The first Spitzer-bashing email from Michael Caputo's NYFacts.net went out on July 10th, 2007, at 12:41 PM Eastern. Since then, the group has sent out 35 further emails. Another site, Spitzerfile.com, which interestingly only loads through a redirect from NYFacts.net, went live sometime after July 10th, and has also been sending out emails.

NYFacts.net even briefly branched out into Obama-bashing on August 8th, with an email entitled "Obama pulls from all-white Harmonie Club', which contained a piece by Maggie Haberman in the Murdoch Post.

It was only yesterday that Capitol Confidential reported, and we picked up here, that comparable pro-Spitzer emails were finally being sent out, presumably under the aegis of the NYSDC.

What's happening here is very simple: the right in general and Joe Bruno in particular are trying to rebrand Eliot Spitzer. We've seen this happen before, with figures such as Howard Dean, Joe Wilson, Jim Webb, John Kerry, even Eliot himself in the 2006 campaign. The current onslaught against Spitzer is an attempt to change the attributes the public associates with him, turn them around and negativize them.

The makeup of a personal brand has four main elements: personality, appearance, competencies, and differentiation. An individuals total perceived value takes into account these elements and is considered to be his or her core message or elevator pitch to an audience.

It is common to divide branding into tangible and intangible. Tangible branding involves associating an individual's name with some specific advantage that they are presumed to offer, while intangible branding involves creating a more general positive feeling about them.

A common thread in the Karl Rove strategy for delegitimizing Democrats and Progressives is to take their perceived strongest advantage and turn it against them; the classic example of this concept was the swiftboating of John Kerry in the 2004 campaign. Caputo and his associates are executing another text-book style campaign within the same parameters, taking Spitzer's strongest advantage - the perception of him as the take-no-prisoners 'Sheriff of Wall Street' - and turning it from an asset into a liability.

The key elements of Eliot Spitzer's personal brand affected by the Caputo/Bruno campaign are competency and differentiation. The competency issue is clear: Eliot Spitzer is the guy whom New Yorkers elected to fix Albany. Now we're being hammered with messages that he's merely continuing Albany's more disreputable tactics. It is, however, on the element of differentiation that the worst damage can conceivably be done. Spitzer campaigned on the slogan 'Day One, Everything Changes', setting up a clear differentiation between him and the status quo in the state capital. The underlying maxim of the present Bruno campaign is that there is no tangible differentiation to be made between Eliot Spitzer and Joe Bruno, the republican Senate leader. The latter may be under Federal investigation for corruption, but look at, says this campaign, how roughly he's being handled.

In short, this campaign - and it is a campaign - minimizes the competitive advantage enjoyed by Eliot and his allies in the political marketplace of New York State.

The response to this campaign has been disorganized, hesitant, and ineffectual, showing once again that Democrats at some level simply don't get how the right operates. As noted, emails countering the right-wing flood of missives started going out only yesterday, August 14th, over a month after the first anti-Spitzer emails hit the inboxes of influentials across the state and beyond. New York has a thriving Progressive blogosphere, with literally dozens of blogs across the state; there hasn't been any outreach that I'm aware of. In part because of this, the right-wing framing of this episode - that this is merely a battle between two flawed personalities - has infiltrated the conventional media, who are already disposed to framing political stories in terms of conflicts between essentially equally worthwhile personalities. The fact that this is pre-eminently a fight over an agenda, one resoundingly endorsed by the voters, has gotten somewhat lost in the scuffle.

At this point, it's inevitable that some damage has been done to the Spitzer brand; polls bear this out, with Quinnipiac showing, on July 31st, a decline in his approval rating from 60/22 approve/disapprove to 48/28. The Spitzer administration has been doing a reasonably good job on keeping his messaging both focused on the business of the state and, when addressing the affair, appropriately contrite; however, New York Democrats need to realize what the underlying goal of the republican campaign is, and counteract it as aggressively as they can. Presently, they aren't doing so, and they're already five weeks behind.

(X-Posted @ TAP and Open Left)

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