MAKING SOCIAL ISSUES into partisan issues took a great deal of work, much of it done by political strategists and well-paid political consultants and made easier by mainframe and desktop computers. By the 1970s, the Lie Factory that had begun manufacturing public opinion in the 1930s when Campaigns, Inc., opened its doors and George Gallup started conducting polls had grown into a billion-dollar industry that divided the electorate by inciting outrage, having demonstrated that, the more emotional the issue, the likelier voters were to turn up at the polls. And the most emotional issues—those
...more
