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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
Why are donations and donors to the DNC so bad? If you want to shitlord the DNC about having donors, you need to establish that they are bad first.
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On June 01 2017 14:23 LegalLord 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? 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.
I see I was, in fact, unsuccessful at avoiding hitting reset on the broken record. Yes, Clinton was a problematic candidate in a wide variety of ways. And again, I did not mean my discussion about the difficulties that campaign leaks present for political messaging to in any way excuse the Clinton loss. There were a lot of problems with her as a candidate, and I don't particularly care to dispute any of your specific claims about her deficiencies – we might have somewhat different ideas about the degree and nature of her shittiness, but I don't think we ultimately disagree that much.
But I will ask this: you seem to be of the opinion that the leaks were only as damaging as they were because Clinton was uniquely positioned to be damaged by them. What do you think the EV would be for a full internal campaign leak for a typical candidate in a typical election? I would actually suspect that in typical elections where there aren't so many huge damaging stories on both sides, a leak like this one would actually have a lot more impact.
Think about how much damage the 47% remark did to Romney – this is a good example of what I'm talking about. A poorly crafted message, spoken in private where the candidate doesn't think they need to speak so carefully, is spotlighted by opponents and achieves much greater penetration than any of the messaging the candidate puts forward. Imagine how many poor wordings and dumb statements are in the average campaign's internal emails. It's not just limited to stuff the candidate said, either – anything an aide or staffer said is potentially something the other side could get outranged about, demand they resign or get fired, etc.
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All these HRC loss diatribes need data, otherwise you are just throwing your biases around with nothing to back it up.
HRC did decisively worse than Obama in Red Suburban counties due to decades of white male media hate. White suburban male radio/FOX listeners have been sitting through a 20 year propaganda campaign against her. These guys (and GH) assume any negative inference against her without any evidence. Accusation is evidence for these guys (really try talking to a FOX or AM Radio person, or read Breitbart). HRC lost the red/white suburbs by bigger margins than Obama. This wasn't about the Left because HRC won the left by bigger margins than Obama. HRC won the left by bigger margins than Obama.
HRC winning more Left
“Democrats did better this time in places that were already blue , and did worse in places that were already red,” said Barry Burden, a political-science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It sort of is a battle of the many versus the few. You add up those smaller rural places, and they were enough to swamp the bigger urban areas, and even suburban counties.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/hillary-clintons-surprising-vote-deficit/509174/
On average, the counties that voted for Obama twice and then flipped to support Trump were 81 percent white. Obama strongholds that supported Clinton were just 55 percent white.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/hillary-clintons-surprising-vote-deficit/509174/
HRC losing more Right
On average, the counties that voted for Obama twice and then flipped to support Trump were 81 percent white. Obama strongholds that supported Clinton were just 55 percent white.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/obama-trump-counties/
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On June 01 2017 14:41 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 14:23 LegalLord 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? 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. I see I was, in fact, unsuccessful at avoiding hitting reset on the broken record. Yes, Clinton was a problematic candidate in a wide variety of ways. And again, I did not mean my discussion about the difficulties that campaign leaks present for political messaging to in any way excuse the Clinton loss. There were a lot of problems with her as a candidate, and I don't particularly care to dispute any of your specific claims about her deficiencies – we might have somewhat different ideas about the degree and nature of her shittiness, but I don't think we ultimately disagree that much. But I will ask this: you seem to be of the opinion that the leaks were only as damaging as they were because Clinton was uniquely positioned to be damaged by them. What do you think the EV would be for a full internal campaign leak for a typical candidate in a typical election? I would actually suspect that in typical elections where there aren't so many huge damaging stories on both sides, a leak like this one would actually have a lot more impact. Think about how much damage the 47% remark did to Romney – this is a good example of what I'm talking about. A poorly crafted message, spoken in private where the candidate doesn't think they need to speak so carefully, is spotlighted by opponents and achieves much greater penetration than any of the messaging the candidate puts forward. Imagine how many poor wordings and dumb statements are in the average campaign's internal emails. It's not just limited to stuff the candidate said, either – anything an aide or staffer said is potentially something the other side could get outranged about, demand they resign or get fired, etc.
Leaks aren't really unprecedented; lots of shit gets leaked here and there in different ways at different times. In a standard campaign with sane candidates it would be just one of the many see-saw moments that consume a news cycle, have a small effect, but then get forgotten as something else comes up. When it's something particularly pointed - like a candidate like Romney who looks terribly out of touch shitting on the working man - that hurts because of context, not just content. His attempts not to admit it was stupid didn't help.
I know where you're trying to go with looking at this from an angle that isn't just "this is why Hillary is bad" but the truth is that you simply can't decouple these things. The problems all feed off each other, but when you follow it all up the chain it's hard not to notice the problem common to all of these issues.
And I once again suggest Shattered because it does talk in depth about the problem you mention, on a lack of messaging and how Hillary wasn't really able to put into words the reasons why she was running and what she hoped to accomplish - right from the get-go, until it all slowly came apart and ultimately failed to achieve the intended goal.
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On June 01 2017 14:41 Wulfey_LA wrote:
Why are donations and donors to the DNC so bad? If you want to shitlord the DNC about having donors, you need to establish that they are bad first.
I can give you my perspective on that, for what it's worth. They are bad because the Supreme Court is wrong: when you give a bunch of money to a politician and then he does what you want, it does have the appearance of corruption. The optics are not good, you look like you're the swamp, and even someone like Donald Trump who is ooooobviously the swamp can convince people that he's the candidate that will look out for them simply by using these optics.
Imagine if Trump had attacked Clinton on being the establishment candidate who doesn't care about the people and she could have answered that actually she doesn't use a super-PAC, her only contributions come from small donors and as such she only answers to the people who voted for her? Suddenly Trump's attack makes a lot less sense.
So it's a politically sound move cause it makes you look more electable, but I also believe that it's a sound move in terms of factual reality cause I agree with the premise, I do think most things (everything?) actually do revolve around money interests in Washington, it's not just an appearance of corruption that the Supreme Court pretends it can't see, it is actual corruption at work. And if both of your parties are going to do their donor's bidding to thank them for their money, nobody speaks for the people anymore. The people generally will have conflicting interests on a lot of issues, especially economical ones. If you never listen to them, economic inequality increases, and this is in large part how we get to today.
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On June 01 2017 14:32 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 14:22 ChristianS wrote: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.
Okay. I don't disagree that the Donna Brazile stuff was shady, and I agree they should not do similar stuff in the future. Is that inconsistent with my post in some way?
On June 01 2017 14:40 a_flayer wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 14:22 ChristianS wrote: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.
I don't know why they did as bad a job at messaging as they did. I like to think that GH's objection to the Donna Brazile stuff is genuine and principled, not merely a manifestation of his grudge against Clinton from the primary, so yeah, I hope he would still have cared. Anti-Wall Street is one option for political messaging that certainly did pretty well for Bernie, although to be honest I doubt that messaging would have been nearly as effective for Clinton. Considering much of her appeal that won her the primary was in being more moderate, it would probably undercut one of the few things she seemed to have in her favor. I certainly would have been less likely to vote for her if she took an explicitly socialist tack, instead of a more mild agenda like "more oversight on Wall Street, revamp the SEC" or "undo Citizen's United, bring back campaign finance law." Even if she had tried out rhetoric like that, I think it would just confirm the worst fears of her opponents, and people like GH would still think she was bullshitting.
Are you under the impression that the donors are directly responsible for the political messaging? That seems unlikely in most cases. Certainly donors have stuff they like said more or said less, and candidates are likely to choose messaging that will attract more donor money, which in turn allows them to run more effective messaging campaigns. In Clinton's case I think everyone will agree her messaging problems were not due to lack of funding, so presumably it was an issue with the direction that messaging took. But I see little reason to believe that it was impossible to craft a message that was simple, positive, and didn't run afoul of donors' concerns.
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On June 01 2017 13:08 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote:
This seems unlikely. Can anyone name 1 problem that god has solved by himself in recent history? Cause I sure can't. Does he feel that way about every problem or just this one.
So he thinks every climate change denier will be struck by lightning or what!?
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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 primary was a shitshow because of split opposition to Trump and the ¡Jeb Bush! effect.
If you're talking qualified to lead politically as in political efforts and staffing an administration, he might be the worst Relublican. But for representing interests and being prepared to fight for them, I can't see Trump being the worst.
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On June 01 2017 14:41 Wulfey_LA wrote:
Why are donations and donors to the DNC so bad? If you want to shitlord the DNC about having donors, you need to establish that they are bad first.
This is what is bad, and why I think the DNC messaging is so shite:
As you know, quite a few major Obama raisers and donors have been put off by the way they've been treated. The campaign did not do a good job making them feel like valued members of the team, or creating a two-way communications environment/structure. Raisers are effectively salespeople selling the candidate on the donor marketplace, so their feedback is valuable to HQ in terms of tweaking policy, messaging, tone, etc.
What I'd suggest to get them re-engaged is a positive communication (preferably in person, else by email) which conveys the subtext that the Clinton campaign will handle things differently. This might include:
• Appreciation for supporting Obama and the Party in 2012
• Desire to develop more two-way dialog and improve campaign responsiveness to what's going on at this end of the field.
• Assigning a full-time staff liaison to this community (big donors usually have ideas/advice and want to feel like they are being heard)
• Scheduling regular open Skype meetings to discuss fundraising issues (raisers can often help each other resolve issues through past experience).
Source
Considering that these big donors are not the ones casting the masses of votes that you need, the messaging that gets tweaked to suit them results in the bullshit you got from Clinton on the campaign trail, rather than a simple "fuck the oligarchs" which is all the public needed to hear.
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United States42753 Posts
On June 01 2017 14:56 Nebuchad wrote:
Imagine if Trump had attacked Clinton on being the establishment candidate who doesn't care about the people and she could have answered that actually she doesn't use a super-PAC, her only contributions come from small donors and as such she only answers to the people who voted for her? Suddenly Trump's attack makes a lot less sense.
The problem is that you're assuming that the number of people who vote for Trump because what he says makes sense and would switch to Clinton if he stopped making sense is greater than the number of people who would vote for Clinton because she spends a million dollars on attack ads showing Trump grabbing people by the pussy.
Voters are ill informed and capricious.
Hell, throughout the debates whenever Trump was attacked for not paying taxes he said that Hillary should have done more to stop him. When the vote came to close the loophole Trump was using Hillary did vote for it. She was a senator. What the fuck more should she have done. But the fact that Trump's point didn't make sense didn't matter, he said it loudly and he said it confidently and people like that.
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Bloomberg: '55 percent chance' Trump will win reelection
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinks there's a "55 percent chance" President Trump will be reelected in 2020.
Bloomberg, who politically identifies as independent, told New York Times columnist Frank Bruni that he thought Democrats didn't have an effective message to win the 2016 election and could repeat that mistake in 2020.
“Hillary said, ‘Vote for me because I’m a woman and the other guy’s bad,’” Bloomberg said about 2016.
The Hill
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On June 01 2017 14:56 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 14:32 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 01 2017 14:22 ChristianS wrote: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. Okay. I don't disagree that the Donna Brazile stuff was shady, and I agree they should not do similar stuff in the future. Is that inconsistent with my post in some way? Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 14:40 a_flayer wrote:On June 01 2017 14:22 ChristianS wrote: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. I don't know why they did as bad a job at messaging as they did. I like to think that GH's objection to the Donna Brazile stuff is genuine and principled, not merely a manifestation of his grudge against Clinton from the primary, so yeah, I hope he would still have cared. Anti-Wall Street is one option for political messaging that certainly did pretty well for Bernie, although to be honest I doubt that messaging would have been nearly as effective for Clinton. Considering much of her appeal that won her the primary was in being more moderate, it would probably undercut one of the few things she seemed to have in her favor. I certainly would have been less likely to vote for her if she took an explicitly socialist tack, instead of a more mild agenda like "more oversight on Wall Street, revamp the SEC" or "undo Citizen's United, bring back campaign finance law." Even if she had tried out rhetoric like that, I think it would just confirm the worst fears of her opponents, and people like GH would still think she was bullshitting. Are you under the impression that the donors are directly responsible for the political messaging? That seems unlikely in most cases. Certainly donors have stuff they like said more or said less, and candidates are likely to choose messaging that will attract more donor money, which in turn allows them to run more effective messaging campaigns. In Clinton's case I think everyone will agree her messaging problems were not due to lack of funding, so presumably it was an issue with the direction that messaging took. But I see little reason to believe that it was impossible to craft a message that was simple, positive, and didn't run afoul of donors' concerns.
Winning a democratic primary doesn't win you the independent vote, though, and by the time you win the primary you already have all of the Democrats voting for you anyway, so I don't see how that's a valid train of thought.
Look at my previous post as to why I think that donors have an influence on messaging.
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On June 01 2017 14:56 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 14:32 GreenHorizons wrote:On June 01 2017 14:22 ChristianS wrote: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. Okay. I don't disagree that the Donna Brazile stuff was shady, and I agree they should not do similar stuff in the future. Is that inconsistent with my post in some way? Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 14:40 a_flayer wrote:On June 01 2017 14:22 ChristianS wrote: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. I don't know why they did as bad a job at messaging as they did. I like to think that GH's objection to the Donna Brazile stuff is genuine and principled, not merely a manifestation of his grudge against Clinton from the primary, so yeah, I hope he would still have cared. Anti-Wall Street is one option for political messaging that certainly did pretty well for Bernie, although to be honest I doubt that messaging would have been nearly as effective for Clinton. Considering much of her appeal that won her the primary was in being more moderate, it would probably undercut one of the few things she seemed to have in her favor. I certainly would have been less likely to vote for her if she took an explicitly socialist tack, instead of a more mild agenda like "more oversight on Wall Street, revamp the SEC" or "undo Citizen's United, bring back campaign finance law." Even if she had tried out rhetoric like that, I think it would just confirm the worst fears of her opponents, and people like GH would still think she was bullshitting. Are you under the impression that the donors are directly responsible for the political messaging? That seems unlikely in most cases. Certainly donors have stuff they like said more or said less, and candidates are likely to choose messaging that will attract more donor money, which in turn allows them to run more effective messaging campaigns. In Clinton's case I think everyone will agree her messaging problems were not due to lack of funding, so presumably it was an issue with the direction that messaging took. But I see little reason to believe that it was impossible to craft a message that was simple, positive, and didn't run afoul of donors' concerns.
I'm saying they are still doing and plan to going forward, so they've decided to ignore the idea they shouldn't.
It's genuine and actually lower on my list of grievances than many, but it's one that's undeniable and yet still get's treated like it didn't happen or that the DNC isn't STILL paying her.
She could have won me over, but it would have taken more than words, it would have taken some real action that demonstrated she had seen the error of her ways. But if she would have at least gave me the rhetoric without having to read it I could have stomached voting for her in a swing state (particularly knowing how terrible Trump really is). But I don't blame the people in Michigan that voted D down the ballot and left the President slot empty. She's told the people that have been left behind by her and the Democratic party to eat shit and and call it cake, that's her bad.
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On June 01 2017 15:02 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 14:56 Nebuchad wrote:
Imagine if Trump had attacked Clinton on being the establishment candidate who doesn't care about the people and she could have answered that actually she doesn't use a super-PAC, her only contributions come from small donors and as such she only answers to the people who voted for her? Suddenly Trump's attack makes a lot less sense. The problem is that you're assuming that the number of people who vote for Trump because what he says makes sense and would switch to Clinton if he stopped making sense is greater than the number of people who would vote for Clinton because she spends a million dollars on attack ads showing Trump grabbing people by the pussy. Voters are ill informed and capricious.
Regardless of the number of voters that it can or cannot switch, it's just worse optics. But sure, you're right that I can't create a model for a result with different premises any more than you can, the only thing I can say is that it's hard to end up with worse given that the democratic party is less popular than Trump at the moment.
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On June 01 2017 14:50 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2017 14:41 ChristianS wrote:On June 01 2017 14:23 LegalLord 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? 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. I see I was, in fact, unsuccessful at avoiding hitting reset on the broken record. Yes, Clinton was a problematic candidate in a wide variety of ways. And again, I did not mean my discussion about the difficulties that campaign leaks present for political messaging to in any way excuse the Clinton loss. There were a lot of problems with her as a candidate, and I don't particularly care to dispute any of your specific claims about her deficiencies – we might have somewhat different ideas about the degree and nature of her shittiness, but I don't think we ultimately disagree that much. But I will ask this: you seem to be of the opinion that the leaks were only as damaging as they were because Clinton was uniquely positioned to be damaged by them. What do you think the EV would be for a full internal campaign leak for a typical candidate in a typical election? I would actually suspect that in typical elections where there aren't so many huge damaging stories on both sides, a leak like this one would actually have a lot more impact. Think about how much damage the 47% remark did to Romney – this is a good example of what I'm talking about. A poorly crafted message, spoken in private where the candidate doesn't think they need to speak so carefully, is spotlighted by opponents and achieves much greater penetration than any of the messaging the candidate puts forward. Imagine how many poor wordings and dumb statements are in the average campaign's internal emails. It's not just limited to stuff the candidate said, either – anything an aide or staffer said is potentially something the other side could get outranged about, demand they resign or get fired, etc. Leaks aren't really unprecedented; lots of shit gets leaked here and there in different ways at different times. In a standard campaign with sane candidates it would be just one of the many see-saw moments that consume a news cycle, have a small effect, but then get forgotten as something else comes up. When it's something particularly pointed - like a candidate like Romney who looks terribly out of touch shitting on the working man - that hurts because of context, not just content. His attempts not to admit it was stupid didn't help.
Leaks aren't unprecedented, but this kind of wholesale leaking is. The tape where the 47% comment came was a leak, but it was just one speech. Having all the e-mails from your entire campaign leak isn't just one news cycle, especially if an opposing organization is intentionally dripping them out slowly so you can't just get it all out in one cycle and move on. When has any campaign for US president had so much of their internal operation made public during the campaign before?
I know where you're trying to go with looking at this from an angle that isn't just "this is why Hillary is bad" but the truth is that you simply can't decouple these things. The problems all feed off each other, but when you follow it all up the chain it's hard not to notice the problem common to all of these issues.
Yes, of course, the candidate is relevant to which leaks are most damaging. If it supports a popular narrative against them, or undercuts a popular narrative in their favor, it will likely be more damaging. Every candidate has narratives against them to be supported, though, and hopefully every candidate has narratives in their favor to be undercut. Romney was particularly damaged by "47 percent" because he was already seen as an out of touch rich white guy. Quayle was particularly damaged by the "potato(e)" stuff because he was already seen as an idiot. Trump is particularly damaged by the leak about sharing intelligence with Russia because he's already seen as a Putin shill.
But in any large-scale leak of campaign material in which members of the campaign are speaking freely, you're likely to find some stuff to support whatever attack narrative you're painting about them, or to undercut whatever positive narrative they're trying to sell (unless, in Hillary's case, they don't have a positive narrative they're selling in the first place). So no, it is entirely possible to discuss the impact that more frequent cybersecurity hacks and leaks are likely to have on future elections without focusing on Hillary's flaws as a candidate (although it is an incredibly characteristic thing for LegalLord to think it's impossible to discuss something without talking about how bad Hillary was/is).
And I once again suggest Shattered because it does talk in depth about the problem you mention, on a lack of messaging and how Hillary wasn't really able to put into words the reasons why she was running and what she hoped to accomplish - right from the get-go, until it all slowly came apart and ultimately failed to achieve the intended goal.
My "to read" list is already longer than I'd like, but I'll try to check it out at some point. Maybe when the next election season is a little closer.
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Complaining about donors who regularly meet with high levels of the party having more influence than people who NEVER talk to someone at the DNC is childish and naive. So what that donors are able to reach out to party leaders and influence things. How else do you think party policy gets formulated? Did you think the party would represent you without you actually participating or supporting the party in some way?
EDIT: Do you really think that a party can run without donations? Or donations in large sums? Most working class people can't afford to support political parties. That is just how it is. How about you inspect your own biases here. Why are you shitlording the DNC over donations that must exist for the Dems to have any hope of resisting the Right in the USA? Even the responses above acknowledge that it is more about appearances. What makes you so vulnerable to suspicions about appearances?
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On June 01 2017 09:20 LegalLord wrote:
Real question is, how do pronounce covfefe?
I do cov-feh-fey
cov-feev
As for how it came to be. Really? Never fallen asleep at your keyboard? Or fatfingered something? I've written and sent far more incoherent shit than a single typo and unfinished sentence. But not on serious channels. More like ingame chat or drunken whatsapp.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
Not every leak gets people to care. The media cycles move fast and while it may be interesting to know how much of a jerk Johnny was to Sally within Clinton's campaign team, we eventually move on. Unless there's something that keeps us stuck to that point because it keeps coming up. Remember Bernie Sanders' rape letter? Probably not because while I guess that's part of a wholesale aspect of a candidate it's just not very interesting in terms of an actual campaign.
The reason the entire emails matter, and later the DNC matter, kept coming up was because Hillary did everything she could over the years to create the reputation that she considered herself above the law and that she loved her cronies. Every time it came up she went right ahead and reinforced that narrative. The DNC matter and the Podesta leak was most interesting in the sense that it reinforced that narrative. The shit DWS said, the aid that Donna Brazile gave to Hillary, and so on. Most of that "wholesale leaking" loses its meaning if it doesn't effectively reinforce an open issue. It wasn't just anything you could possibly find, it was just what people expected to find and got some confirmation.
There are a lot of good summaries if you want a short version. What was most striking, though, is how the course of her campaign reflects the aftermath quite perfectly: a game of cronyism with an incompetent leader, constant unwillingness to accept responsibility for wrongdoing, and tone deafness as to how real voters perceive her.
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On June 01 2017 15:17 Wulfey_LA wrote:
Complaining about donors who regularly meet with high levels of the party having more influence than people who NEVER talk to someone at the DNC is childish and naive. So what that donors are able to reach out to party leaders and influence things. How else do you think party policy gets formulated? Did you think the party would represent you without you actually participating or supporting the party in some way?
EDIT: Do you really think that a party can run without donations? Or donations in large sums? Most working class people can't afford to support political parties. That is just how it is. How about you inspect your own biases here. Why are you shitlording the DNC over donations that must exist for the Dems to have any hope of resisting the Right in the USA? Even the responses above acknowledge that it is more about appearances. What makes you so vulnerable to suspicions about appearances?
I understand everything you are saying perfectly well, but do you understand this: Working class people that do not participate in the DNC nor send money CAN and DO support political parties - by voting them into office. One vote per person is how you win in the end. If the messaging get clogged up by the donors, and the messaging as tweaked by the donors doesn't appeal to the people, then you don't get votes. It's a simple as that.
You need votes to win, so you have to balance your messaging between getting votes and appealing to the money that donates to you. Votes are counted at the booth. Donations aren't. Donations help finance the marketing part of the campaign, but that doesn't equate to votes unless the messaging is on-point.
As an afterthought: maybe HRC could have pledged not to assign any bankers to her cabinet or something. That would have won me over if I'd been able to vote, provided she had made the pledge convincing enough.
Edit: also, unless I am mistaken, isn't this one of the few times where the biggest pool of donations DIDN'T win?
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On June 01 2017 13:08 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote:This seems unlikely. Can anyone name 1 problem that god has solved by himself in recent history? Cause I sure can't. Does he feel that way about every problem or just this one. https://twitter.com/TIME/status/870112720078729216
Let's see what parable fits here. Yes. How about this one?
A fellow was stuck on his rooftop in a flood. He was praying to God for help.
Soon a man in a rowboat came by and the fellow shouted to the man on the roof, "Jump in, I can save you."
The stranded fellow shouted back, "No, it's OK, I'm praying to God and he is going to save me."
So the rowboat went on.
Then a motorboat came by. "The fellow in the motorboat shouted, "Jump in, I can save you."
To this the stranded man said, "No thanks, I'm praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith."
So the motorboat went on.
Then a helicopter came by and the pilot shouted down, "Grab this rope and I will lift you to safety."
To this the stranded man again replied, "No thanks, I'm praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith."
So the helicopter reluctantly flew away.
Soon the water rose above the rooftop and the man drowned. He went to Heaven. He finally got his chance to discuss this whole situation with God, at which point he exclaimed, "I had faith in you but you didn't save me, you let me drown. I don't understand why!"
To this God replied, "I sent you a rowboat and a motorboat and a helicopter, what more did you expect?"
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EPT
