Combating The National Republican Fear Campaign?
It is well understood by communications experts that fear is an extremely powerful emotion to reverse. The RNC is executing a powerful national campaign of fear, based mostly on ISIL and Ebola. It is grounded in their national and local messaging strategy that government doesn’t work, especially an Obama/Pelosi government.
The DNC, by our own Chair’s pronouncement a few months back, has no national branding or messaging strategy. Premise for the 2014 cycle…all politics are local. That premise has been pretty well debunked a few years back with the Gingrich Contract With America campaign.
So, the DNC’s major message to us, without reminders as to the central idea our party stands for, send money. Lots of it. Send more money. Our fear message? The Republicans are coming. Some of it is actually being used by local Democratic campaigns to denounce their own party and its accomplishments of late.
So, America, be very much afraid. No reminders from the DNC that we have mostly contained radical Islam to their middle eastern back yard and kept you safe in your own American back yard and are vigilant on that mission. No reminders that Ebola is contained in west Africa and we are actively assisting infected countries to contain the disease there and bolstering our defenses here.
Yes, memories are short. America is seldom reminded that in the meantime, this Democratic President and a Democratic congress literally saved the world economy from collapse, introduced monumental healthcare reform to provide care for millions previously abandoned, ended two horrific wars and has made great progress toward restoring a job market that was in collapse.
The national media, even alternative and social media has been allowed to fixate on fear, relentless fear mongering on ISIL and Ebola, with an ineffective PR and public information effort from the DNC and our Administration.
Local media has been bombarded with disparate and uncoordinated Democratic candidate and pathetically little local Party messaging on a myriad of issues, largely overwhelmed by the audience/readership building stories about ISIL and Ebola. In the meantime, local Republican messaging programs have been much better synced with the RNC messaging program.
Save a possible “October Surprise” from the Obama Administration, I see little prospect of averting a Republican bloodbath and little prospect of a sizable Democratic turnout. Maybe the magical new targeting vehicles to mobilize our Democratic majority will kick in with highly motivating messages to get us off our couches. But less than a month out, I see and read little evidence of this.
There’s plenty of evidence that fear will mobilize the Republican base and paralyze some of the Democratic base.
I hope I’m wrong. I really hope.
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Mr Merriman (?) wrote:
Seems like that’s just about right, because several Democratic Senate candidates, both incumbents like Mark Pryor and Kay Hagan and challengers like Alison Grimes, are running away from President Obama as hard as they can, in the states where he is unpopular.
So, what will be the lesson? Assuming that the polls are close to correct, Senator Hagan will eke out a close win, while Senator Pryor and Mrs Grimes will lose. Does that mean that running away from a liberal Democratic president didn’t work, except when it did in North Carolina? Or will it be held that Senator Hagan didn’t run as far away from President Obama as did some of the others, and that’s why she won?
We have a liberal President now? Since when?
Ebola and ISIS are being hyped to the roof and beyond right now, I see neither as a motivator for the Republican base nor as an intimidator for the Dem base. In addition I suspect the media will burn itself out on these two like they have done with all the rest ( Benghazi!!!). I do suspect that Ferguson may well be a more lasting motivator for blacks as a whole. Sadly I do think Grimes will lose, it was always a long shot at best.
Mr 330, we sure don’t have a conservative one!
Mr bamboozer wrote:
It wasn’t as long a shot as you might think: as of May 20, 2014, there were 1,672,664 registered Democrats compared to 1,196,183 registered Republican voters in the Bluegrass State, and Democrats control both the state House of Representatives and the gubernatorial seat; the GOP has the majority in the state Senate.
But Kentucky Democrats are moderate to conservative Democrats, not nearly as liberal as the Democratic Party at the federal level. They are the United Mine Workers Democrats of eastern Kentucky as well as the further left Democrats in Louisville. Mrs Grimes tried to appeal to them, and I think that she had a decent chance at it, but she made some major campaign mistakes. The silly notion that she’s not going to say whether she voted for Barack Obama because of the privacy of the polling place might be technically correct, but she was a delegate to the 2008 and 2012 Democratic National Conventions, an Obama delegate in the latter one. It’s just assumed that she voted for President Obama, and saying so wouldn’t have hurt her in the slightest . . . but the way she handled it has.
Thing is, Mrs Grimes isn’t a novice candidate: she won statewide office, as Secretary of State, by first defeating the incumbent Democrat (who had been appointed, not elected) in the primary, and the Republican nominee in the fall of 2012. She’s the daughter of Jerry Lundergan, a former Kentucky Democratic chairman and state representative, and the Lundergans and the Beshears are the two most prominent Democratic political families in the state. But, let’s face it: the Secretary of State race isn’t on the same intensity level as that for a United States Senate seat.
I don’t live in Kentucky any longer — though that’s where we’ll retire in five years — but I keep in touch with family and old friends. Most of my hometown friends will be voting for Senator McConnell, but there are several vociferous Grimes supporters. One of my sisters will be voting for Mrs Grimes, while the other, along with her husband, will vote for Mr McConnell.
I think that the race will turn out closer than expected, but with Mr McConnell still winning.
One of the interesting ads in Kentucky, by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, claims that thirty years in Washington has changed Mitch McConnell, with the implication that he used to represent Kentucky, but doesn’t any longer. That sort of plays into the idea that Kentuckians were right to have elected him in the past, but it’s no longer right.
“Mr 330, we sure don’t have a conservative one!”
It depends on the definition of conservative. Once upon a time, a president who kept the country from an economic collapse and saw the Dow more than double on his watch would have earned accolades from Republicans who were considered conservative. Of course, those Republicans didn’t care so much about policing the uteri of the nation’s women, so they wouldn’t be considered conservative by today’s mutated meaning of the word.
Mr. Obama is, at root, a corporatist — as opposed to say Mr. Romney, who was what we used to call a “financier.” For many decades, that word carried malignant connotations, because they were seen to have wrecked the world’s economy. As those who were adults in the Depression died off, the ’80s happened. the economic caution that had ruled since the end of WWII died with them. People like Mr. Romney are capitalism’s hyenas. He had no idea how to create jobs; his entire experience was in eliminating them (and don’t bring up the olympics; he made that work with billions in federal money).
Mr. Obama, by contrast, puts his trust in the country’s dominant corporations. In direct opposition to what our ill-informed conservatives say, he has allowed a marked increase in petrochemical extraction; a liberal would have held up the fracking revolution until we learned more about the downside. He did not seek to hold anyone in the Bush administration accountable for the lies that convinced the public that invading Iraq was a good idea; a liberal would have worked with Congress to at least hold hearings. This is a pretty reasonable sign that he believed what he was saying about bipartisanship. This monumental favor got him nothing from people like you but more scorn. Likewise, he turned the page on the financial meltdown rather than putting the screws to Goldman Sachs, as a populist would.
In short, you’re too near-sighted to have any idea what kind of president Obama is.
Geezer is spot on. Obama is a “new” Democrat. Like Markell, Carper, Carney, and Coons.
Obama’s healthcare reform was……..a republican idea.
Throw the commoners some social issues like LGBT equality (because that doesn’t cost money) and talk alot but never deliver on anything resembling liberal/progressive policies.
>It depends on the definition of conservative. Once upon a time, a president who kept the country from an economic collapse and saw the Dow more than double on his watch would have earned accolades from Republicans who were considered conservative.
I couldn’t agree more. Nixon was considered “conservative”. The modern day Republicans would call him a communist.
It’s about fear. Tell everyone the Ebola danger is small, but under control. Have the head of the CDC speak out load and clear to the nation that you are monitoring the few folks exposed to the virus. THEN, put an exposed, infected healthcare worker on an airplane, tell everyone she shouldn’t have been on the plane from the mouth of your CDC expert. THEN confirm she called the CDC 3x and asked can I get on the airplane with a fever? Sit back and watch the media feast on the story, watch the concern (fear) grow exponentially and “blame” republicans for running a “fear campaign”.
No wonder the “D’s” want to ban all guns. Instead of Ebola, just think of the electoral carnage we could cause with a few bullets dropped around the White House and a couple of guns in the closet. The PR clowns in the administration might just shoot themselves in the head. Another successful R “fear campaign”. Sometimes we just get more credit than we deserve. Sometimes this works because Goverment, well, just is…really incompetent.
FYI: Many of the people freaking out over Ebola viewed the H1N1 flu vaccine as a government plot. Just sayin’
Mayor Quinby once said; People please, we’re all frightened and horny. We can’t let a few killer dolphins keep us from living and scoring.
What constitutes a bloodbath? We can all speak in hyperbole, but care to put up some numbers of house and senate seats lost?