In the ‘Be careful what you wish for’ category …
Is it just me, or did Joni Ernst just effectively announce that she wants to kill farm subsidies? Of course, how effectively she announced it will depend on whether her opponent, Bruce Braley, picks up this ball and runs with it.
Although maybe she’s talking about something else she thinks is pork.
Be careful what you wish for, Iowa voters.
This is the perfect opening for Braley to inform the public about the really dramatic reduction in federal spending in the last few years–and what, exactly, the effects are. (Tuition at public universities; medical research; etc. Y’know; all the stuff that Obama should point out, but doesn’t trouble himself to.)
And, speaking of out-of-the-mouths-of-babes admissions, this one is downright-comically jaw-dropping—and presumably will be mentioned in the soon-to-be-filed “cert” petitions to the Supreme Court in the slew of voter-ID/voter-access cases that have made headlines in the last month.
I mean … seriously … how dumb is Chris Christi? I do suspect that by now most people know they shouldn’t buy the deed to that bridge he’s selling. But just in case they didn’t know before ….
One of the things that really bothers me about Democratic Party advertising is that it fails to engage the opposition candidate’s claims as they are in the last few weeks.
The DCCC is particularly at fault. They make their commercials, put them in a can and run them until we are all sick to death of them. Meanwhile, the Republican with better consultants may have finessed to a position that either says or strongly implies, falsely at least in some respect, that the Democrats are lying about him or her, and it’s left at that, with the Democrats failing to respond.
We are seeing that in the race for Brad Schneider’s seat in the 10th District in Illinois. The DCCC commercial that’s been running for a couple of weeks says the Republican, Bob Dold (when he was in Congress before) voted 10 times against a woman’s right to choose, while the Republican candidate is, uncharacteristically but necessarily in this kind of district, claiming to be the “moderate” who is “pro-choice.” As of yet, and I doubt if we ever will, we have not seen a Democratic responsive commercial that says, “Bob Dold claims he is pro-choice [moderate], but here are the facts. . . .” What the voter gets is two commercials continuing to talk past each other — not much of an aid in decision-making — while Dold happily sees this so-called “moderate” image stick.
Tammy Duckworth lost to Peter Roskam in 2006 at least in part because of the DCCC’s failure to respond to an effective counter by Roskam against what appeared to be poorly-researched claims against him by the DCCC. Instead, the Democrats went only with what they already had in the can, primarily showing Duckworth’s heroic service in Iraq. They never seem nimble enough to anticipate what kind of messages might be necessary in the last two or three weeks of a tight election and deliver a new commercial. It is not impossible to do new commercials quickly. Keep your voice-over talent on hold, for one thing.
Of course, one of the problems we see in the same commercial being run over and over and over and over and over from September until election day is that it destroys the credibility of the hourly requests for money from umpteen different organizations.
FWIW
From: The Rising Tide: Will All Boats Be Lifted?, August 01, 2014, by Richard Reeves
… The crucial factor, Podhorzer found, is Democrats’ vote share among voters making less than $50,000: … whether Democrats win these voters by a 10-point or a 20-point margin tells you who won every national election for the last decade. … To reach these voters, Podhorzer believes, candidates need to focus on the economic issues of the working class. ‘Economic populism decides who wins elections in America,’ he said.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_rising_tide_will_all_boats_be_lifted_20140801