Trump has identified a clear problem to which many Republican voters respond: America doesn’t “win anymore.” And he has offered a simple solution that only he can provide: Trump “will make America great again.”
The fact that the problem and solution are laughably vague is a virtue. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been forgettable exactly because she has insisted on promoting a myriad of highly specific solutions to very concrete problems before she has laid out the one big problem she wants to solve. (In fact, it’s not so different from how Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign of “hope and change” crushed Clinton’s campaign of policy white papers.)
.. Again, Obama’s historic 2008 campaign is a good point of comparison: the vague promise of “hope and change” was married to an enormously sophisticated national operation that tended to the mechanics of winning the delegates needed to capture his party’s nomination.
How I Helped Todd Akin Win — So I Could Beat Him Later
Tom Kiley, my pollster, turned up some findings that seemed crazy to me. For example, less than one quarter of the likely Republican primary voters believed that Barack Obama had been born in the United States. These were the voters who could help tip a Republican primary to an archconservative, but that conservative would have a hard time winning the state.
.. Using the guidance of my campaign staff and consultants, we came up with the idea for a “dog whistle” ad, a message that was pitched in such a way that it would be heard only by a certain group of people. I told my team we needed to put Akin’s uber-conservative bona fides in an ad—and then, using reverse psychology, tell voters not to vote for him. And we needed to run the hell out of that ad.
.. Sure enough, a radio ad calling Akin “too conservative” that went on the air in the closing days of the primary was paid for by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. We would later find out that their rural radio buy was $250,000.
.. As it turned out, we spent more money for Todd Akin in the last two weeks of the primary than he spent on his whole primary campaign.
The Biden Formation Story
If Democrats are arguing over what positions to fight for, Republicans are arguing about how to fight.
Republican presidential candidates have found that the strongest way to win favor on the stump is to attack the leaders of their party in Congress for being timid and inept. Many Republican voters are alienated from their party’s leadership. They’re looking for a candidate who can lead a mutiny.
..Donald Trump’s mutiny story is pretty clear. In doing business deal after business deal, he mastered the skills needed to take on the morons who are now running the party and the world. Ben Carson’s story is clear, too. Through his faith and through his medical career he developed the purity of heart and the discipline of will required to walk into Washington without being corrupted by the rottenness found there.
Marshall Mcluhan: 3 transformed elections
Twice before in the last hundred years a new medium has transformed elections. In the 1920s, radio disembodied candidates, reducing them to voices. It also made national campaigns far more intimate. Politicians, used to bellowing at fairgrounds and train depots, found themselves talking to families in their homes. The blustery rhetoric that stirred big, partisan crowds came off as shrill and off-putting when piped into a living room or a kitchen. Gathered around their wireless sets, the public wanted an avuncular statesman, not a firebrand. With Franklin Roosevelt, master of the soothing fireside chat, the new medium found its ideal messenger.
.. What’s important now is not so much image as personality. But, as the Trump phenomenon reveals, it’s only a particular kind of personality that works—one that’s big enough to grab the attention of the perpetually distracted but small enough to fit neatly into a thousand tiny media containers. It might best be described as a Snapchat personality. It bursts into focus at regular intervals without ever demanding steady concentration.
.. all three see a modern political discourse that is broken by a lack of physicality and shared context, as well as by a focus on charisma and emotion over content.
.. Is this what 2016 will look like—a mess of politicians bombarding their voters with Twitter battles, Instagram selfies, Snapchat updates, and Youtube videos? Everyone fighting to have the loudest voice and largest personality?
If Carr is right, our methods of reading and sharing news almost guarantee it.