After reading this typical Peggy Noonan article (typical meaning that it contains a few decent points but the thrust of it is wrong), in which she argues that Obama is bad at politics because of the contraception mandate brouhaha of a few months back, I was just wondering…why doesn’t Obama have a few more “mistakes” like that one?

Seriously, the contraception mandate fiasco was a revelation if you think about it. How many times have Republicans insisted that they were focused, laser-like, on the economy? And yet the Bishops used the Wurlitzer to put their pet issue on the map, and bloodthirsty Republicans couldn’t wait to start throwing anti-religion labels at the White House. The response was immediate and long-lasting, and a definite win for the Administration for not backing down and basically letting opponents tear themselves to pieces. This was a revelation because the received wisdom is that the Wurlitzer is an unalloyed advantage for Republicans–it gets the base good and angry, the mainstream media takes notice, Democrats and progressives fall back in fear, etc.

Thing is, though, that I don’t really think it’s much of an advantage anymore. Maybe it was when it was just Ailes and Limbaugh and Drudge directing from on high, utilizing their own respective medium to converge on what the Repubs wanted focused on. But it’s not like that anymore. Social media has decentralized the apparatus to an unprecedented level, and the terrain is looking more and more multipolar. From the O’Keefe pranksters to those trying their damnedest to fill the hole in the Breitbart empire, the entire landscape has become unpredictable, with a lot of people trying to become the social media equivalent of Ailes or Limbaugh. All of whom have a clear incentive to pump up even the most minor stories into category-I hurricanes of panic and anger. Part of the reason why conservatives’ success on information control has been so durable was because there was a fairly small group of people who set the tone, arguably that’s far less the case now (though those men are still pretty darn influential).

So, why not use the classic wedge strategy with a new media twist? Find a list of things to say or executive actions to do that would (a) be popular with the public, and (b) provoke a cataclysm of abuse from the Wurlitzer. This shouldn’t be hard. Then, plot them out in terms of time, ideally timed out just enough to drown out Romney’s message just as soon as his campaign recovers from the last pseudo-controversy. Romney can’t not engage on these topics, connected as he is to the right-wing id, and the best part is that this strategy is asymmetrical. Romney can’t really return the favor because the structure of the left’s opinion sector is very different, tilted far more in the direction of wonks and researchers.

I don’t really expect the Obama Administration to do this, partly because I think they wouldn’t have put forth the policy on contraception had they known the disruption it would cause (see here), so I don’t think they’d want to take it further. For better or worse, they’re still fixated on healing partisan divides, and this would amount to exploiting them strategically. But wouldn’t it work? And wouldn’t it be better for right-wingers to be angry at Obama for, say, enacting greenhouse gas rules via the EPA than for some imaginary race war? Better for Obama himself too, I should think, since that would at least be something resembling real debate.