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United Kingdom13775 Posts
Well God does bless America every single day so I think that we will be able to get through this climate matter unscathed.
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On June 01 2017 12:59 Kevin_Sorbo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 12:43 Gahlo wrote:On June 01 2017 12:34 Kevin_Sorbo wrote:On June 01 2017 12:18 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 01 2017 12:12 Nyxisto wrote:
I still don't believe that Clinton needs to do some game of thrones like walk of shame. She had a very sound program and was the victim of a ridiculous campaign against her person. It shouldn't have even been close. If you obsess over the Clinton choice you neglect the institutional problems that seem to especially plague the US.
If candidates lose elections because of risotto recipes in emails and fake pedophile rings in non-existent basements you've got a bigger problem than an uncharismatic candidate. No one who was going to vote for her was like "oh what, she's a Pedo ringleader, pfft nevermind..." She lost because she was a uniquely bad choice to be the nominee for a long list of reasons. If people continue to perpetuate this myth that it was "fake news" that cost her the election and not a long list of mistakes and flaws that made it so that something like "fake news" could be a deciding factor, we've got much bigger problems than "fake news". She had more votes than the other candidate though. People can't have seen her as such an evil candidate to begin with. In most democratic countries around the world she would have won her election fair and square. In most democratic countries she wouldn't be the candidate for a "left" party. In most democratic countries, the Democrats would'nt be a 'left' party.
Progress is relative to extant reality, not some absolute standard. Dems want to push forwards progressive legislation relative to the status quo in the USA. Comparing Dems to places with a lefter status quo (Canada, England, NZ) isn't very useful.
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Clinton campaign had issues that started from the start that had nothing to do with the medias attention against her. Never presenting a positive message to vote for her after the primary campaign that sapped all the enthusiasm from her base would have killed a candidate in a normal election. Her VP pick was bland as toast and did nothing to solve her issues I can't remember who he was today. Her convention boost was kneecapped by giving DWS a job in her campaign. Contrast that with whatever you can say about trump his campaign gave out enthusiasm to his base like air to a fire. His VP pick shored up his religious flank and he had a message that gave the voters on the fence in the critical states an actual reason to vote for him.
Sure she got a few bad breaks and did poor to react to all of them but its not nearly the biggest reason why she lost the election.
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It basically boils down to, if she wasn't a uniquely bad candidate to nominate the fake news wouldn't have cost her the election, but if she was as bad as she is, and there was just the typical amount (adj. for inflation) of "fake news" it's hard to say she wouldn't have lost.
Otherwise you arrive at a place where you're basically saying that there is no way any Democratic candidate could have beat the worst Republican candidate in modern history. Which just piles on to the reasons the Democratic party is miraculously more of a dumpster fire than the Republican party.
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On June 01 2017 12:59 Kevin_Sorbo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 12:43 Gahlo wrote:On June 01 2017 12:34 Kevin_Sorbo wrote:On June 01 2017 12:18 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 01 2017 12:12 Nyxisto wrote:
I still don't believe that Clinton needs to do some game of thrones like walk of shame. She had a very sound program and was the victim of a ridiculous campaign against her person. It shouldn't have even been close. If you obsess over the Clinton choice you neglect the institutional problems that seem to especially plague the US.
If candidates lose elections because of risotto recipes in emails and fake pedophile rings in non-existent basements you've got a bigger problem than an uncharismatic candidate. No one who was going to vote for her was like "oh what, she's a Pedo ringleader, pfft nevermind..." She lost because she was a uniquely bad choice to be the nominee for a long list of reasons. If people continue to perpetuate this myth that it was "fake news" that cost her the election and not a long list of mistakes and flaws that made it so that something like "fake news" could be a deciding factor, we've got much bigger problems than "fake news". She had more votes than the other candidate though. People can't have seen her as such an evil candidate to begin with. In most democratic countries around the world she would have won her election fair and square. In most democratic countries she wouldn't be the candidate for a "left" party. In most democratic countries, the Democrats would'nt be a 'left' party.
The conservative party is in charge of Germany. We have a fiscally conservative party in charge here in the Netherlands. Macron in France is pretty much in the same spirit as our fiscally conservative party, I think.
The US took the anti-communism spirit a bit too far into the extremist spectrum, I think.
That and, judging by one of the posts on the previous page, religious extremism. I mean, really? God will take care of climate change? No wonder the US is going backwards.
That reminds me. Didn't Trump put in charge of the department that handles (amongst other things) nuclear energy a guy that thinks the Earth is 6000 years old? How can that dude possibly have the slightest grasp on how nuclear energy works if he doesn't even acknowledge one of the foundational bits of understanding on which that source of power is based (ie. half-life - and thus carbon dating, which excludes any notion of Earth being 6000 years old)?
And this is supposed to be the country leading the world. It's a joke.
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On June 01 2017 12:18 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 12:12 Nyxisto wrote:
I still don't believe that Clinton needs to do some game of thrones like walk of shame. She had a very sound program and was the victim of a ridiculous campaign against her person. It shouldn't have even been close. If you obsess over the Clinton choice you neglect the institutional problems that seem to especially plague the US.
If candidates lose elections because of risotto recipes in emails and fake pedophile rings in non-existent basements you've got a bigger problem than an uncharismatic candidate. No one who was going to vote for her was like "oh what, she's a Pedo ringleader, pfft nevermind..." She lost because she was a uniquely bad choice to be the nominee for a long list of reasons. If people continue to perpetuate this myth that it was "fake news" that cost her the election and not a long list of mistakes and flaws that made it so that something like "fake news" could be a deciding factor, we've got much bigger problems than "fake news".
I don't think we need to have the conversation about multiple sufficient causes again, but you really make it seem like you don't grasp the concept when you tell someone "no, dummy, she didn't lose the election because of x, it was clearly y." The thing is, I know you do grasp the concept of multiple sufficient causes because iirc you've expressed the concept before in the thread. I'm also fairly certain almost everyone in the thread is familiar with the concept that small tipping factors (e.g. the Comey letter) aside, she really should never have been within striking distance if she were a less flawed candidate. Unfortunately everyone keeps on saying stuff that makes it sound like they don't grasp these concepts and then it sends the thread into an old and very familiar spiral as everyone else rushes to correct them.
I actually have a thought on this though, that I'm not sure has been talked about as much in this well-worn subject. People frequently argue that Clinton must have been pretty bad to not win the election after an October surprise like the Access Hollywood tape, which was a pretty unprecedented bombshell that close to an election. But here's something else that was pretty unprecedented: having the internals of your campaign made pretty much completely public during the campaign. And I'm not talking about the actual scandalous material from the leaks (e.g. Donna Brazile). That stuff was bad, of course, and it's difficult to know whether the Clinton campaign had more of that stuff than most campaigns would given a similar forced transparency.
I mean all the other stuff. Politics is mostly marketing, and clear, crisp messaging is very important. From my amateur understanding of this stuff, the two most important rules of political messaging are "stay on message" and "keep it simple, stupid." Good marketing is extremely concise, focused, and straight-forward, so basic it seems like a child could have written it. And yet that kind of marketing is really hard to come up with, which is why corporations have scores of highly paid marketing executives to come up with that messaging.
Imagine how much harder it would be if all of the discussions those marketing teams have in the process of coming up with their messaging have to also be part of the message, because they're made public and scrutinized by competitors. It creates an environment where any member of your team can word something poorly in an e-mail, and that poor wording will be spotlighted by competitors and the media so heavily that it achieves much greater penetration than whatever message your team ultimately produces as an end product.
In a (probably unsuccessful) effort to avoid restarting the broken record of this thread, I am not saying any of this to excuse the Clinton campaign's loss. I'm sure books will be written about all of the failures of that campaign. Putting all external factors aside, off the top of my head I'd give them a B- on the "stay on message" principle, and a D on the "keep it simple stupid" one. But going forward, there's sort of an open question about whether these kinds of large-scale leaks are going to be a continuing occurrence in future elections. If campaigns manage to tighten up their cybersecurity, maybe they'll be able to go back to the old days of large communications teams e-mailing back and forth freely in crafting a good message to campaign on. But if the leaks simply can't be plugged (and from what little I know of phishing, I would certainly suspect that these sorts of leaks aren't going to stop immediately), are campaigns going to have to figure out how to discuss internally in a way that won't hurt the messaging too much if it gets leaked publicly?
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On June 01 2017 13:42 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 12:18 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 01 2017 12:12 Nyxisto wrote:
I still don't believe that Clinton needs to do some game of thrones like walk of shame. She had a very sound program and was the victim of a ridiculous campaign against her person. It shouldn't have even been close. If you obsess over the Clinton choice you neglect the institutional problems that seem to especially plague the US.
If candidates lose elections because of risotto recipes in emails and fake pedophile rings in non-existent basements you've got a bigger problem than an uncharismatic candidate. No one who was going to vote for her was like "oh what, she's a Pedo ringleader, pfft nevermind..." She lost because she was a uniquely bad choice to be the nominee for a long list of reasons. If people continue to perpetuate this myth that it was "fake news" that cost her the election and not a long list of mistakes and flaws that made it so that something like "fake news" could be a deciding factor, we've got much bigger problems than "fake news". I don't think we need to have the conversation about multiple sufficient causes again, but you really make it seem like you don't grasp the concept when you tell someone "no, dummy, she didn't lose the election because of x, it was clearly y." The thing is, I know you do grasp the concept of multiple sufficient causes because iirc you've expressed the concept before in the thread. I'm also fairly certain almost everyone in the thread is familiar with the concept that small tipping factors (e.g. the Comey letter) aside, she really should never have been within striking distance if she were a less flawed candidate. Unfortunately everyone keeps on saying stuff that makes it sound like they don't grasp these concepts and then it sends the thread into an old and very familiar spiral as everyone else rushes to correct them. I actually have a thought on this though, that I'm not sure has been talked about as much in this well-worn subject. People frequently argue that Clinton must have been pretty bad to not win the election after an October surprise like the Access Hollywood tape, which was a pretty unprecedented bombshell that close to an election. But here's something else that was pretty unprecedented: having the internals of your campaign made pretty much completely public during the campaign. And I'm not talking about the actual scandalous material from the leaks (e.g. Donna Brazile). That stuff was bad, of course, and it's difficult to know whether the Clinton campaign had more of that stuff than most campaigns would given a similar forced transparency. I mean all the other stuff. Politics is mostly marketing, and clear, crisp messaging is very important. From my amateur understanding of this stuff, the two most important rules of political messaging are "stay on message" and "keep it simple, stupid." Good marketing is extremely concise, focused, and straight-forward, so basic it seems like a child could have written it. And yet that kind of marketing is really hard to come up with, which is why corporations have scores of highly paid marketing executives to come up with that messaging. Imagine how much harder it would be if all of the discussions those marketing teams have in the process of coming up with their messaging have to also be part of the message, because they're made public and scrutinized by competitors. It creates an environment where any member of your team can word something poorly in an e-mail, and that poor wording will be spotlighted by competitors and the media so heavily that it achieves much greater penetration than whatever message your team ultimately produces as an end product. In a (probably unsuccessful) effort to avoid restarting the broken record of this thread, I am not saying any of this to excuse the Clinton campaign's loss. I'm sure books will be written about all of the failures of that campaign. Putting all external factors aside, off the top of my head I'd give them a B- on the "stay on message" principle, and a D on the "keep it simple stupid" one. But going forward, there's sort of an open question about whether these kinds of large-scale leaks are going to be a continuing occurrence in future elections. If campaigns manage to tighten up their cybersecurity, maybe they'll be able to go back to the old days of large communications teams e-mailing back and forth freely in crafting a good message to campaign on. But if the leaks simply can't be plugged (and from what little I know of phishing, I would certainly suspect that these sorts of leaks aren't going to stop immediately), are campaigns going to have to figure out how to discuss internally in a way that won't hurt the messaging too much if it gets leaked publicly?
Yeah, they gotta keep playing a public marketing scheme, on top of that do better at covering up corruption by playing the marketing in their internal communications as well, and finally they need to better hide the fact that any message put out by the campaign is tainted by the large donors that funds them. That's the solution to the problem.
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On June 01 2017 13:49 a_flayer wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 13:42 ChristianS wrote:On June 01 2017 12:18 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 01 2017 12:12 Nyxisto wrote:
I still don't believe that Clinton needs to do some game of thrones like walk of shame. She had a very sound program and was the victim of a ridiculous campaign against her person. It shouldn't have even been close. If you obsess over the Clinton choice you neglect the institutional problems that seem to especially plague the US.
If candidates lose elections because of risotto recipes in emails and fake pedophile rings in non-existent basements you've got a bigger problem than an uncharismatic candidate. No one who was going to vote for her was like "oh what, she's a Pedo ringleader, pfft nevermind..." She lost because she was a uniquely bad choice to be the nominee for a long list of reasons. If people continue to perpetuate this myth that it was "fake news" that cost her the election and not a long list of mistakes and flaws that made it so that something like "fake news" could be a deciding factor, we've got much bigger problems than "fake news". I don't think we need to have the conversation about multiple sufficient causes again, but you really make it seem like you don't grasp the concept when you tell someone "no, dummy, she didn't lose the election because of x, it was clearly y." The thing is, I know you do grasp the concept of multiple sufficient causes because iirc you've expressed the concept before in the thread. I'm also fairly certain almost everyone in the thread is familiar with the concept that small tipping factors (e.g. the Comey letter) aside, she really should never have been within striking distance if she were a less flawed candidate. Unfortunately everyone keeps on saying stuff that makes it sound like they don't grasp these concepts and then it sends the thread into an old and very familiar spiral as everyone else rushes to correct them. I actually have a thought on this though, that I'm not sure has been talked about as much in this well-worn subject. People frequently argue that Clinton must have been pretty bad to not win the election after an October surprise like the Access Hollywood tape, which was a pretty unprecedented bombshell that close to an election. But here's something else that was pretty unprecedented: having the internals of your campaign made pretty much completely public during the campaign. And I'm not talking about the actual scandalous material from the leaks (e.g. Donna Brazile). That stuff was bad, of course, and it's difficult to know whether the Clinton campaign had more of that stuff than most campaigns would given a similar forced transparency. I mean all the other stuff. Politics is mostly marketing, and clear, crisp messaging is very important. From my amateur understanding of this stuff, the two most important rules of political messaging are "stay on message" and "keep it simple, stupid." Good marketing is extremely concise, focused, and straight-forward, so basic it seems like a child could have written it. And yet that kind of marketing is really hard to come up with, which is why corporations have scores of highly paid marketing executives to come up with that messaging. Imagine how much harder it would be if all of the discussions those marketing teams have in the process of coming up with their messaging have to also be part of the message, because they're made public and scrutinized by competitors. It creates an environment where any member of your team can word something poorly in an e-mail, and that poor wording will be spotlighted by competitors and the media so heavily that it achieves much greater penetration than whatever message your team ultimately produces as an end product. In a (probably unsuccessful) effort to avoid restarting the broken record of this thread, I am not saying any of this to excuse the Clinton campaign's loss. I'm sure books will be written about all of the failures of that campaign. Putting all external factors aside, off the top of my head I'd give them a B- on the "stay on message" principle, and a D on the "keep it simple stupid" one. But going forward, there's sort of an open question about whether these kinds of large-scale leaks are going to be a continuing occurrence in future elections. If campaigns manage to tighten up their cybersecurity, maybe they'll be able to go back to the old days of large communications teams e-mailing back and forth freely in crafting a good message to campaign on. But if the leaks simply can't be plugged (and from what little I know of phishing, I would certainly suspect that these sorts of leaks aren't going to stop immediately), are campaigns going to have to figure out how to discuss internally in a way that won't hurt the messaging too much if it gets leaked publicly? Yeah, they gotta keep playing a marketing scheme, on top of that do better at covering up corruption by playing the marketing in their internal communications as well, and finally better hide the fact that any message put out by the campaign is tainted by the large donors that funds them. That's the solution to the problem.
I'm not sure what you're saying. My post was about political messaging and the impact that frequent leaks are likely to have on that. What do corruption or large donors have to do with that? Or did you just want to change the subject to what you want to talk about (in which case, why quote me)?
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On June 01 2017 13:32 GreenHorizons wrote:
It basically boils down to, if she wasn't a uniquely bad candidate to nominate the fake news wouldn't have cost her the election, but if she was as bad as she is, and there was just the typical amount (adj. for inflation) of "fake news" it's hard to say she wouldn't have lost.
Otherwise you arrive at a place where you're basically saying that there is no way any Democratic candidate could have beat the worst Republican candidate in modern history. Which just piles on to the reasons the Democratic party is miraculously more of a dumpster fire than the Republican party.
I hear this line a lot... that Trump was the worst candidate around. What makes him supposedly the worst? He's certainly not an establishment Republican (and changed his party affiliation many times over the years), but he was clearly a more viable and more popular candidate than the dozen of "real" Republicans who ran against him, right? I mean, Republican voters voting against their own interests and buying into utter crap, racism, and anti-science is about as quintessentially conservative as one can get nowadays in America.
Maybe "Worst" = "Least qualified, politically and intellectually"? I'd agree with that. But he certainly had the qualities that the Republicans were looking for, based on the primary votes.
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On June 01 2017 13:52 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 13:49 a_flayer wrote:On June 01 2017 13:42 ChristianS wrote:On June 01 2017 12:18 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 01 2017 12:12 Nyxisto wrote:
I still don't believe that Clinton needs to do some game of thrones like walk of shame. She had a very sound program and was the victim of a ridiculous campaign against her person. It shouldn't have even been close. If you obsess over the Clinton choice you neglect the institutional problems that seem to especially plague the US.
If candidates lose elections because of risotto recipes in emails and fake pedophile rings in non-existent basements you've got a bigger problem than an uncharismatic candidate. No one who was going to vote for her was like "oh what, she's a Pedo ringleader, pfft nevermind..." She lost because she was a uniquely bad choice to be the nominee for a long list of reasons. If people continue to perpetuate this myth that it was "fake news" that cost her the election and not a long list of mistakes and flaws that made it so that something like "fake news" could be a deciding factor, we've got much bigger problems than "fake news". I don't think we need to have the conversation about multiple sufficient causes again, but you really make it seem like you don't grasp the concept when you tell someone "no, dummy, she didn't lose the election because of x, it was clearly y." The thing is, I know you do grasp the concept of multiple sufficient causes because iirc you've expressed the concept before in the thread. I'm also fairly certain almost everyone in the thread is familiar with the concept that small tipping factors (e.g. the Comey letter) aside, she really should never have been within striking distance if she were a less flawed candidate. Unfortunately everyone keeps on saying stuff that makes it sound like they don't grasp these concepts and then it sends the thread into an old and very familiar spiral as everyone else rushes to correct them. I actually have a thought on this though, that I'm not sure has been talked about as much in this well-worn subject. People frequently argue that Clinton must have been pretty bad to not win the election after an October surprise like the Access Hollywood tape, which was a pretty unprecedented bombshell that close to an election. But here's something else that was pretty unprecedented: having the internals of your campaign made pretty much completely public during the campaign. And I'm not talking about the actual scandalous material from the leaks (e.g. Donna Brazile). That stuff was bad, of course, and it's difficult to know whether the Clinton campaign had more of that stuff than most campaigns would given a similar forced transparency. I mean all the other stuff. Politics is mostly marketing, and clear, crisp messaging is very important. From my amateur understanding of this stuff, the two most important rules of political messaging are "stay on message" and "keep it simple, stupid." Good marketing is extremely concise, focused, and straight-forward, so basic it seems like a child could have written it. And yet that kind of marketing is really hard to come up with, which is why corporations have scores of highly paid marketing executives to come up with that messaging. Imagine how much harder it would be if all of the discussions those marketing teams have in the process of coming up with their messaging have to also be part of the message, because they're made public and scrutinized by competitors. It creates an environment where any member of your team can word something poorly in an e-mail, and that poor wording will be spotlighted by competitors and the media so heavily that it achieves much greater penetration than whatever message your team ultimately produces as an end product. In a (probably unsuccessful) effort to avoid restarting the broken record of this thread, I am not saying any of this to excuse the Clinton campaign's loss. I'm sure books will be written about all of the failures of that campaign. Putting all external factors aside, off the top of my head I'd give them a B- on the "stay on message" principle, and a D on the "keep it simple stupid" one. But going forward, there's sort of an open question about whether these kinds of large-scale leaks are going to be a continuing occurrence in future elections. If campaigns manage to tighten up their cybersecurity, maybe they'll be able to go back to the old days of large communications teams e-mailing back and forth freely in crafting a good message to campaign on. But if the leaks simply can't be plugged (and from what little I know of phishing, I would certainly suspect that these sorts of leaks aren't going to stop immediately), are campaigns going to have to figure out how to discuss internally in a way that won't hurt the messaging too much if it gets leaked publicly? Yeah, they gotta keep playing a marketing scheme, on top of that do better at covering up corruption by playing the marketing in their internal communications as well, and finally better hide the fact that any message put out by the campaign is tainted by the large donors that funds them. That's the solution to the problem. I'm not sure what you're saying. My post was about political messaging and the impact that frequent leaks are likely to have on that. What do corruption or large donors have to do with that? Or did you just want to change the subject to what you want to talk about (in which case, why quote me)?
Yes, you're talking about having a sensible message in their political marketing scheme and saying they should communicate internally in a way that doesn't reveal their flaws. Well, the leaked internal communications revealed that large donors have a substantial amount of control over their messaging ("big donors like to be heard"). Unfortunately for the DNC, large money donors != large amount of voters if those voters do not get on board with the message crafted by those large money donors, and therein lies the problem. The voters liked the message of the guy that bitched about the large money donors and didn't let them control his message. Hiding things better is not going to solve the problem if it results in the same things. You have to overtly rage against the oligarchy if you want voters, and if you just try to hide the fact that you're bought out by large donors, then I very much doubt that kind of a message will ever get out and be perceived as sincere.
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On June 01 2017 13:57 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
Maybe "Worst" = "Least qualified, politically and intellectually"? I'd agree with that. But he certainly had the qualities that the Republicans were looking for, based on the primary votes.
When people talk about how terrible Trump is, they're generally referring to the former. The latter is just sad truth.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
Well if we want to stick to objective measures, we can start with worst = lowest favorability rating. Which Trump wins hands down.
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On June 01 2017 13:57 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 13:32 GreenHorizons wrote:
It basically boils down to, if she wasn't a uniquely bad candidate to nominate the fake news wouldn't have cost her the election, but if she was as bad as she is, and there was just the typical amount (adj. for inflation) of "fake news" it's hard to say she wouldn't have lost.
Otherwise you arrive at a place where you're basically saying that there is no way any Democratic candidate could have beat the worst Republican candidate in modern history. Which just piles on to the reasons the Democratic party is miraculously more of a dumpster fire than the Republican party. I hear this line a lot... that Trump was the worst candidate around. What makes him supposedly the worst? He's certainly not an establishment Republican (and changed his party affiliation many times over the years), but he was clearly a more viable and more popular candidate than the dozen of "real" Republicans who ran against him, right? I mean, Republican voters voting against their own interests and buying into utter crap, racism, and anti-science is about as quintessentially conservative as one can get nowadays in America. Maybe "Worst" = "Least qualified, politically and intellectually"? I'd agree with that. But he certainly had the qualities that the Republicans were looking for, based on the primary votes.
"the worst" has a couple meanings. It does mean "least qualified, politically and intellectually", it also means the "least trusted and least liked".
EDIT: America paid $2,000,000,000+ to elect Hillary Clinton and we didn't get it, then she has the hubris to turn around and blame us, then some people somehow find themselves defending HER.
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On June 01 2017 11:38 NewSunshine wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 11:10 Nevuk wrote:On June 01 2017 11:05 LegalLord wrote:On June 01 2017 11:01 Gahlo wrote:On June 01 2017 10:43 LegalLord wrote:
Post-election Hillary seems like the type of person who blames anything and anyone for her own failure to win an election that should have been easy pickings. Everything she has done since then reeks of opportunism of a particularly petty kind. It's like Trump if he didn't win the election. Except he wouldn't need to collect speech money from wealthy donors because he would be wealthier than half those donors. Uh, he took donations a plenty. He just misappropriated them right into paying for lawsuits he'd lost. I doubt he'd have stopped if he lost. Clinton is totally misplaying it though. If she had kept quiet for another 5-6 months and emerged as a quiet voice of reason instead of what she's currently doing then most people would be thinking about what an opportunity they'd passed up... She is playing hard into the notion that she's not much better than Trump right now. Hard to believe she'd be as bad or worse than Trump, but is this really the best we've got right now?
Wasn't then, isn't now.
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On June 01 2017 14:14 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 11:38 NewSunshine wrote:On June 01 2017 11:10 Nevuk wrote:On June 01 2017 11:05 LegalLord wrote:On June 01 2017 11:01 Gahlo wrote:On June 01 2017 10:43 LegalLord wrote:
Post-election Hillary seems like the type of person who blames anything and anyone for her own failure to win an election that should have been easy pickings. Everything she has done since then reeks of opportunism of a particularly petty kind. It's like Trump if he didn't win the election. Except he wouldn't need to collect speech money from wealthy donors because he would be wealthier than half those donors. Uh, he took donations a plenty. He just misappropriated them right into paying for lawsuits he'd lost. I doubt he'd have stopped if he lost. Clinton is totally misplaying it though. If she had kept quiet for another 5-6 months and emerged as a quiet voice of reason instead of what she's currently doing then most people would be thinking about what an opportunity they'd passed up... She is playing hard into the notion that she's not much better than Trump right now. Hard to believe she'd be as bad or worse than Trump, but is this really the best we've got right now? Wasn't then, isn't now.
You're reminding me of Trump's ridiculous tweet bragging about a generous 48% approval rating. I'm not praising him here by any stretch.
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On June 01 2017 13:59 a_flayer wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 13:52 ChristianS wrote:On June 01 2017 13:49 a_flayer wrote:On June 01 2017 13:42 ChristianS wrote:On June 01 2017 12:18 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 01 2017 12:12 Nyxisto wrote:
I still don't believe that Clinton needs to do some game of thrones like walk of shame. She had a very sound program and was the victim of a ridiculous campaign against her person. It shouldn't have even been close. If you obsess over the Clinton choice you neglect the institutional problems that seem to especially plague the US.
If candidates lose elections because of risotto recipes in emails and fake pedophile rings in non-existent basements you've got a bigger problem than an uncharismatic candidate. No one who was going to vote for her was like "oh what, she's a Pedo ringleader, pfft nevermind..." She lost because she was a uniquely bad choice to be the nominee for a long list of reasons. If people continue to perpetuate this myth that it was "fake news" that cost her the election and not a long list of mistakes and flaws that made it so that something like "fake news" could be a deciding factor, we've got much bigger problems than "fake news". I don't think we need to have the conversation about multiple sufficient causes again, but you really make it seem like you don't grasp the concept when you tell someone "no, dummy, she didn't lose the election because of x, it was clearly y." The thing is, I know you do grasp the concept of multiple sufficient causes because iirc you've expressed the concept before in the thread. I'm also fairly certain almost everyone in the thread is familiar with the concept that small tipping factors (e.g. the Comey letter) aside, she really should never have been within striking distance if she were a less flawed candidate. Unfortunately everyone keeps on saying stuff that makes it sound like they don't grasp these concepts and then it sends the thread into an old and very familiar spiral as everyone else rushes to correct them. I actually have a thought on this though, that I'm not sure has been talked about as much in this well-worn subject. People frequently argue that Clinton must have been pretty bad to not win the election after an October surprise like the Access Hollywood tape, which was a pretty unprecedented bombshell that close to an election. But here's something else that was pretty unprecedented: having the internals of your campaign made pretty much completely public during the campaign. And I'm not talking about the actual scandalous material from the leaks (e.g. Donna Brazile). That stuff was bad, of course, and it's difficult to know whether the Clinton campaign had more of that stuff than most campaigns would given a similar forced transparency. I mean all the other stuff. Politics is mostly marketing, and clear, crisp messaging is very important. From my amateur understanding of this stuff, the two most important rules of political messaging are "stay on message" and "keep it simple, stupid." Good marketing is extremely concise, focused, and straight-forward, so basic it seems like a child could have written it. And yet that kind of marketing is really hard to come up with, which is why corporations have scores of highly paid marketing executives to come up with that messaging. Imagine how much harder it would be if all of the discussions those marketing teams have in the process of coming up with their messaging have to also be part of the message, because they're made public and scrutinized by competitors. It creates an environment where any member of your team can word something poorly in an e-mail, and that poor wording will be spotlighted by competitors and the media so heavily that it achieves much greater penetration than whatever message your team ultimately produces as an end product. In a (probably unsuccessful) effort to avoid restarting the broken record of this thread, I am not saying any of this to excuse the Clinton campaign's loss. I'm sure books will be written about all of the failures of that campaign. Putting all external factors aside, off the top of my head I'd give them a B- on the "stay on message" principle, and a D on the "keep it simple stupid" one. But going forward, there's sort of an open question about whether these kinds of large-scale leaks are going to be a continuing occurrence in future elections. If campaigns manage to tighten up their cybersecurity, maybe they'll be able to go back to the old days of large communications teams e-mailing back and forth freely in crafting a good message to campaign on. But if the leaks simply can't be plugged (and from what little I know of phishing, I would certainly suspect that these sorts of leaks aren't going to stop immediately), are campaigns going to have to figure out how to discuss internally in a way that won't hurt the messaging too much if it gets leaked publicly? Yeah, they gotta keep playing a marketing scheme, on top of that do better at covering up corruption by playing the marketing in their internal communications as well, and finally better hide the fact that any message put out by the campaign is tainted by the large donors that funds them. That's the solution to the problem. I'm not sure what you're saying. My post was about political messaging and the impact that frequent leaks are likely to have on that. What do corruption or large donors have to do with that? Or did you just want to change the subject to what you want to talk about (in which case, why quote me)? Yes, you're talking about having a sensible message in their political marketing scheme and saying they should communicate internally in a way that doesn't reveal their flaws. Well, the leaked internal communications revealed that large donors have a substantial amount of control over their messaging ("big donors like to be heard"). Unfortunately for the DNC, large money donors != large amount of voters if those voters do not get on board with the message crafted by those large money donors, and therein lies the problem. The voters liked the message of the guy that bitched about the large money donors and didn't let them control his message. Hiding things better is not going to solve the problem if it results in the same things. You have to overtly rage against the oligarchy if you want voters, and if you just try to hide the fact that you're bought out by large donors, then I very much doubt that kind of a message will ever get out and be perceived as sincere.
I think perhaps we're talking about different things. A good message is simple, understandable, almost obvious, and yet broadly applicable. Simple is the most important part. That means if a candidate goes to a rally and says "Well the thing about the Middle East is that it's a really complicated conflict. If you go back to 70 years ago..." and then proceeds to give a long, boring snooze fest about the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, that's bad messaging. It doesn't matter if their description of the history is accurate or thought-provoking or well-cited, because the fact that you're talking about it at such length in the first place is a mistake. As a more obvious example, remember when Newt Gingrich started talking about building a base on the moon back in 2012 during the Republican primary? What the fuck was that? It was so incredibly off-message, I don't know how anyone thought it was a good idea. Here everyone is talking about fixing healthcare or growing the economy or reducing the debt, and this crazy guy is going on TV talking about building moon cities. It doesn't matter if you think it's a good idea to build a base on the moon in the next 10 years, that's bad political messaging.
So I'm not talking about "hiding their flaws." The flaws bit (e.g. Donna Brazile) is its own interesting story, but going forward it's not that interesting to talk about what should be done: don't do shady shit in the first place, obviously. What's harder is crafting political messaging in an environment where you never know what's public and what's private. Like, remember the Wikileak about Clinton saying she didn't like "the American people?" Of course, it was a misunderstanding, she was saying she didn't like using the phrase "the American people" in speeches, not that she secretly despises Americans. And yet the sentence sounds bad. If she'd said it publicly, it would unambiguously be a gaffe, because even if her meaning is actually innocent, the sentence will still sound bad. There will be a few people that heard that she said it and never heard the innocent explanation, and even for those who heard it, they probably come out of it liking her less than if they never heard about the sentence in the first place. In internal e-mails, though, she understandably was not trying to speak only in carefully crafted, public-ready statements, because she didn't think this one would be public. My point is, are we going to move to a world where even in private, politicians need to speak in public-ready marketing-speak just in case something gets leaked?
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On June 01 2017 13:42 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 12:18 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 01 2017 12:12 Nyxisto wrote:
I still don't believe that Clinton needs to do some game of thrones like walk of shame. She had a very sound program and was the victim of a ridiculous campaign against her person. It shouldn't have even been close. If you obsess over the Clinton choice you neglect the institutional problems that seem to especially plague the US.
If candidates lose elections because of risotto recipes in emails and fake pedophile rings in non-existent basements you've got a bigger problem than an uncharismatic candidate. No one who was going to vote for her was like "oh what, she's a Pedo ringleader, pfft nevermind..." She lost because she was a uniquely bad choice to be the nominee for a long list of reasons. If people continue to perpetuate this myth that it was "fake news" that cost her the election and not a long list of mistakes and flaws that made it so that something like "fake news" could be a deciding factor, we've got much bigger problems than "fake news". I don't think we need to have the conversation about multiple sufficient causes again, but you really make it seem like you don't grasp the concept when you tell someone "no, dummy, she didn't lose the election because of x, it was clearly y." The thing is, I know you do grasp the concept of multiple sufficient causes because iirc you've expressed the concept before in the thread. I'm also fairly certain almost everyone in the thread is familiar with the concept that small tipping factors (e.g. the Comey letter) aside, she really should never have been within striking distance if she were a less flawed candidate. Unfortunately everyone keeps on saying stuff that makes it sound like they don't grasp these concepts and then it sends the thread into an old and very familiar spiral as everyone else rushes to correct them. I actually have a thought on this though, that I'm not sure has been talked about as much in this well-worn subject. People frequently argue that Clinton must have been pretty bad to not win the election after an October surprise like the Access Hollywood tape, which was a pretty unprecedented bombshell that close to an election. But here's something else that was pretty unprecedented: having the internals of your campaign made pretty much completely public during the campaign. And I'm not talking about the actual scandalous material from the leaks (e.g. Donna Brazile). That stuff was bad, of course, and it's difficult to know whether the Clinton campaign had more of that stuff than most campaigns would given a similar forced transparency. I mean all the other stuff. Politics is mostly marketing, and clear, crisp messaging is very important. From my amateur understanding of this stuff, the two most important rules of political messaging are "stay on message" and "keep it simple, stupid." Good marketing is extremely concise, focused, and straight-forward, so basic it seems like a child could have written it. And yet that kind of marketing is really hard to come up with, which is why corporations have scores of highly paid marketing executives to come up with that messaging. Imagine how much harder it would be if all of the discussions those marketing teams have in the process of coming up with their messaging have to also be part of the message, because they're made public and scrutinized by competitors. It creates an environment where any member of your team can word something poorly in an e-mail, and that poor wording will be spotlighted by competitors and the media so heavily that it achieves much greater penetration than whatever message your team ultimately produces as an end product. In a (probably unsuccessful) effort to avoid restarting the broken record of this thread, I am not saying any of this to excuse the Clinton campaign's loss. I'm sure books will be written about all of the failures of that campaign. Putting all external factors aside, off the top of my head I'd give them a B- on the "stay on message" principle, and a D on the "keep it simple stupid" one. But going forward, there's sort of an open question about whether these kinds of large-scale leaks are going to be a continuing occurrence in future elections. If campaigns manage to tighten up their cybersecurity, maybe they'll be able to go back to the old days of large communications teams e-mailing back and forth freely in crafting a good message to campaign on. But if the leaks simply can't be plugged (and from what little I know of phishing, I would certainly suspect that these sorts of leaks aren't going to stop immediately), are campaigns going to have to figure out how to discuss internally in a way that won't hurt the messaging too much if it gets leaked publicly?
I very much think that the Clinton campaign should have been able to reel in a few hundred thousand people like GH: genuine lefties who should have every reason to be willing to get behind her, even if reluctantly, and all they want in return is some reason to believe they won't be cast aside and forgotten like an annoying distraction. The seeds of discontent were planted as she showed that she would never give them any genuine attention.
And although the specific circumstances - leaks, Comey, and so on, were unlucky, you can't really say they came out of nowhere. That the DNC got hacked multiple times is quite consistent with the reality that they are a shitty organization. That the DNC leaks had the effect they did was a matter of such a perfect storm of resentment that she helped to build in the lead-up (and the DWS-onto-campaign was just mind-numbing stupidity). The Comey matter stemmed from a lack of trust in Hillary and in her supporters - rightly so, considering that Lynch acted the way a sleaze would act in all matters Hillary. If not for the DOJ/FBI/public interest conflicts that the circumstances created, there would be no Comey letter. If Hillary didn't act the way guilty people do when she was pressed on the emails, the Comey announcement wouldn't have been so damaging and emails might have been possible to bury. And so on.
There is a clear theme that pervades each of these failures: a terrible incompetent candidate surrounded by cronies unable to convince the voters that she's better than the other terrible incompetent candidate surrounded by cronies just by virtue of having more years of experience pushing projects with a spotty success record. It shouldn't be a surprise that she was vulnerable. In fact I think she is the only one who doesn't know at this point.
Leaks are an interesting thing, though. They wouldn't have stung nearly as hard if the setup for their use weren't in place. They were little more than that little push to get all those unpleasant sentiments to manifest into a genuine long term problem.
As far as books written on the failures of the campaign - a good one was discussed a little back, called "Shattered." It goes through the Clinton journey into a surprise upset and gives a picture that certainly can't be described as pleasant, based on a bunch of interviews with "sources" after the fact.
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On June 01 2017 14:22 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 13:59 a_flayer wrote:On June 01 2017 13:52 ChristianS wrote:On June 01 2017 13:49 a_flayer wrote:On June 01 2017 13:42 ChristianS wrote:On June 01 2017 12:18 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 01 2017 12:12 Nyxisto wrote:
I still don't believe that Clinton needs to do some game of thrones like walk of shame. She had a very sound program and was the victim of a ridiculous campaign against her person. It shouldn't have even been close. If you obsess over the Clinton choice you neglect the institutional problems that seem to especially plague the US.
If candidates lose elections because of risotto recipes in emails and fake pedophile rings in non-existent basements you've got a bigger problem than an uncharismatic candidate. No one who was going to vote for her was like "oh what, she's a Pedo ringleader, pfft nevermind..." She lost because she was a uniquely bad choice to be the nominee for a long list of reasons. If people continue to perpetuate this myth that it was "fake news" that cost her the election and not a long list of mistakes and flaws that made it so that something like "fake news" could be a deciding factor, we've got much bigger problems than "fake news". I don't think we need to have the conversation about multiple sufficient causes again, but you really make it seem like you don't grasp the concept when you tell someone "no, dummy, she didn't lose the election because of x, it was clearly y." The thing is, I know you do grasp the concept of multiple sufficient causes because iirc you've expressed the concept before in the thread. I'm also fairly certain almost everyone in the thread is familiar with the concept that small tipping factors (e.g. the Comey letter) aside, she really should never have been within striking distance if she were a less flawed candidate. Unfortunately everyone keeps on saying stuff that makes it sound like they don't grasp these concepts and then it sends the thread into an old and very familiar spiral as everyone else rushes to correct them. I actually have a thought on this though, that I'm not sure has been talked about as much in this well-worn subject. People frequently argue that Clinton must have been pretty bad to not win the election after an October surprise like the Access Hollywood tape, which was a pretty unprecedented bombshell that close to an election. But here's something else that was pretty unprecedented: having the internals of your campaign made pretty much completely public during the campaign. And I'm not talking about the actual scandalous material from the leaks (e.g. Donna Brazile). That stuff was bad, of course, and it's difficult to know whether the Clinton campaign had more of that stuff than most campaigns would given a similar forced transparency. I mean all the other stuff. Politics is mostly marketing, and clear, crisp messaging is very important. From my amateur understanding of this stuff, the two most important rules of political messaging are "stay on message" and "keep it simple, stupid." Good marketing is extremely concise, focused, and straight-forward, so basic it seems like a child could have written it. And yet that kind of marketing is really hard to come up with, which is why corporations have scores of highly paid marketing executives to come up with that messaging. Imagine how much harder it would be if all of the discussions those marketing teams have in the process of coming up with their messaging have to also be part of the message, because they're made public and scrutinized by competitors. It creates an environment where any member of your team can word something poorly in an e-mail, and that poor wording will be spotlighted by competitors and the media so heavily that it achieves much greater penetration than whatever message your team ultimately produces as an end product. In a (probably unsuccessful) effort to avoid restarting the broken record of this thread, I am not saying any of this to excuse the Clinton campaign's loss. I'm sure books will be written about all of the failures of that campaign. Putting all external factors aside, off the top of my head I'd give them a B- on the "stay on message" principle, and a D on the "keep it simple stupid" one. But going forward, there's sort of an open question about whether these kinds of large-scale leaks are going to be a continuing occurrence in future elections. If campaigns manage to tighten up their cybersecurity, maybe they'll be able to go back to the old days of large communications teams e-mailing back and forth freely in crafting a good message to campaign on. But if the leaks simply can't be plugged (and from what little I know of phishing, I would certainly suspect that these sorts of leaks aren't going to stop immediately), are campaigns going to have to figure out how to discuss internally in a way that won't hurt the messaging too much if it gets leaked publicly? Yeah, they gotta keep playing a marketing scheme, on top of that do better at covering up corruption by playing the marketing in their internal communications as well, and finally better hide the fact that any message put out by the campaign is tainted by the large donors that funds them. That's the solution to the problem. I'm not sure what you're saying. My post was about political messaging and the impact that frequent leaks are likely to have on that. What do corruption or large donors have to do with that? Or did you just want to change the subject to what you want to talk about (in which case, why quote me)? Yes, you're talking about having a sensible message in their political marketing scheme and saying they should communicate internally in a way that doesn't reveal their flaws. Well, the leaked internal communications revealed that large donors have a substantial amount of control over their messaging ("big donors like to be heard"). Unfortunately for the DNC, large money donors != large amount of voters if those voters do not get on board with the message crafted by those large money donors, and therein lies the problem. The voters liked the message of the guy that bitched about the large money donors and didn't let them control his message. Hiding things better is not going to solve the problem if it results in the same things. You have to overtly rage against the oligarchy if you want voters, and if you just try to hide the fact that you're bought out by large donors, then I very much doubt that kind of a message will ever get out and be perceived as sincere. I think perhaps we're talking about different things. A good message is simple, understandable, almost obvious, and yet broadly applicable. Simple is the most important part. That means if a candidate goes to a rally and says "Well the thing about the Middle East is that it's a really complicated conflict. If you go back to 70 years ago..." and then proceeds to give a long, boring snooze fest about the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, that's bad messaging. It doesn't matter if their description of the history is accurate or thought-provoking or well-cited, because the fact that you're talking about it at such length in the first place is a mistake. As a more obvious example, remember when Newt Gingrich started talking about building a base on the moon back in 2012 during the Republican primary? What the fuck was that? It was so incredibly off-message, I don't know how anyone thought it was a good idea. Here everyone is talking about fixing healthcare or growing the economy or reducing the debt, and this crazy guy is going on TV talking about building moon cities. It doesn't matter if you think it's a good idea to build a base on the moon in the next 10 years, that's bad political messaging. So I'm not talking about "hiding their flaws." The flaws bit (e.g. Donna Brazile) is its own interesting story, but going forward it's not that interesting to talk about what should be done: don't do shady shit in the first place, obviously. What's harder is crafting political messaging in an environment where you never know what's public and what's private. Like, remember the Wikileak about Clinton saying she didn't like "the American people?" Of course, it was a misunderstanding, she was saying she didn't like using the phrase "the American people" in speeches, not that she secretly despises Americans. And yet the sentence sounds bad. If she'd said it publicly, it would unambiguously be a gaffe, because even if her meaning is actually innocent, the sentence will still sound bad. There will be a few people that heard that she said it and never heard the innocent explanation, and even for those who heard it, they probably come out of it liking her less than if they never heard about the sentence in the first place. In internal e-mails, though, she understandably was not trying to speak only in carefully crafted, public-ready statements, because she didn't think this one would be public. My point is, are we going to move to a world where even in private, politicians need to speak in public-ready marketing-speak just in case something gets leaked?
It's... You realize the DNC just paid Donna Brazile $88,000 in a month not long ago? I don't think they could comprehend what "don't do shady shit" means?
Have you ever seen/heard an addict talk about acquiring their substance of choice around other addicts? They don't realize how they sound to "not addicts". That's the DNC. They don't even know all that money they are snorting and then vomiting out their donors talking points, looks really gross to people who aren't hooked on big money donor cash.
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On June 01 2017 13:39 a_flayer wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 12:59 Kevin_Sorbo wrote:On June 01 2017 12:43 Gahlo wrote:On June 01 2017 12:34 Kevin_Sorbo wrote:On June 01 2017 12:18 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 01 2017 12:12 Nyxisto wrote:
I still don't believe that Clinton needs to do some game of thrones like walk of shame. She had a very sound program and was the victim of a ridiculous campaign against her person. It shouldn't have even been close. If you obsess over the Clinton choice you neglect the institutional problems that seem to especially plague the US.
If candidates lose elections because of risotto recipes in emails and fake pedophile rings in non-existent basements you've got a bigger problem than an uncharismatic candidate. No one who was going to vote for her was like "oh what, she's a Pedo ringleader, pfft nevermind..." She lost because she was a uniquely bad choice to be the nominee for a long list of reasons. If people continue to perpetuate this myth that it was "fake news" that cost her the election and not a long list of mistakes and flaws that made it so that something like "fake news" could be a deciding factor, we've got much bigger problems than "fake news". She had more votes than the other candidate though. People can't have seen her as such an evil candidate to begin with. In most democratic countries around the world she would have won her election fair and square. In most democratic countries she wouldn't be the candidate for a "left" party. In most democratic countries, the Democrats would'nt be a 'left' party. The conservative party is in charge of Germany. We have a fiscally conservative party in charge here in the Netherlands. Macron in France is pretty much in the same spirit as our fiscally conservative party, I think.
You can't really make a comparison like that I don't think, conservative doesn't mean much in terms of actual policy it just means "opposed to change/attached to tradition" (very broadly of course). The United States is the only place as far as I know where the conservative party is the far right party, in Europe they're simply going to be the right wing party most of the time (in France the conservative candidate was Fillon who is a liberal). Wonder if you'll have some leftwing conservatives in Scandinavia in a few years.
Rereading your post I may have misunderstood what you were saying though, sorry if that's the case.
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On June 01 2017 14:22 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 13:59 a_flayer wrote:On June 01 2017 13:52 ChristianS wrote:On June 01 2017 13:49 a_flayer wrote:On June 01 2017 13:42 ChristianS wrote:On June 01 2017 12:18 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 01 2017 12:12 Nyxisto wrote:
I still don't believe that Clinton needs to do some game of thrones like walk of shame. She had a very sound program and was the victim of a ridiculous campaign against her person. It shouldn't have even been close. If you obsess over the Clinton choice you neglect the institutional problems that seem to especially plague the US.
If candidates lose elections because of risotto recipes in emails and fake pedophile rings in non-existent basements you've got a bigger problem than an uncharismatic candidate. No one who was going to vote for her was like "oh what, she's a Pedo ringleader, pfft nevermind..." She lost because she was a uniquely bad choice to be the nominee for a long list of reasons. If people continue to perpetuate this myth that it was "fake news" that cost her the election and not a long list of mistakes and flaws that made it so that something like "fake news" could be a deciding factor, we've got much bigger problems than "fake news". I don't think we need to have the conversation about multiple sufficient causes again, but you really make it seem like you don't grasp the concept when you tell someone "no, dummy, she didn't lose the election because of x, it was clearly y." The thing is, I know you do grasp the concept of multiple sufficient causes because iirc you've expressed the concept before in the thread. I'm also fairly certain almost everyone in the thread is familiar with the concept that small tipping factors (e.g. the Comey letter) aside, she really should never have been within striking distance if she were a less flawed candidate. Unfortunately everyone keeps on saying stuff that makes it sound like they don't grasp these concepts and then it sends the thread into an old and very familiar spiral as everyone else rushes to correct them. I actually have a thought on this though, that I'm not sure has been talked about as much in this well-worn subject. People frequently argue that Clinton must have been pretty bad to not win the election after an October surprise like the Access Hollywood tape, which was a pretty unprecedented bombshell that close to an election. But here's something else that was pretty unprecedented: having the internals of your campaign made pretty much completely public during the campaign. And I'm not talking about the actual scandalous material from the leaks (e.g. Donna Brazile). That stuff was bad, of course, and it's difficult to know whether the Clinton campaign had more of that stuff than most campaigns would given a similar forced transparency. I mean all the other stuff. Politics is mostly marketing, and clear, crisp messaging is very important. From my amateur understanding of this stuff, the two most important rules of political messaging are "stay on message" and "keep it simple, stupid." Good marketing is extremely concise, focused, and straight-forward, so basic it seems like a child could have written it. And yet that kind of marketing is really hard to come up with, which is why corporations have scores of highly paid marketing executives to come up with that messaging. Imagine how much harder it would be if all of the discussions those marketing teams have in the process of coming up with their messaging have to also be part of the message, because they're made public and scrutinized by competitors. It creates an environment where any member of your team can word something poorly in an e-mail, and that poor wording will be spotlighted by competitors and the media so heavily that it achieves much greater penetration than whatever message your team ultimately produces as an end product. In a (probably unsuccessful) effort to avoid restarting the broken record of this thread, I am not saying any of this to excuse the Clinton campaign's loss. I'm sure books will be written about all of the failures of that campaign. Putting all external factors aside, off the top of my head I'd give them a B- on the "stay on message" principle, and a D on the "keep it simple stupid" one. But going forward, there's sort of an open question about whether these kinds of large-scale leaks are going to be a continuing occurrence in future elections. If campaigns manage to tighten up their cybersecurity, maybe they'll be able to go back to the old days of large communications teams e-mailing back and forth freely in crafting a good message to campaign on. But if the leaks simply can't be plugged (and from what little I know of phishing, I would certainly suspect that these sorts of leaks aren't going to stop immediately), are campaigns going to have to figure out how to discuss internally in a way that won't hurt the messaging too much if it gets leaked publicly? Yeah, they gotta keep playing a marketing scheme, on top of that do better at covering up corruption by playing the marketing in their internal communications as well, and finally better hide the fact that any message put out by the campaign is tainted by the large donors that funds them. That's the solution to the problem. I'm not sure what you're saying. My post was about political messaging and the impact that frequent leaks are likely to have on that. What do corruption or large donors have to do with that? Or did you just want to change the subject to what you want to talk about (in which case, why quote me)? Yes, you're talking about having a sensible message in their political marketing scheme and saying they should communicate internally in a way that doesn't reveal their flaws. Well, the leaked internal communications revealed that large donors have a substantial amount of control over their messaging ("big donors like to be heard"). Unfortunately for the DNC, large money donors != large amount of voters if those voters do not get on board with the message crafted by those large money donors, and therein lies the problem. The voters liked the message of the guy that bitched about the large money donors and didn't let them control his message. Hiding things better is not going to solve the problem if it results in the same things. You have to overtly rage against the oligarchy if you want voters, and if you just try to hide the fact that you're bought out by large donors, then I very much doubt that kind of a message will ever get out and be perceived as sincere. I think perhaps we're talking about different things. A good message is simple, understandable, almost obvious, and yet broadly applicable. Simple is the most important part. That means if a candidate goes to a rally and says "Well the thing about the Middle East is that it's a really complicated conflict. If you go back to 70 years ago..." and then proceeds to give a long, boring snooze fest about the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, that's bad messaging. It doesn't matter if their description of the history is accurate or thought-provoking or well-cited, because the fact that you're talking about it at such length in the first place is a mistake. As a more obvious example, remember when Newt Gingrich started talking about building a base on the moon back in 2012 during the Republican primary? What the fuck was that? It was so incredibly off-message, I don't know how anyone thought it was a good idea. Here everyone is talking about fixing healthcare or growing the economy or reducing the debt, and this crazy guy is going on TV talking about building moon cities. It doesn't matter if you think it's a good idea to build a base on the moon in the next 10 years, that's bad political messaging. So I'm not talking about "hiding their flaws." The flaws bit (e.g. Donna Brazile) is its own interesting story, but going forward it's not that interesting to talk about what should be done: don't do shady shit in the first place, obviously. What's harder is crafting political messaging in an environment where you never know what's public and what's private. Like, remember the Wikileak about Clinton saying she didn't like "the American people?" Of course, it was a misunderstanding, she was saying she didn't like using the phrase "the American people" in speeches, not that she secretly despises Americans. And yet the sentence sounds bad. If she'd said it publicly, it would unambiguously be a gaffe, because even if her meaning is actually innocent, the sentence will still sound bad. There will be a few people that heard that she said it and never heard the innocent explanation, and even for those who heard it, they probably come out of it liking her less than if they never heard about the sentence in the first place. In internal e-mails, though, she understandably was not trying to speak only in carefully crafted, public-ready statements, because she didn't think this one would be public. My point is, are we going to move to a world where even in private, politicians need to speak in public-ready marketing-speak just in case something gets leaked?
So why do you think that the Clinton messaging was so off? What influenced their decision making in crafting a message to the point where it was so utterly flawed that they couldn't win over people like GH? Do you think GH would have cared about any of the Donna Brazile stuff if Clinton had been on stage consistently going "We need to hang the bankers, take their money [out of politics] and put it into socialized healthcare" or something like that but more sensibly put? And not just mention it here or there - say it as often and consistently as Trump said "Drain the swamp". It's not that difficult. The votes come from masses of people, not from a bunch of rich white dudes that give money and want their little say in the campaign messaging.
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