From my recent perch in low-information land, I've attempted to hammer home the idea that the water-cooler script is king.

People don't act on information, they act on impressions.

If you can create an impression of yourself, or your adversaries, you've reached the pinnacle of political communication. I don't think a lot of people thought of John McCain as a rich guy, but when he couldn't say how many homes he actually owned, he succeeded in creating an impression that no doubt hurt his campaign. Boom! That quick. Your an out-of-touch rich guy.

Notably, Mitt Romney has been divesting himself of his superfluous domiciles ever since.

That's why these comments on Face the Nation are so devastating for the Obama administration.

JAN CRAWFORD: ...But it’s not just those sound bites. I mean those are sound bites. The reason that’s an issue for Obama is that it goes to the bigger question of the competency of his government and the trust that people have in that government. You look at polls. Polls show that the trust in government is an all time low. Domestically, obviously, stimulus plan hasn’t worked. Unemployment is high....

BOB SCHIEFFER: Finally today, Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano is getting
hammered because her first response to the undie bomber fiasco was that the system worked.

We shouldn’t have been surprised. Sure, she looks a little silly now that the facts are dribbling out. But she was just following the modern bipartisan public relations template in this age of information management.

First, play down the problem. Second, emphasize what did not go wrong. Assure us that those in charge are investigating, and most important, emphasize no one in any position of responsibility is at fault. It’s not lying. But it’s not exactly the whole truth, certainly not the whole story. All she left out was that part about asking us to respect the privacy of those involved. Oh, I’m sorry. I got the government spin mixed up with the Tiger spin.

Here is the difference. Tiger can hire as many people as he wants to make his excuses. It may do him no good but it’s his money to spend as he wishes. When government officials insult us with spin they’re doing it on our dime, which is supposed to be used to operate the government, not to hold news conferences to tell us what a fine job people on the public payroll are doing.

As we learned during Katrina, self-serving spin at the first sign of crisis does not help the situation. It makes it worse. Because it makes it harder to believe anything the government says. Real security is built on trust in government. That requires truth, which should be the beginning of government presentations, not the fallback position.

In a recent conversation with an old (liberal) friend, I was asked what I thought of Obama. After a pause, I thought honesty the best policy and expressed me view that he and his administration are incompetent. Predictably, her response was not a direct address of whether Obama has acted well thus far in his term of office, but a plea for me to "look at what Bush did..."

That was before the fruit-of-the-loom bomber torched his testicles, but even then I sensed a lack of conviction in her retort--near desperation to recast the obvious. She probably wouldn't even ask me the question now.

Once formed, impressions like these are hard, if not impossible to shake.

I'm thinking particularly of Dan Quayle, who was the youngest Senator elected in Indiana history and reelected by the largest margins. Quayle's early verbal flubs became the basis for believing he was an idiot, and every subsequent misspeaking garnered prominent media coverage and reinforced that impression. So persistent was the perception that after an eight year hiatus, he was DOA for the Republican party nomination.

Obama and the Democrats have friendly media to mitigate this process, but the incompetence of the federal government under Democrat control is so profound that every day seems to reinforce the impression.

Small government conservatism is coming back with a vengeance, and we have Obama, Pelosi and Reid to thank for it.