Uppity Wisconsin said it well yesterday, but they kind of buried it:

Walker, like so many — “conservatives” doesn’t seem to quite cover it — have been amazingly successful at tearing down their opponents with attacks designed to turn the opponents strengths into weaknesses.

The classic case is the “Swift-Boating” of John Kerry by people in service to an administration of draft dodgers.

Now we have Walker attacking Mary Burke by vilifying Trek for not paying income tax and for outsourcing.

While presumably this is something he’d applaud in other businesses, Walker needs to attack Mary Burke’s obvious strengths of competency and business acumen.

It was refreshing to see the normally supine Milwaukee Journal Sentinel give considerable space to a clarification of Burke’s and Trek’s record. Sadly he hasn’t received a “pants-on-fire” rating.

I don’t have an obvious answer to this stratagem, and I suppose if it were obvious, the body politic would have been inoculated against it some time ago.

But we’d all to well to anticipate its use against any progressive candidate we support. The key thing is that it is hard to imagine a bald-faced lie about our candidates’ strengths, but, given the current state of political reportage in this state and country, it’s likely to happen, and the lie told gets more attention an has a bigger impression that the refutation. We need to train ourselves to imagine what we are