Look into my eyes, you're feeling very sleepy, you're losing your critical faculties, you're becoming mere putty in my hands, you will do my bidding.
With not a great leap of imagination, that is the sort of thing Joseph Muscat seems to have pulled off with a vast swathe of voters and a significant number of people who scribble in the press.
He hasn't managed to inculcate in them specific ideas and notions to the extent they can come up with chapter and verse if pushed, but he's certainly got platoons of folk convinced that his mantra about the PN being negative, negative, negative has aspects of infallibility about it.
A normally erudite writer, Lino Spiteri a couple of days ago fell victim to this (mythical) hypnosis tactic. His Opinion piece was shot through with the running theme of Muscat's main gambit, that the PN, specifically Simon Busuttil, are negative and have nothing to propose to the electorate.
At face value, the MEP Election result would tend towards supporting this, because it is clear that an insufficient number of PN voters felt sufficiently invigorated to turn out to support their party, while Labour got their vote out in virtually the same strength as the last three or four elections.
Spiteri, though, was not completely mesmerised by Muscat's mantra: in the same piece, he also criticised Busuttil and company for not being assertive, which is a bit strange, because when an Opposition is assertive, it is opposing the Government, which is precisely what makes Joseph Muscat stamp his little foot and whine about the PN being negative, negative, negative.
Which is what the electorate is said, by Spiteri etc, to have seen the PN as being, which is why they didn't vote for them.
A slightly circular argument, I think you'll agree, when boiled down to its essentials: the PN isn't being assertive, which is why people didn't vote for them, but when it asserts itself, it's being negative, so people won't vote for it.
Who'd be Simon Busuttil? Climbing Everest (good one, by the way, guys) is a doddle compared to what he needs to pull off.