What's the point of hiring a former political staffer as a political analyst if he's caught off-guard by 15-year-old advances in campaign tactics?

LA Times blogger/former Bush flack Andrew Malcolm breaks news of a newfangled tactic you probably haven't heard of: The “prebuttal”:

Representatives of political parties once used to wait for opponents to speak before countering with their own set of contradictory talking points.

But now those few Americans who are paying attention to national politics in these fading few days of summer are being treated to what's being honestly called “prebuttals.” So eager are they to fight, that U.S. political opponents are pre-reacting a day in advance to what they think the other guy is going to say.

And here's The Washington Post from May 26, 1996:

It's “Team GOP” vs. the Clinton War Room.

President Clinton's White House and campaign team have been drawing favorable reviews for their rapid response operation and penchant for picking off issues before Senate Majority Leader Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) even gets his TelePrompTer warmed up. Vice President Gore calls it “prebuttal.”

Hmmm. If the LA Times didn't hire Malcolm for his cutting-edge insight into modern politics, maybe they wanted him for his relentlessly misleading (and often false) attacks on Democrats?

Having revealed the dark secrets of the prebuttal, hitherto known only to everybody who's been paying any attention since the mid-1990s, Malcolm then bizarrely contends that by prebutting House GOP Leader John Boehner's economic attacks, Democrats fell into “the trap” set by Boehner's team. See, Malcolm contends that Democrats would rather talk about mosques than about the economy, and that Boehner's staff cannily baited them into putting aside discussion of the Park51 project. No, really -- he does. I am not making this up:

Democrats would rather argue over, say, the religious freedom to build a mosque or a threatened return to past policies, while Republicans want to hold the majority's feet to the fire of voter anger over the economy and jobs.

Malcolm doesn't identify a single Democrat who is happy that the last two weeks have been dominated by discussion of the Park51 project, and I suspect if he devoted the next three months to finding such a Democrat, he'd be unsuccessful.

And then, as if to dispel any lingering suspicion that maybe he has some idea what he's talking about, Malcolm suggests that if incumbents lose in large numbers this fall, it will be a referendum on … prebuttals!

Such predictable sparring is what the parties do, though. Why? Because despite what voters tell pollsters, it works. Americans in recent elections have re-elected about 80% of incumbent senators and 90% of House representatives.

We'll see come the night of Nov. 2 if 2010's voters remain as hypocritical as they're so quick to say pols are. Or if this era of fear and frustration spurs a real change in ballot box retribution -- and, thus, perhaps even an end to predictable pathetic prebuttals.

I've seen some strained attempts to declare an election to be a referendum on a specific topic, but this is the most absurd yet. He may as well suggest that if a lot of incumbents lose, members of Congress will interpret it as a referendum on press releases and fire half their communications staff.