Credit for the title of this entry goes to Christopher Beam at Slate. (Who, yes, I kinda knocked earlier in another post.)
So, basically, there's another Obama music video from will.i.am called We Are the Ones. The constant stream of chants of "O-Ba-Ma. O-Ba-Ma..." in the background, as Beam said, "give grist to the dolts crying fascism." Beam called it "creepy," and I kinda see what he means. For me, it's more like a promising new writer's disappointing second novel, except that, while novelists should keep writing novels, is there a really a need for another star-studded Obama music video? (And I think the Obamas agree with me. I got the first one from an email from Michelle Obama herself; the campaign has not sent this one around to its email list.)
It probably is just another brain child of will.i.am, pure and simple, but I can't help but imagine a group of non-white celebrities pissed at themselves for not getting in on the first one--which, you know, officially put them behind Kate Walsh in the line of being badass--so they started circulating a petition, called something like let's-make-another-Obama-video-so-I-can-be-in-one-too. We are the ones features John Leguizamo, George Lopez, Jessica Alba talking about her unborn child (si, se peude), Kerry Washington, Forest Whittaker, Luis Guzman, Ryan Phillippe, Ben McKenzie, and (guess who?) MacymotherfuckingGray! I never stopped rooting for her. Also one of the dudes from Friday Night Lights, a show I find unwatchable, but it's set in Texas, so his appearance might bring in some Texas voters (?).
I'm glad Hollywood, like me, has found change it can believe in. (The more I have in common with George Clooney, the better.) But the tone of this last video planted a thought: that the nationwide O-love is starting to breed
O-stalkers.
There's been buzz recently about how, if Barack's elected, he's at high risk for assassination. When we hear that, we inevitably imagine some ignorant racist white man picking up one of his many legally purchased rifles, but maybe we should be more worried about an assassination in the Selena mold: a fan/member of his team whose love-obsession can only be quenched by a murder-suicide. A person who seems to be part of Obama's success and promotional efforts who is actually a time bomb.
Someone like, oh I don't know, will.i.am.
Like he wants a place in the Ocabinet, you know, in recognition of all his youtube efforts, just something small, like Secretary of Rhyming Words With Themselves... but Obama says "uh, no thanks, brother, the Ocabinet's all full."
And will.i.am like.freaks.the.fuck.out.
That is obviously retarded speculation on my part, right? But then I read things like this, which will.i.am said about getting the video's cast together:
"There's no casting ... the inspiration is the casting director."
I mean, is it me or has he wandered into the suburbs of Crazyville? (...and is that much closer to "the inspiration pulled the trigger.")
Anyway, this video isn't nearly as good as the first one, Yes We Can, which is quite moving. (And if you haven't seen it yet, it means, uh sorry, you didn't survive that accident--YOU'RE DEAD. Everyone alive was emailed the link forty times at least.)
Postscript:
An even more impressive celebrity singing-coordination effort than We Are the Ones is here. It's basically "We are the world" except the chorus is "I'm fucking Ben Affleck." It's even better than you hope it will be.
Yowza. Youtube is the baby daddy of like %70 of the endorphins in my brain.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Did Tina Fey get Bill Clintoned?
The Bill Clinton effect, especially on women, is well documented. Tina Fey, you are still my hero. It doesn't matter that you came out on Saturday Night Live for Hillary--I have no problem with people who support Hillary (or rather, their support for her alone would not give me a problem with them). Especially if they're going to point out so hilariously that Bitches Get Stuff Done.
Tina was a guest anchor on Weekend Update last weekend. Here's a partial transcript:
FEY: Maybe what bothers me the most is that people say that Hillary is a bitch. Let me say something about that:
Yeah, she is.
And so am I and so is this one. (Pointing to Amy Poehler)
POEHLER: Yeah, deal with it.
FEY: Know what? Bitches get stuff done.
Like back in grammar school, they could have had priests teaching you but, no, they had those tough old nuns who slept on cots and who could hit ya and you HATED those bitches.
But at the end of the school year you KNEW the capital of Vermont!
And she ended with:
BITCH IS THE NEW BLACK!
It's okay for an Obama fan like me to admit on the world wide web that it was, in fact, great. And Hillary can use some cultural cache in her corner. (Please compare Hillary for You and Me to Yes We Can, juuuuuuuuust in case you don't know what I mean.)
But all of this is background to point out this tiny fact buried in a Time Magazine article:
Tina, did you forget to feed your baby because he make you feel like you were literally the only one in the room? We're suckers for it, I know.
(On a non election note, but sort of a Tina Fey note, the insanest object of my celebrity worship is without a doubt Mariah Carey, who just released this utterly insane video which features 30 Rock cast member Jack McBrayer.)
Tina was a guest anchor on Weekend Update last weekend. Here's a partial transcript:
FEY: Maybe what bothers me the most is that people say that Hillary is a bitch. Let me say something about that:
Yeah, she is.
And so am I and so is this one. (Pointing to Amy Poehler)
POEHLER: Yeah, deal with it.
FEY: Know what? Bitches get stuff done.
Like back in grammar school, they could have had priests teaching you but, no, they had those tough old nuns who slept on cots and who could hit ya and you HATED those bitches.
But at the end of the school year you KNEW the capital of Vermont!
And she ended with:
BITCH IS THE NEW BLACK!
It's okay for an Obama fan like me to admit on the world wide web that it was, in fact, great. And Hillary can use some cultural cache in her corner. (Please compare Hillary for You and Me to Yes We Can, juuuuuuuuust in case you don't know what I mean.)
But all of this is background to point out this tiny fact buried in a Time Magazine article:
After Saturday Night Live lampooned the media for their love affair with Obama, Bill telephoned guest host Tina Fey to thank her.
Tina, did you forget to feed your baby because he make you feel like you were literally the only one in the room? We're suckers for it, I know.
(On a non election note, but sort of a Tina Fey note, the insanest object of my celebrity worship is without a doubt Mariah Carey, who just released this utterly insane video which features 30 Rock cast member Jack McBrayer.)
He's not just charming...HE'S WORKING HIS ASS OFF
Thanks for breaking this down so explicitly, Frank Rich.
I'm a little behind, this column is from February 24th, but I was busy looking for pictures of Beyonce in African garb. They're surprisingly hard to find, given what I can only describe as her tribal flailing at the end of the "Baby Boy" video. But I digress.
The highlights from Mr. Rich's column:
In other words, Hillary: You took the nomination for granted and didn't work hard enough to make sure you had it. You had no post-Febrary 5th contingency plan. You, the supposed workhorse candidate, are getting superbly outworked by your opponent. And just because he has the charisma to make it seem easy doesn't mean that it is.
Because, Hillary, it's not easy. As you should know better than anyone. A number of people very close to me work part or full time on Obama's campaign, and they are earning every vote they get. And it's just wack that some members of the media, and you, are equating the Obama support base to a bunch of kids on some political acid.
Here's Frank again, expanding on the organizational failure of her campaign:
Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid.
This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.
After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn’t won in “any of the significant states” outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the “insult 40 states” strategy.
Haha, that is hilarious. Go blogs!!
Anyway, given that my last post was about how fed-up I am with everyone scrutinizing Hillary's lack of charisma, lack of ability to publicly seem "consistent" and "in control of herself," and pitting that against Obama's sea of calm and cool...God if I read the word "cool"--pejorative or not--to describe Obama I'm gonna... Anyway...
Thank you Frank, for bringing us back to the nuts and bolts of what these two candidates are doing, what campaigning for president is and should be about, and how their actions are, and are not, working on us. And if you happen to read this, I'm that girl you almost hired to be your assistant whom you told to finish college instead.
I'm a little behind, this column is from February 24th, but I was busy looking for pictures of Beyonce in African garb. They're surprisingly hard to find, given what I can only describe as her tribal flailing at the end of the "Baby Boy" video. But I digress.
The highlights from Mr. Rich's column:
- "The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done."
- South Carolina: "where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots."
- Kansas: "three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3."
- Wisconsin "the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11."
- Vermont: "There were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago."
- Pennsylvania: "the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline."
- I'm going to add that she also admitted in debate at being baffled by the Texas primary system which had "grown men crying." Huh? The grown men on your campaign, Hillary? Not your best, or most competent-sounding, sound bite.
In other words, Hillary: You took the nomination for granted and didn't work hard enough to make sure you had it. You had no post-Febrary 5th contingency plan. You, the supposed workhorse candidate, are getting superbly outworked by your opponent. And just because he has the charisma to make it seem easy doesn't mean that it is.
Because, Hillary, it's not easy. As you should know better than anyone. A number of people very close to me work part or full time on Obama's campaign, and they are earning every vote they get. And it's just wack that some members of the media, and you, are equating the Obama support base to a bunch of kids on some political acid.
Here's Frank again, expanding on the organizational failure of her campaign:
Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid.
This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.
After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn’t won in “any of the significant states” outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the “insult 40 states” strategy.
Haha, that is hilarious. Go blogs!!
Anyway, given that my last post was about how fed-up I am with everyone scrutinizing Hillary's lack of charisma, lack of ability to publicly seem "consistent" and "in control of herself," and pitting that against Obama's sea of calm and cool...God if I read the word "cool"--pejorative or not--to describe Obama I'm gonna... Anyway...
Thank you Frank, for bringing us back to the nuts and bolts of what these two candidates are doing, what campaigning for president is and should be about, and how their actions are, and are not, working on us. And if you happen to read this, I'm that girl you almost hired to be your assistant whom you told to finish college instead.
Who's more awesome? Journalists weigh in--unfortunately
The constant personality analysis, comparison, the stream of adjectives: insecure, nurturing, cocky, graceful, self-deprecating, presidential, vulnerable, feminine, masculine, bellicose, glamorous.....
Is anyone else getting tired of journalists' amateur attempts at psychoanalysis? Not just of the candidates, but us and our responses to them?
Even a huge O-fan like me is getting worried about the frequency of references to how he's making politics "cool." Google two words: "Obama" and "awesomeness." The number of results, I fear, actually lends credence to the (false) argument that he is all hype, no ability to govern. I cringe every time someone playfully writes that his rallies are like raves, girls are fainting, yada yada yada.
To put it another way, writers everywhere are getting in touch with their inner Maureen Dowd.
Let's start with her. Here. And here. Columns called "Begrudging his Bedazzling," and "Quien es less Macho?" have produced this, by now tired, brand of insight:
Another Times columnist Gail Collins can't seem to find anything to offer us except more Hillary pseudo-psychobabble. From yesterday's Hillary, Buckeye Girl:
Same with Bob Herbert: "There’s a fine line between brash and cocky. You can’t embark on a quest as audacious as Mr. Obama’s without a certain brashness. But cocky turns people off. And the senator seemed at times to stray across that line." And this: "Pride, the nuns told me in grammar school, goeth before a fall."
Christopher Beam's political blog is Slate:
I was out to dinner with a group last night, and we got into a fun conversation about the something called the enneagram, a Jungian-like outline of the main personality types. It's a way of thinking about people in terms of their personality's pitfalls and strengths. What's annoying me is that much political analysis is framing election results as the by-product of personality nuance--the candidates' and our own. We want more or less glamor, more or less femininity, more or less ease in the candidate's own skin. What all those campaign workers campaigning their Obama-supporting asses off? What about people being legitimately weirded out by a forced "mandate," i.e. uncharted policy territory in the US health care history? What about Iraq votes, not releasing records, conditions of meeting with leaders and pulling out of NAFTA? Repulsion to dirty campaigning?
Can't his ascent and her decline in popularity be about something other than our need to be nurtured by a feminine leadership style (which, these writers love pointing out, he has and she does not)?
Everyone wants to offer his or her theory about how Hillary's hardness or Barack's grace has made the poll results somehow inevitable. But if he were losing, we'd be calling his "feminine moderation" spinelessness, and claiming Americans feel insecure and want a president who seems tough.
The personality-ergo-poll-results is, of course, only ushered out when the votes are counted, which makes the analysis all the less interesting. No one's actually risking making the wrong prediction based on our reaction to her tears and his Dick Cheney-cousin jokes. It makes reading political analysis kind of like reading a kid's paper about Oedipus' or Achilles' hubris. Like one thing in your personality cemented your destiny... of which you already know the outcome.
And even when the personality assessments are positive ("Obama is just so fricking awesome), I still worry about its effect on his campaign. Shallow praise of his awesomeness from serious journalists feeds Obama doubters more doubts. If I was on the fence, I'd be like, yeah so what's he gonna do as commander in chief, unleash his awesome arsenal of awesomeness and shake it out all over the desert till people put down their guns? Yeah, right.
Maybe there's nothing wrong with any of this. I'm just getting sick of it is all. It's made the most exciting race of my life boring to read about.
Is anyone else getting tired of journalists' amateur attempts at psychoanalysis? Not just of the candidates, but us and our responses to them?
Even a huge O-fan like me is getting worried about the frequency of references to how he's making politics "cool." Google two words: "Obama" and "awesomeness." The number of results, I fear, actually lends credence to the (false) argument that he is all hype, no ability to govern. I cringe every time someone playfully writes that his rallies are like raves, girls are fainting, yada yada yada.
To put it another way, writers everywhere are getting in touch with their inner Maureen Dowd.
Let's start with her. Here. And here. Columns called "Begrudging his Bedazzling," and "Quien es less Macho?" have produced this, by now tired, brand of insight:
- "Voters gravitate toward the presidential candidates who seem more comfortable in their skin. The fact that Obama is exceptionally easy in his skin has made Hillary almost jump out of hers."
- "Her sunshine-colored jackets on the trail hardly disguise the fact that she’s pea-green with envy." (And my newspaper is about to be pea green with puke.)
- "Just as in the White House, when her cascading images and hairstyles became dizzying and unsettling, suggesting that the first lady woke up every day struggling to create a persona..." (This stuff is when the misogynist word gets rolled out, leave her hair in the White House alone, even if it is an okay metaphor for your played-out point.)
- "Obama tapped into his inner chick and turned the other cheek."
- Re: Hillary's feistiness, Maureen encourages her to be more feminine, like Barack: "Less towel-snapping and more towel color coordinating, less steroids and more sensitivity."
- Re: Hillary's spending at Dunkin Doughnuts: "But total domination in the snack arena does not cut the mustard."
- "By threatening to throw the kitchen sink at Obama, the Clinton campaign simply confirmed the fact that they might be going down the drain."
Another Times columnist Gail Collins can't seem to find anything to offer us except more Hillary pseudo-psychobabble. From yesterday's Hillary, Buckeye Girl:
- "If Hillary Clinton were a state, she’d be Ohio."
- "She has managed to become the boring candidate in this primary. This is one of the great anti-glamour stories in history."
- "If Hillary can win this one — and if she doesn’t, she is as cooked as reheated risotto — it will be because people here worry that Barack Obama is getting show-offy."
- "Back around Debate 10 — lo those many debates ago — ... she was confident and presidential"
- "Now, he’s better than she is — calm and witty at crucial junctures."
Same with Bob Herbert: "There’s a fine line between brash and cocky. You can’t embark on a quest as audacious as Mr. Obama’s without a certain brashness. But cocky turns people off. And the senator seemed at times to stray across that line." And this: "Pride, the nuns told me in grammar school, goeth before a fall."
Christopher Beam's political blog is Slate:
- "Because he’s loose on the stump, self-deprecating yet cocky, Obama gets away with appropriating the language of his own deification."
- He asked a voter why he's supporting Obama: "'Because I just saw him.' That seems to be the way it works for many young people: To see him is to be for him."
- "In other ways, Obama doesn’t act messianic—just cocky."
I was out to dinner with a group last night, and we got into a fun conversation about the something called the enneagram, a Jungian-like outline of the main personality types. It's a way of thinking about people in terms of their personality's pitfalls and strengths. What's annoying me is that much political analysis is framing election results as the by-product of personality nuance--the candidates' and our own. We want more or less glamor, more or less femininity, more or less ease in the candidate's own skin. What all those campaign workers campaigning their Obama-supporting asses off? What about people being legitimately weirded out by a forced "mandate," i.e. uncharted policy territory in the US health care history? What about Iraq votes, not releasing records, conditions of meeting with leaders and pulling out of NAFTA? Repulsion to dirty campaigning?
Can't his ascent and her decline in popularity be about something other than our need to be nurtured by a feminine leadership style (which, these writers love pointing out, he has and she does not)?
Everyone wants to offer his or her theory about how Hillary's hardness or Barack's grace has made the poll results somehow inevitable. But if he were losing, we'd be calling his "feminine moderation" spinelessness, and claiming Americans feel insecure and want a president who seems tough.
The personality-ergo-poll-results is, of course, only ushered out when the votes are counted, which makes the analysis all the less interesting. No one's actually risking making the wrong prediction based on our reaction to her tears and his Dick Cheney-cousin jokes. It makes reading political analysis kind of like reading a kid's paper about Oedipus' or Achilles' hubris. Like one thing in your personality cemented your destiny... of which you already know the outcome.
And even when the personality assessments are positive ("Obama is just so fricking awesome), I still worry about its effect on his campaign. Shallow praise of his awesomeness from serious journalists feeds Obama doubters more doubts. If I was on the fence, I'd be like, yeah so what's he gonna do as commander in chief, unleash his awesome arsenal of awesomeness and shake it out all over the desert till people put down their guns? Yeah, right.
Maybe there's nothing wrong with any of this. I'm just getting sick of it is all. It's made the most exciting race of my life boring to read about.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Who looks better in African Clothes: Barack or Beyonce?
Tough one. I think our boy has it on Jay-Z though, for sure. Jay-Z looks like he needed a last minute costume to a frat party.
not that there's anything wrong with that...right?
Being a guest in a foreign country... I mean, you know, being a guest and participating in a welcome ritual from your venerable hosts... in the place where your dad and his ancestors are from... the place where you are from...
Sorry, the incoherence--though typed and reread and left as incoherence--is sincere.
I am referring to the alleged Clinton campaign leak of a picture of Obama dressed as a Somali elder on a 1996 trip to Kenya...
According to Tuesday's Ohio debate, Hillary denied knowing about the photo or anyone on her campaign leaking it, and Barack believed her. And they moved on.
Um, that's fine, but pictures of Rudy Giuliani in drag this is not.
An article in Reuters has this quote, which at last echoed my initial reactions to this "controversy:"
The dispute has angered many in Kenya, especially ethnic Somalis from the northeast, who resent the implication that Obama did anything wrong during his visit.
The story explains that a venerable elder dresses a visitor in these clothes to honor the tribe's guest. "We give special treatment and respect to any visitor."
It came up in the debate, and both Hillary and Barack played it cool and acted above the pettiness of it. I guess when an issue is weird and stupid, that's the smart tack to take. But it was a missed opportunity to touch on what it means to be a guest in a foreign place, and to participate in someone else's guest-host culture, accepting it as the honor it is. Especially since doing that gracefully is something seen as so very un-American. Obama is all about crossing boundaries, right? And dissipating the image of America that is arrogant and unresponsive to the local scenery.
I know, I know. I mean, I get it. It's a float in the Barack-wears-a-turban parade, which was supposed to gather a crowd of people nervous that we are about to elect a terrorist to the White House.
I guess I just want to take this chance to point out that this picture represents a notion about how Americans should carry ourselves when we go abroad. In the case of a potential US president, this attitude will serve us at the negotiating table as well as at a dinner table. Our efforts to participate in the development of the rest of the world would be more successful if we were better at the kind of exchange pictured above.
Oh, but here's the next phase of this story (also from the Reuters article):
Mohamed Ibrahim, who attended one of two crisis meetings held in Wajir on Thursday by clan members who hosted Obama on his trip, said Washington must immediately make amends to them and especially to the elder pictured with him.
Apparently our dumb political tactics are being taken personally in Kenya. Phillip Kennicott in the Washington Post validated my bewilderment, which somewhat assuages my embarrassment over this American cultural moment. He writes:
By the end of the day, the only clear message from the strange episode is that whoever was spreading the image was not particularly sophisticated about the way images work in our new media world...
Sorry, the incoherence--though typed and reread and left as incoherence--is sincere.
I am referring to the alleged Clinton campaign leak of a picture of Obama dressed as a Somali elder on a 1996 trip to Kenya...
According to Tuesday's Ohio debate, Hillary denied knowing about the photo or anyone on her campaign leaking it, and Barack believed her. And they moved on.
Um, that's fine, but pictures of Rudy Giuliani in drag this is not.
An article in Reuters has this quote, which at last echoed my initial reactions to this "controversy:"
The dispute has angered many in Kenya, especially ethnic Somalis from the northeast, who resent the implication that Obama did anything wrong during his visit.
The story explains that a venerable elder dresses a visitor in these clothes to honor the tribe's guest. "We give special treatment and respect to any visitor."
It came up in the debate, and both Hillary and Barack played it cool and acted above the pettiness of it. I guess when an issue is weird and stupid, that's the smart tack to take. But it was a missed opportunity to touch on what it means to be a guest in a foreign place, and to participate in someone else's guest-host culture, accepting it as the honor it is. Especially since doing that gracefully is something seen as so very un-American. Obama is all about crossing boundaries, right? And dissipating the image of America that is arrogant and unresponsive to the local scenery.
I know, I know. I mean, I get it. It's a float in the Barack-wears-a-turban parade, which was supposed to gather a crowd of people nervous that we are about to elect a terrorist to the White House.
I guess I just want to take this chance to point out that this picture represents a notion about how Americans should carry ourselves when we go abroad. In the case of a potential US president, this attitude will serve us at the negotiating table as well as at a dinner table. Our efforts to participate in the development of the rest of the world would be more successful if we were better at the kind of exchange pictured above.
Oh, but here's the next phase of this story (also from the Reuters article):
Mohamed Ibrahim, who attended one of two crisis meetings held in Wajir on Thursday by clan members who hosted Obama on his trip, said Washington must immediately make amends to them and especially to the elder pictured with him.
"The U.S. government must apologise to us as a clan and the old man," Ibrahim told Reuters by telephone. "We have been offended and we cannot afford to just watch and stay silent."
He said it was essential Clinton "clear her name" too....
If there was no apology, the elders said, they would demand the expulsion of U.S. troops based near Garissa town.
Apparently our dumb political tactics are being taken personally in Kenya. Phillip Kennicott in the Washington Post validated my bewilderment, which somewhat assuages my embarrassment over this American cultural moment. He writes:
By the end of the day, the only clear message from the strange episode is that whoever was spreading the image was not particularly sophisticated about the way images work in our new media world...
An image such as this one also needs to circulate first among people inclined to believe the worst about its target. For a smear photograph to function properly, it must begin its journey into the body politic with what one might call a "Have you seen this?" phase. As it circulates under the radar, it gains a kind of credibility momentum, as people inclined to believe begin to think it is actual, documentary evidence of something that is being suppressed. The idea that it is being suppressed -- that it hasn't broken out to a larger audience -- actually helps it build credibility momentum.
If the image debuts to the larger world without that momentum, its smear message will be drowned out by a chorus of other story lines: Where did it come from? Who distributed it? Why did they do it? And that seemed to be case yesterday.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Does negative campaigning work?
Here I am posting two statements from bloggers on the excellent Back Ally Media about Hillary's tactics in Wisconsin over the last week.
The first one is basically saying, don't be mean in Wisconsin, my very kind, unironic state.
I believe Hillary made a big tactical mistake in choosing Wisconsin as the first state to go negative. If you should know anything about the denizens of Wisconsin, it’s that A) we’re big Packer fans who have an affinity for cheap beer, brats, and cheese curds and 2) we’re nice. Wisconsinites - especially progressive Democratic voters - don’t like the nasty stuff. In the last week, Hillary threw a lot of dirty stuff, hoping that something would stick: “Obama ducks debates,” “Obama is an empty suit,” “Obama is a plagiarist.” It all received a lot of coverage, but it clearly didn’t stick and very possibly backfired (though maybe it helped avert a 25-point loss).
The second statement points out that, according to the Wisconsin poll data anyway, the later you decide who to vote for, the more likely you are to support Hillary...and therefore, did the negative campaigning actually work, even if it didn't work well enough to secure Hillary's victory there?
Okay, but I'll stop being lazy--no more using dirt/mud/their aerodynamics metaphors. Because here's what really happens when she, or anyone else, starts negative campaigning over bullshit (Barack's compromised oratory integrity, or the Jesse Jackson supposed analogy, etc.): we lose track of Hillary The Candidate, the one with
and instead we're in the room with Hillary the ruthless Campaign Strategist, the one who
The first one is basically saying, don't be mean in Wisconsin, my very kind, unironic state.
I believe Hillary made a big tactical mistake in choosing Wisconsin as the first state to go negative. If you should know anything about the denizens of Wisconsin, it’s that A) we’re big Packer fans who have an affinity for cheap beer, brats, and cheese curds and 2) we’re nice. Wisconsinites - especially progressive Democratic voters - don’t like the nasty stuff. In the last week, Hillary threw a lot of dirty stuff, hoping that something would stick: “Obama ducks debates,” “Obama is an empty suit,” “Obama is a plagiarist.” It all received a lot of coverage, but it clearly didn’t stick and very possibly backfired (though maybe it helped avert a 25-point loss).
The second statement points out that, according to the Wisconsin poll data anyway, the later you decide who to vote for, the more likely you are to support Hillary...and therefore, did the negative campaigning actually work, even if it didn't work well enough to secure Hillary's victory there?
Did negative attacks work?
Probably not, but here’s something interesting. I was looking at the exit polls from Wisconsin, and it seems to me that you could make the argument that Clinton’s attacks on Obama over the last week had an effect. People who made up their minds “today” only support Obama by a 51-49 margin. People who made up their minds in the last three days are for Obama 56 to 44; people who decided ‘last week’ are 68 to 32 for Obama; and people who decided ‘last month’ are 69 to 30 for Obama. So did Clinton’s attacks sway some undecideds?
Well, your guess is as good as mine, but I'm am loving the story I (and therefore this blog) keep telling the world: That when someone comes into the ring and insists on playing clean, the business-as-usual mud-slinging from the others looks like what it is: dirty.Okay, but I'll stop being lazy--no more using dirt/mud/their aerodynamics metaphors. Because here's what really happens when she, or anyone else, starts negative campaigning over bullshit (Barack's compromised oratory integrity, or the Jesse Jackson supposed analogy, etc.): we lose track of Hillary The Candidate, the one with
- experience,
- Republican survival scars,
- a groundbreaking role as a female Democrat who figured out how to wield power, compromise, and get feisty
and instead we're in the room with Hillary the ruthless Campaign Strategist, the one who
- puts winning the election ahead of why we should vote for her,
- has strategy sessions, meetings with handlers, a bevy of consultants about when to "go negative"
- caters to and summons forces that make this election about things other than policy change, political will, and steering America towards a more just, equal, peaceful society
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