of Wilde's.
OSCAR: It sodding was not! It was Shaw!
SHAW: I... I merely meant, Your Majesty, that you shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark.
PRINCE (accepting the compliment) /: Oh.

Can't be a lot of fun to be a sycophant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days.)

Meme: "Crisis of Confidence"

Value: When this phrase got pinned to Carter's energy policy speech (you remember--the cardigan sweater speech) even though, if memory serves, he never used the phrase in the speech, it became just one more nail in the coffin of his reelection hopes, . The lesson learned by all Republicans: Never use the "CoC" phrase, no matter how bad things look. Never.

Forecast: Sell! For pity's sake, sell! What on earth could have possessed Tony Snow to use this phrase in describing the American public's documented disdain for Bush's Iraq policy and the lock-step Republican congressional support for it? Any rookie PR flack knows you never repeat a hot-button phrase like than when it's tucked into a reporter's question, and you never--never!--introduce it into the conversation yourself.

Why didn't Snow drive the stake in the rest of the way and call Bush's middle-east policies "Carteresque" and complain that America is experiencing a "malaise?"