Senator Hammer’s campaign in the 90s, 2Legit 2Quit, was highly successful.
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You did not do what I requested. I will explain the difference if I wasn’t clear.
No, for sure, you don’t need to be George Lucas to know there was something awful about his prequels. As you know, I primarily work in a couple of industries for what’s essentially programming strategy. It’s been about a decade since I touched anything political (outside of my dumb memes but lol at those counting) but I’m still connected here and there and often wonder what journalists or politicians really should be doing.
I hear your complaints and everyone else’s, but when I go beyond sympathetic grievances and start crafting strategy, things get lost in the weeds real fast.
I’m asking because I’m not arrogant enough to assume that because I don’t know the answer, there must not be one. I have nothing but more sympathy if no one else has any better suggestions. This is hard.
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Vanilla Ice rebranding as a home renovation expert imo
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But this needs to happen 100% of the time. Much like “debating” on 22, one side is constantly drawn offside by bad faith on the other side.
When M4A comes up, “How are we going to pay for it” is not a legitimate question yet people get stalled out or engage the bad faith.
Engaging bad faith responses happens over and over as too many dems try to chez everything
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If every single Dem in office spends time correcting every single lie the GOP spews, they are doing precisely what the GOP wants them to do. I keep saying this over and over but at some point personal responsibility comes in. When Donald Trump says all Mexicans are rapists, I don’t need that fact checked. I know he is lying. It is not the Dems problem if people are so stupid that they need to fact check racist garbage like that.
You’re right, but probably not for the reason you think you are.
To Matty’s point, agreed.
To your point, how would you provoke someone into caring? Maybe provoke is not the right word. But you see what I mean.
At one point, Dems had people like Barton Swaim and Ben Rhodes (who secretly led negotiations with Cuba that normalized inter-national relations) consulting on messaging, but that’s years ago now. Maybe it’s time they bring in big gun Chuck Lorre, because by Obama’s second term,
“his aides came to feel that it was virtually “impossible to break through” the “media filter” or the noise on social media.”
In the modern media landscape, social media is king. Political speechwriters, once settling for a joke or pointed remark in a ceremony rather than grand pronouncements in the SOTU, now craft tweets. Assuming they get to do that much.
There are of course exceptions for this, primarily, as you would guess, outside of the GOP. But it’s essentially become the same as writing jokes for a late night show.
No one yet has really adapted to this, and Trump is perhaps so valuable to the GOP because while they don’t totally understand how to make this work to its fullest potential, any moron can see that while Trump can’t explain it, he’s very good at it. All it costs is any hunt of dignity or morality.
Sam Rosenman, who wrote speeches for Franklin Roosevelt, said that FDR “expected us to criticize and argue with him, and to suggest changes in language and ideas.” Any writer who didn’t, Rosenman added, was “useless to” Roosevelt and “might as well go home.”
In this vein I was imagining a short video that would explain the story as simply as possible in 2 minutes or less. It would have all the best aspects of a good campaign ad and a good movie trailer.
It would be pushed as “if you think it’s too complicated just watch this 2-minute video that breaks it all down so even a child can understand it”.
I don’t have the skill to make this video, but I made the one below. Instead of just the words on the screen imagine a voiceover by Sam Elliot or Meryl Streep. And imagine a lot of quick shots of the bad guys looking bad, the good guys looking good, Ukrainian soldiers fighting, etc. all set to a moving score. It’s probably still too complicated and could be trimmed to 90 or even 60 seconds.
The point is there are plenty of people out there who still don’t get it. And I don’t see any downside to at least trying to win this messaging war.
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Let me think about it while you read my recent reply. Seems you and I both have a messaging problem 
Love your ideas
60 seconds for sure and compelling if you can cut most of the text and instead have a voiceover spelling that stuff out in-between outrageous quotes like what you clipped. The VO and testimonial quotes should be perceived by the audience as a kind of dialogue that builds to a fever pitch.
You can’t rely on people reading the text. It just doesn’t work like that anymore, if it ever did.
I got into this a little with [redacted], but I cannot overstate the importance of building some sort of intuitively satisfying and coherent narrative. A setup. A midpoint. A climax. A resolution. This is just how most people perceive the world and why people like Burr dont get it. The facts might speak for thmselves, but the narrative does not. That is absolutely something the GOP excels at and why people instinctively no longer trust facts.
Ukraine took off like never before precisely because the narrative is soooooooooo easy to frame. But is it a story anyone cares about? It’s not sexy, but then again, public response to the president’s gross sexual acts moved the needle so little that if Ukraine is the most powerful narrative available, it is what it is until Trump inevitably exposes something even worse but far sexier.
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The democrats have to get comfortable using the phrase “Shut up dummy.” And then be prepared for the owners of fainting couches to use them due to the loss of civility.
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You tell me.
Is Bill Burr the audience for whom you think this is terrible messaging? Do you think he represents the larger audience you want to persuade?
Or do we need to reach a different kind of person? I think the nature of Burr’s age and income distinguishes him. People 18-35 will respond to different messaging than people 50+. I’d say income categories matter a lot, too, because even if we’re using entertainment as the content model to get the audience’s attention, the reasons people turn to entertainment (and different kinds of entertainment) are different when under economic stress.
For example, the GOP appeals to two groups of people.
- Low-info, low-income voters
- Low to high-info, high-income voters
Low-info, low-income voters feel a pervasive economic anxiety without any kind of explanation they can begin to understand. Why try? Instead, it’s easy to appeal to their fear and grievances with a convincing villain character they’ll never actually face.
High-income voters don’t care about anything except further enriching themselves, which the GOP is delighted to do.
(not all high-income voters, etc etc)
Can the Democrats use a similar messaging strategy for low-income, low-info voters? Sure, it’s just hard and often hard to justify if you have any sense of shame, and to be honest, I don’t know that this kind of messaging is easy given the different psychological makeup of Dem-trending voters in this category or in general.
The GOP is willing to embrace full-throated racism and xenophobia in order to identify a convenient boogeyman, but when the Democrat’s factual comparison is the GOP themselves, you can’t blame the public for rolling their eyes and thinking lol, so it really is just petty infighting.
It’s in part why Dems are so grateful for Trump. He is a cartoon villain come to life. He is finally someone they can blast with the same volume and intensity that the GOP use for immigrants. You can argue Bush and similar were more than awful enough to deserve this treatment, but that’s the point. Trump is so bad that even people who hesitated to pull the trigger on a previous president are now seeing that it’s fine to write clear headlines like “Trump is a Racist”
But without that kind of cartoon villain, or beyond it, Dems have for better or worse attached themselves to virtue politics. I don’t think it’s entirely in bad faith or that it’s a bad thing, it just is what it is. So being as dirty as the GOP, even when it’s justified and fact-based, risks losing the very people that make up the core of their voters.
I don’t mean to qualify those voters in any way, only to define them as people who perceive themselves as actively progressive.
What about the second category of high-income voters? Well they’re already appealing to them LOL.
So what about the middle class (heh?!) of voters? Not low-income and not low-info, more stable than thriving.
So I guess that brings us back to where we started, but hopefully with some ideas for who we might actually try to reach and what might work.
A few related points.
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Lol Pelosi with her printed newspapers. Ok boomer.
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The democrats get their messaging right at times. The issue is that they then muddy the water instead of staying firmly on message and hammering the same points over and over.
For example literally every dem should be laughing in Nune’s face as being up to his neck in this corruption every time he opens his mouth.
- I honestly think this community could pump out some really good messaging that would get a wider audience and reach people.
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Yup… When with him everytime he says something stupid, interrupt and point and laugh and take over the narrative is how we win.
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This Congressman from IL is doing a good job imo. Maybe he will give us a brief consult.
https://twitter.com/SeanCasten/status/1198325574747480070
https://twitter.com/SeanCasten/status/1198325809867563009
https://twitter.com/SeanCasten/status/1198325990801494017
https://twitter.com/SeanCasten/status/1198326159601213443
https://twitter.com/SeanCasten/status/1198326536237146112
https://twitter.com/SeanCasten/status/1198326701526323200
https://twitter.com/SeanCasten/status/1198327237319254018
https://twitter.com/SeanCasten/status/1198329636297609217
https://twitter.com/SeanCasten/status/1198329874118828037
https://twitter.com/SeanCasten/status/1198330622848196608
Whole thread is worth a read.
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That series of tweets is a good indicator for the scandal to be to complex to really move the needle. Even the guy doing the thread mixes up details and callsSondland ambassador to the Ukraine. How should people follow this if even congressmen can‘t?
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Why make it so complicated? Trump used military aid as leverage to make Ukraine announce a sham investigation into his political rival. That’s it.
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To back Johnny up, in addition to having a tight elevator pitch on Ukraine, we also need to counter the general, “everything sucks, but nothing matters” background noise.
Like, imagine someone for whom this video resonates and see if you can think of something that convinces them that it’s important to stay tuned in…
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