With next week’s GOP Michigan primary a coin toss, new plays are driving a new narrative in the 2012 race.  Isn’t Tampa just down the road from Jeb’s place?  Boy it’s a shame Mitch Daniels never got vetted.  Mitt or Rick are gonna make Barry Goldwater look like a winner.

You get the idea.  With party elders nervous, conditions are ideal for low-engagement stratagems that assess and probe what’s possible without sending pulses of panic or peril.  Some are hard to see.  Others are more obvious but tougher to attribute.  Either way, they're harbingers of a brokered late-August convention or a late-arriving Obama-beater.

What are the influence strategies at play?  And who’s employing them? Here's a handy decoder:

TESTING PLAYS

• THE PING. To hint and hide; the oblique reference or suggestion.  Conservative Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson is sounding the alarm, though more through suggestion than overt objection:  “The longer these controversies continue, the longer President Obama has to regain his political balance.  …As long as Republicans are focused elsewhere, they are providing Obama with his own private bailout.”

• THE MIRROR. To expose inconvenient facts; the introduction of facts or contradictory information.  Here’s a snippet from the left-leaning Eugene Robinson, also of The Post, who seems keen to help Mr. Gerson and other GOP hand-wringers to their conclusion:  “Mitt Romney…is incapable of putting away a couple of – let’s face it – political has-beens.”  In the same piece, he uses terms like Romney flameout and the dragooning of Governors Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush into a brokered convention.

SURROGATES.  In our system there are three distinct kinds:

• THE PARTNER.  A third party aligned with the player who operates as a coequal.  Here’s where we find Gerson and Robinson, each theoretically independent of their party, but each carrying its water.

• THE PROXY.  A hired gun; an associate who advocates for and supports the agenda of a player.  This is the row and seat number of the GOP and DNC leaders, Reince Priebus and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, respectively.  They’re on the dole, on-script and on-strategy.

• THE PLANT.  A secret ally, a trusted and confidential player who seeds information.  Here is where party elders whisper on deep background.  They are the unattributed but confirmable sources whose Pings and Mirrors are driving the call for a fresh face in Tampa.

And what about Sarah Palin?  By this analysis, she's well off-strategy, running self-serving Peacocks, directly and on her own.  Think Pa-Lin-Sanity.  She is not who Gerson, much less Robinson, are expecting to dance in Tampa.

Posted by Alan Kelly

Photo credit: Planet of the Apes