Twinsies!
(I can’t believe her show got canned after one season)
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#metoo is genius messaging. It applies to every harassment victim no matter the scale of abuse, gender of the person being abused, race of the person being abused, or literally anything else. There’s a reason it went viral af.
@riskyflush I think the Democrats need to go full bore economic populist. Bernie, Warren, and Yang are all doing a good job of this. I have minor concerns with all three candidates approaches: Bernie is putting forward policy ideas that I think are pretty weak but messaging them well, Warren is putting forward strong policy ideas but messaging them poorly (she’s doing a good job of painting the top 1000 people in the economy as others), and Yang despite doing the best job of delivering a broadly positive message isn’t othering the top 1000 almost at all except for Jeff Bezos and Amazon.
I feel pretty uncomfortable critiquing Bernie and Yang’s comms strategies because I think they are substantially better at it than I am. I feel like Warren’s team’s strong point isn’t communications or risk management and I suspect it’s going to cost her the nomination. We now have two massive communications fuck ups where she’s taken a huge risk for a small reward and lost which I think is indicative of a pretty serious leak… which is unfortunate because I think if she actually made it to the WH she’d be the best candidate in the field for getting the results we want.
As for the moderates… yeah fuck 'em. They fixed their communications by watering down the substance, and I haven’t given any thought to how to message that.
One thing I’d say for the general election for all campaigns is that anecdotes are powerful, and Democrats tend to try to be too truthful with them. They need to find really extreme edge cases that are super sympathetic and push those.
For instance vs Trump they should have been running tons and tons of ads with small business owners who Trump fucked over staring into the camera telling their story about how ‘Trump f*cked me’ (make sure you bleep the swear word but absolutely leave it in). Have them talk about the people who lost their jobs because he fucked them. Have them talk about how they lost their homes, their businesses, their retirement savings. Make it super super clear he’s a full blown predator. He’s fucked thousands of people, many of them salt of the earth contractor types that midwesterners are going to identify with strongly. The fact that the primary line of attack wasn’t on his finances, his grifting, and the rest is completely insane to me.
The fact of the matter is that Trump loses his fucking mind whenever anyone talks about his real net worth, his finances, or really anything else about his public image as a businessman. That’s because it’s a huge weakness and it’s complete bullshit. Swift boat the fuck out of it obviously.
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Thank you for indulging me.
So true about Dems. In a way, Trump is right about them being arrogant intellectuals. They know so much about government that it’s absurdly easy to show other government officials how stupid he is. And good lord do they love to show how little he knows about politics.
But to most people, dunking on someone for being ignorant about how the government works is like when most people hear two physicists arguing String Theory vs Standard Model. It sounds stupid and no one cares to even begin to parse who is right.
Dems need to pound on what’s relatable.
I’m sure many of you are old enough to remember the moment Bill Clinton won his first presidency. He was debating Bush, and one woman asked how voters can be certain the next president understands their economic struggles.
Holy shit does Bush fumble this. He talks about stupid things like his stocks going down. And then he’s absurdly baffled at the suggestion that he wouldn’t understand the plight of the common person just because he comes from wealth.
Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
I can’t find a clip of Clinton’s response (ty to anyone who can find it), but he doesn’t waste a second defending himself and his already substantial wealth. He talks about all of the people he’s met across the country who are suffering. He talks about people like the one who asked the question. People like those who are watching and wondering if they can/should vote for him.
That’s all a lot of people are looking for. Just to be acknowledged and seen and understood. But even politicians from humble beginnings lose voters when they don’t recognize that if they only continue to talk about the issues most directly relevant to THEM, those issues stopped being relevant for voters a while ago.
Rising YouTube star Tiffany Ferg has a great internet analysis series. One of her most recent videos is on how to keep your content relevant even if your life is no longer relevant. The DNC could stand to watch a video by a 24-year-old vlogger.
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I’m surprised by his lack of bluster about the Soleimani killing and Irans weak public response. Doesn’t seem very Trump like. I guess he’s just scared now?
I thought for sure he would talk shit about how Iran is too afraid to attack American soldiers under Trump, but under a dem they would!
Zero chance he thought that through and realized it’d backfire if they did kill American soldiers after that so its gotta be something else.
I thought it was news about hypersonic weapons, but then after googling I found this from September based on a presentation the military gave that doesn’t seem to have been in error. So, don’t know why they all looked upset.
Edit - Perhaps they know that, like lots of US defence projects, it’s a big pile of overpriced shite.
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Further to the missile talk, it’s actually only Iran’s proxies who have used ‘proper’ guided weapons in anger. The Houthis, and I think Hezbollah in Syria, have used ‘drones’ which are effectively slow moving, very light cruise missiles - they can follow GPS courses and might even be able to be guided in if you have someone close to the target. Everyone assumes Iran gave them to them - there’s no real credible alternative, and Iran has shown some stuff that looks similar.
Iran claimed recently to have tested a tomahawk-like cruise missile, but it’s unknown how good it is or even if it works that well.
My entire weight loss plan is in progress or just getting ready to start!
It has been for 8 months now, and I’ve put on 20 pounds, but it is 100% in progress or getting ready to start.
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I’ll xpost this in the Podcast thread, but wanted to mention it here.
Noted LolLawBro Preet’s most recent podcast is actually quite informative. It’s with another old lawyer who had served in the OLC under Bush; they discuss legal precedents and how they apply to modern executive branch decision-making (and how Congress is complicit). It’s a frustrating listen because they don’t quite get the implications of what they’re discussing and how dangerous it is conceptually, but there is a small amount of self-awareness. Regardless, it’s eye-opening because the guest is able to cite off the top of his head several exact historical precedents that have built up to what, in his view, was a legal assassination targeted killing of QS.
I’ll spoil the upshot of their conversation: basically anything the president wants to do is legal according to US law.
Can you give an example of when AOC used messaging in the way you are advocating? So far I have only seen her as an uncompromising straight shooter.
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The green new deal. That being said you can be good at messaging and a straight shooter. Authenticity is excellent packaging in 2020.
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It absolutely doesn’t imply the same thing and that you don’t see that is the problem. You also fail to see that messaging is not the problem. The all lives matter and blue lives matter crowd would have simply chosen a different attack vector. They didn’t look at BLM and contemplated their message. The already had their position firmly staked out and worked their way backwards.
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The Dem nominee should bring that up during a presidential. “You can’t even find Iran on a map” and when he replies “Of course, I can. I am the best at maps” pull out an unlabeled map.
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