Author: Jim Eltringham

Political consultant specializing in grassroots mobilization, online media, and public relations.

Sunday Funnies: Monsters!

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This seems appropriate for Halloween.  (Plus I messed up when I tried to post it last weekend.)

If you live in the Washington, DC area and watch a lot of local news, you get to see a lot of television ads for issue campaigns (the one that’s burning up the airwaves now, for instance, is a call to oppose taxes on sodas and snacks).  Often, these ads tell you to go to a website and “make your voice heard” by signing an online petition.  Sometimes they use what can best be called “creative imagery” to illustrate the problem.

And, apparently, all this is far from new, as I found when surfing through political ads on YouTube:

Crist’s cross won’t make Meek jump, jump…

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Earlier this week, the intrigue surrounding the Florida Senate race involved Bill Clinton’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering to get Kendrick Meek out of the race.  Now, it turns out, Charlie Crist was behind the whole thing – and tried to seal the deal by offering a cross as a gift.

Though 2010 is not a good year to have details of back-room political deals come out on the weekend before election day, Meek was so far out of the race it didn’t figure to hurt him.  But the inclusion of Crist in this bizarre dance – and his odd choice of Christian imagery – may just seal the deal on the race.  Rubio enjoys a near-20 point advantage in most polls, and has been trending up since August.

The question now becomes whether the stench of political horsetrading (especially with America’s honorary “first black President” trying to convince a black candidate to stand aside so a well-tanned-but-still-white candidate could defeat a Latino) will depress turnout among Democrats on Tuesday.


 

Our dire political environment

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To hear most people talk about it, you would think that our biannual election tradition has the country whipped into a such frenzy that riots in the streets are inevitable.  In fact, no less astute a student of history than former President Carter said that the current environment was worse than that leading up to the Civil War.  (Let’s say that again – Carter thinks the current political environment is more tense than the one that led to a protracted war in which hundreds of thousands of Americans killed each other over the concept of owning another human being.)

After all, just look at the nasty, disgusting political advertising that’s going on.  It didn’t used to be like this, some of the pundits tell us.  Time was when American politics was built on a foundation of civility and mutual respect.

Reason Magazine blows that myth up right quick:

This weekend in DC: Sanity gets restored.

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The left is looking for a savior, and Jon Stewart is in town.

The Big Daddy co-star’s Rally to Restore Sanity, along with famed Congressional witness Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Fear, descends upon Washington DC this weekend just before the election.  Many are hoping this event – which figures to be huge, both here in DC and in satellite rallies across the country – helps round up the Obama flock in a final push for the polls.  That hope is misplaced, if only because of timing.

If the idea was really to organize and mobilize, the weekend before Election Day is far, far too late.  When Glenn Beck and FreedomWorks held rallies in August and September, there were still months – months! – to go before election day.  There were doors to knock on, voters to call, and independent friends and neighbors to convince.  Those who attend this weekend’s rallies will surely vote, but aren’t likely to impact campaigns.  (And even if they did, who’s to say that the Stewart/Colbert crowd will all be center-left oriented?  I have plenty of right-leaning friends who are looking forward to the weekend.)

Stewart and Colbert can be pretty funny – especially Colbert, whose commitment to staying in character is nearly unparalleled among television comics.  More than likely, their show will have more value as a comedy extravaganza than as a political movement.

 

Please keep talking about Christine O’Donnell

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Christine O’Donnell isn’t a witch.  And she probably won’t be the next Senator from Delaware, either.  That hasn’t stopped a wave of national media attention.  From witchcraft to debate gaffes to media clashes to the now-famous Gawker story about an alleged one-night stand, every move O’Donnell makes seems to light up the DC pundit crowd.

Considering that O’Donnell is looking up at a 18 point deficit, her campaign really doesn’t deserve the attention.  But in a time when coverage of every local election seems to include the context of national trends, Republicans could do worse.

In 2002, a tasteless pep rally over Paul Wellstone’s corpse is blamed soured many voters on Democrats and helped big Republican gains.  In 2006, George Allen’s macaca moment and Mark Foley’s dalliances with 16-year-old-boys contributed to the narrative of Republicans as out-of-touch, scandal-prone, and fat with power – a theme which had been established by the Katrina debacle and the Iraq war losing popularity.   Elections in 2004 and 2008 benefited from Presidential coattails.

Thanks to O’Donnell’s fumbling, stumbling campaign, CNN and MSNBC aren’t banging their drums about the romper stomper outside a Rand Paul rally.  Keith Fimian’s unwise use of the 2006 Virginia Tech shootings to illustrate the need for gun rights may cost him a tight race, but it won’t save other endangered Virginia Democrats – or successfully paint Republicans as crazy gun-toting nut jobs in races nationwide.

Christine O’Donnell won’t win a Senate seat in Delaware, but her campaign may help Republican gains elsewhere.

(One side note on this Gawker deal: So this lurid story of a one-night stand comes from from someone is doing well enough in life that he wasn’t interested in sealing the deal with O’Donnell, but not so well that he was above accepting a “low four figures” payment for the story?)

Slurpublicans

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

This week, Tammy Bruce riffed on a line that President Obama has been using to characterize Congressional Republicans as sitting back, “sipping a Slurpee,” while Democrats did the hard work to advance the change we could believe in.

CBS News’s Mark Knoller reported on the recurring imagery earlier this month:

Though he doesn’t mention any Slurpee-sipping Republicans by name, his rhetoric suggests an image of Senate and House Minority Leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, dressed casually (perhaps in shorts and sneakers) with a couple of Big Gulp cups in their hands, sipping on 7-Eleven’s sweet and glacial libation… Mr. Obama clearly thinks Republicans are elitist, but the line wouldn’t be as funny if he said they were sipping Chardonnay or a Mint Julep.

For all his faults as a politician, Obama and his team are no slouches when crafting imagery.  So as dead-on as Knoller is about the evolution of the talking point, that explanation of it as an accusation of elitism is a little too simplistic.  The line wouldn’t just be less funny if Obama subbed in Chardonnay, it would be less effective at delivering the message he wants to get across.  There’s actually a much more impressive slur at work here.

Think about 7-Eleven, and think beyond the racial stereotypes that a certain Vice President may harbor.  Besides the Slurpees in question, 7-Eleven delicacies include assorted snacks of dubious nutritional value, week-old taquitos, and something that looks like the result of a drunken one-night-stand between a hot dog and a hamburger.  (“Hot dog?  Yeah, it’s Hamburger.  We need to talk…)  It isn’t exactly a bastion of elitism.

And the driving-the-car-into-the-ditch metaphor so often used to illustrate the Republican stewardship of the economy doesn’t paint the Republicans as elitist.  In fact, it paints them as incompetent – a much better message for President so easily painted as aloof who is talking to a base who gave him their votes in part as a protest of the perceived simplicity of his predecessor.

That insult layered into the President’s pop culture reference like so much cheese on a plastic tray full of stale nachos?  He isn’t calling Republicans elitist.

He’s calling them white trash.

 

RapLeaf and opposition research

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This week, the Wall Street Journal discussed just how fine online targeting companies can get thanks to online behavioral targeting companies like RapLeaf.  For what it’s worth, RapLeaf seems to make a good faith effort to keep certain personally identifiable information private, but that’s a little like putting toothpaste back in a tube.

So here’s an interesting hypothetical: does this become part of campaign opposition research?

Obviously, a campaign couldn’t call up RapLeaf for a file on a particular user, but there are other ways to get private records.  Medical records are the best example: one candidate will release full medical records to demonstrate a clean bill of health; if an opponent doesn’t do the same thing, it looks like they have something to hide.

Let’s say a squeaky clean candidate goes to RapLeaf and wants to buy the file they have on him or her.  After a thorough review by the campaign staff, the record is released to the media.  The opponent has to do the same thing, right?

It could be interesting to see where candidates spend their time online.  We as an electorate would be able to peer into the brains behind the names on the ballot.  Sure, we would learn where they get their news, what pundits they read, and what issues are really the most important to them.  But we could also learn how much time they spend playing Farmville, which YouTube videos of windsurfing ostriches they’ve commented on, and whether they’re into midget porn.

In other words, it could offer a treasure trove of embarrassing and/or hilarious moments for the campaigns of tomorrow.

Foursquare fights back

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Just after Gowalla started getting some nice press for their campaign activity, Foursquare fought back by acquiescing to Jordan Raynor’s suggestion and creating an “I Voted” Badge.   Foursquare is also hosting an “I Voted” website, which will track polling place check-ins nationwide.

As Foursquare looks to cement their lead in the location-based network game, it’s a wise move to become involved in politics.  But there’s a danger in entering the political space to “encourage civic participation”; Generic get-out-the-vote efforts simply can’t match the passion of a hotly contested election.  A non partisan GOTV worker might knock on your door and encourage you to get to the polls by citing the need for participation to support Democracy; a partisan GOTV effort will tell you why the world might just end if you stay home and let evil win.  Which is more likely to encourage action?

By engaging with campaigns, Gowalla’s political strategy fuels the more effective of these two methods and encourages market expansion.  The “I Voted” concept is a good start, but Foursquare will have to continue to expand and integrate with individual campaigns to continue its dominance of the location-based social network market.

Getting ahead of the curve on voter fraud

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Remember the good old days, when American politics was about a battle of ideas put to the test at the ballot box on election day?  Back then, after the results were tallied, that’s when the vanquished loser would accuse the winner of fraud.

Apparently, now we have pre-emptive accusations.

Election Journal release a mobile application called iReport this week.  As the small “i” suggests, it’s only available for the iPhone, but that’s of little concern.  This is a messaging device.

Democrats are already starting to hint at voter fraud complaints against Republicans in close races in Chicago and Texas.  The accusations are familiar, and luckily for our democratic system they tend to be untrue.  But they do make it easier to overturn an election in court later on.

Election Journal – which exposed New Black Panther Party members pacing about wielding beat-down rods at voting locations in Philadelphia in 2008 – effectively counters with transparency.  Their app lets the user take pictures and video of any suspicious activity, regardless of whether the offender is a Tea Party Activist or a union goon.  After all, either one should be punished for committing voter fraud, right?

Why can’t Chuck start a business?

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The Institute for Justice hit one out of the park with this video, which is one of the few attempts at online humor that is both effective at delivering a message and really funny.  One of DC’s most philosophically consistent defenders of individual liberties, IJ just released a series of studies on the effects local governments can have on the business climate, even as elected officials try to “fix this unemployment problem.”