The Real Meaning of "When They Go Low We Go High"

 A lot of people have mocked Michelle Obama for saying, "When they go low, we go high."  This has been dismissed as hopelessly naive and utopian.  Indeed, Michelle has been accused of not following her own advice at the Democratic Convention.

I am not convinced.  There is another way of understanding the remark.  Most people seem to assume that there are three possible responses to attack ads, all of them bad.

The first is to ignore the attack as beneath response.  That has the disadvantage of looking like an admission that the accusation is true, or why are you letting it go unanswered.

The second is to deny the accusation.  The problem, of course, is that that only serves to amplify it.  That is the point behind the apocryphal story that Lyndon Johnson wanted to accuse his opponent of committing unspeakable acts with farm animals, just to force him to deny it.

The third alternative is to hit back, hard.  This is the one usually seen as the most effective -- when they go low, we go lower.  It is effective -- the reason there is so much attack advertising in politics is that it works. The result is the both campaigns compete to go lower and lower.  The one who goes lowest usually wins, but the overall result is to make voters despise both candidates and reinforce cynicism about the whole process.

I think that what Michelle Obama is saying is that there is a fourth alternative, a sort of political jiujitsu that turns the attacker's attack back on himself.  Ronald Reagan perfectly exemplified the technique when he responded to attempts to portray him as a dangerous extremist by chuckling and saying, "There you go again!"  It proved highly effective.

Barrack Obama was also a master of the technique.  He knew just how to drive his opponents crazy and then shake his head at their antics.  If an opponent wallowed in the sewer and invited him to come down and fight, Obama would say, "Wow!  It must really stink down there!"

A more recent example is Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock's famous ad.  Rather than making any detailed attempt at refutation, it shows him walking an impossibly cute dog, while saying showing a whole serious of headlines finding that attacks to be false out out of context.  "But I think Georgian's will see her ads for what they are," he says, throwing a bag of dog poop into the trash.  "Don't you?"  The dog barks agreement.  

Kamala Harris is showing some signs of understanding this technique as well.  The question is whether it will matter.  The latest poll shows Trump pulling ahead.