Part of smart politics is understanding the audience you're trying to persuade. During election season, the main audience is clearly voters.
What about in recount season?
The Bush 2000 team targeted the refs -- those counting the ballots -- and chose their intimidation tactics accordingly.
This week, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (which I co-founded) and Democracy for America launched a campaign with an audience that Chris Matthews summed up perfectly last night:
They’re asking Democrats for a dollar every day Norm Coleman doesn’t concede the race to Democrat Al Franken. They’re going to use the money to fund progressive challengers in 2010.
That’s right, they want to give the Republicans an incentive to give up that fight in Minnesota.
Exactly! By connecting Coleman's obstinance to a day-by-day building of a warchest to help progressive candidates win, we're moving DC Republicans to a place where they'll want Coleman to concede.
(At the time of the New York Times article Matthews based his comments on, we'd raised $15,000. Now, it's over $27,500 -- nearly doubling our leverage -- and that grows by the hour. You can join the fun by visiting NormDollar.com.)
But who is Norm Coleman targting with his messaging?? From the New York Times:
The fledgling campaign is intended as a way to influence other Republicans to help pressure Mr. Coleman to quit his protracted fight to regain his seat.
In response to the new fund-raising drive, Tom Erickson, a spokesman for Mr. Coleman, returned to an accusation that Mr. Franken owes back taxes and suggested that the proceeds from the dollar campaign might be used to settle that tab.
Really? Stupid, petty, old messaging? Who is the audience??
It's a serious question. The Minnesota Supreme Court? No. Voters in 2014, assuming both a Coleman miracle win now and a Coleman-Franken rematch? Kinda dumb. DC Republicans? Doesn't seem like trumped up tax allegations against Franken will reverse DC insiders' political calculations one bit.
I suppose it's good news for us that the Team Coleman is from the Republican JV league.
That said, if you've had enough of watching these JV players on the field for 5 months after the game was supposed to be over, help cut this game short by adding to the Dollar a Day.
The fight for 2012 is here. Beltway media insiders rejoice!
Who's it going to be? Spunky Sarah? Moneyed Mitt? Holy Huckabee? Some dark-horse candidate flying under the radar? One thing is for sure: While the media clamors for every tiny detail in the looming battle for the Republican presidential nomination, the real fight for 2012 is taking place right before their very eyes.
Has anyone noticed that Chris Matthews has moved a bit off the center in the last year or so? He used to be reliably centrist in his yelling but at some point during the second term of the Torture Administration he developed a bit of a conscience. At least sometimes. Today he went off on Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) for using the phrase "Democrat Party." The Issa comments is at 4:43 and the Matthews upbraiding at about 5:05 in the video below:
If you can't play the video Matthews ignores Issa's point and instead points out his use of "Democrat" and asks "Why do we have to do this every night?" He also calls it "Mickey Mouse" and says "let's just call people what they call themselves."
It is now acceptable to go on national TV and argue openly for the use of torture as formal US bi-partisan consensus policy.
I went looking to see what I could find in terms of prominent media figures defending the use of torture, and here's what I found.
Most egregious is radio host and (non-practising, I hope) attorney Michael Smerconish who is a regular contributer to Hardball. Here he is in December of 2008:
A couple of hot-shot commentators hit the target on Chris Matthews, but neither hits the bullseye. To do that, we need to take a trip back to a classic Seinfeld episode....
Yesterday, both Dday at Hullabaloo and MissLaura at DKos commented on a particularly bizaare piece of cable tv political threatre on Hardball, which was pointed out by Media Matters.
Here's the Media Matters summary:
On Hardball, while remarking on Sen. Barack Obama's reported request for orange juice after being offered coffee at an Indiana diner, David Shuster asserted: "[I]t's just one of those sort of weird things. You know, when the owner of the diner says, 'Here, have some coffee,' you say, 'Yes, thank you,' and, 'Oh, can I also please have some orange juice, in addition to this?' You don't just say, 'No, I'll take orange juice,' and then turn away and start shaking hands." Host Chris Matthews agreed, "You don't ask for a substitute on the menu."
DDay made a fairly solid point:
Now, this isn't limited to Democrats, actually, here's a recent report about how McCain couldn't fold his pizza in half like a real New Yorker. The difference is that those quick hits on Republicans don't usually make that metaphorical leap to turn some random event about bowling or orange juice into a symbolic manifestation of the candidate and Democrats in general. I mean, if this did hit Hardball, someone would say that everyone knows McCain's a real man and he just isn't used to New York's way of chowing down on pizza but he made a game attempt and isn't it great that he tried? What a guy!
And MissLaura got down into the wonky details of Dinerland:
Third, "substitute" doesn't mean what Matthews thinks it means. So I'm going to school him on that one. (But first, to establish my regular-guy authority to speak of diners, I will note that in each of the last two towns I've lived in, there's been a diner waitress who knew my regular order.)
A substitution is when you're ordering a meal and ask to have one of the components of said meal replaced with another. Perhaps you ask for fresh fruit to replace the bacon in your lumberjack breakfast, to choose a hearty-regular-guy-eating-a-big-meal example that I predict will send a thrill up Tweety's leg. Asking for orange juice as a stand-alone order? Not substituting.
And if your waitress likes you -- an experience Tweety may never have had -- you damn well can substitute.
No, those idiots are the ones who don't know how you work a damn diner. Shoot, they apparently don't know how you order in one.
But both, I fear, missed something quite essential here. For what Tweety & Co were talking about was not how one behaves in a diner, but how one performs there-specifically, how a candidate performs the act of being a "regular Jo(e)" in a diner. And, as it turns out-Surprise! Surprise!-performing authenticity is quite another thing than actually being authentic.
There was much ado this week about the U.S. Senate's condemnation of MoveOn, with Hillary Clinton voting against the resolution. But on September 26th, Clinton joined 75 Senators to pass a resolution calling the Iranian Army a "terrorist organization," a Dick Cheney pipe dream that could lead us to another pre-emptive War. The mainstream media, however, was too busy declaring Clinton the Democratic presidential nominee. As the candidates gathered that night for another debate, the media said it was John Edwards and Barack Obama's "last chance" to shift momentum - even though we still have over 3 months left before the first primary. As a frequent Hillary critic, I got a call that morning to be on "Hardball" to provide commentary. But they didn't want me on their TV show to argue why Clinton should not be the nominee; they wanted me to predict she will lose the primaries and to "debate" someone who says she will win. I would not make that prediction - the whole thing seemed like a set-up - so they did not invite me on. But it speaks volumes about how the media is covering this race, as it blatantly cheerleads Hillary's "inevitable" nomination.
