[nrook]

There's a funny passage in one of Al Franken's books about this. Franken was a comedian who ran for the U.S. Senate and was successfully elected. (He later escaped in celestial disgrace, but that's unrelated.) He talks about how he was trained to do this by his PR folks, thought it was stupid, tried it out in a few interviews to get them off his back, and then was amazed that it worked every time.

[hgsgm]

The documentary "Thank You For Smoking" illustrates this.