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MakeAmericaSaneAgain. A 2016 political campaign.

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The AdjectiveName branding strategy is excellent and one of the more brilliant of Trump's campaigning moves. It makes sense for us to use it for things like #WickedWalker and #BankruptTrump, because it's a great use of twitter. Provided that we use it right. There's a massive difference between using this branding strategy and going full Trump-style negative.

Publicola's right that Christie's savage attacks on Rubio didn't help him win the New Hampshire primary, because he gave voters reasons not to vote Rubio, but failed to convince him why they should vote for him. In a 2-way race like the general, this is okay because you're the only other choice. Either they swap to you or stay home. But in a primary, there's 14 other people to choose from. Their second choice for Rubio wasn't Christie, but Kasich, which is why the votes went to him. The lesson is simple: It's okay to unload on Walker for this scandal, but we also need to give people reasons to vote for George Pataki. Which we are doing. The tone of our campaign is still very positive.

yidgamer said:
Look deeper down the rabbit hole. There are more in-depth articles about how Libby Pataki was using these organizations, funded with taxpayer money, to pay herself a six-figure salary while they did very little and had no board to hold her accountable.
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Just spin it into a sexism thing. They're complaining that a woman like Libby shouldn't be allowed to make a great salary when she's brilliant and well qualified.
 
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Stealthy said:
The AdjectiveName branding strategy is excellent and one of the more brilliant of Trump's campaigning moves. It makes sense for us to use it for things like #WickedWalker and #BankruptTrump, because it's a great use of twitter. Provided that we use it right. There's a massive difference between using this branding strategy and going full Trump-style negative.
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Ok, I'm sold on the use for hashtags only. Trump uses it at rallies and such which lowers the level of discourse tremendously.
Stealthy said:
Just spin it into a sexism thing. They're complaining that a woman like Libby shouldn't be allowed to make a great salary when she's brilliant and well qualified.
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That spin wouldn't work. She ran two orgs with the same purpose to double her salary: one was limited and had an outdated website. One basically doesn't exist at all. It's indefensible.
 
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You misunderstanding spin. The point is that we take the question from being "Did Libby Pataki use unethical practices to cheat the taxpayers?" to "Do the candidates attacking Libby Pataki think she's being paid too much because she's a woman?" and "How dare you go after my wife!". Question 1 isn't a winning battle, so we're not gonna fight it. But Question 2 is something we can work with. I mean, I'm sure there may be a better Question 2 that we can use, but that's the main concept. It's what we did with the Trump B&E story. We immediately changed it from "Pataki breaks into Trump campaign" to "NYT uses dishonest journalism". And it seems to have worked pretty well.
 
Wait, a solution to all of this. Clearly, the article was only written rather recently. All we need to do is, as Laxalt, through the history of the Pataki's. When we two are complete surprise find the issue, we fix it.
 
Artemis said:
Wait, a solution to all of this. Clearly, the article was only written rather recently. All we need to do is, as Laxalt, through the history of the Pataki's. When we two are complete surprise find the issue, we fix it.
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I'm not sure our reseach department is competent enough to conduct oppo research on Pataki, at least not thoroughly enough to ensure that there are no skeletons in the closet that we don't know about. That said, we should get on that when our research team eventually gets upgraded to 3, which might take a while with the rolls we get on research actions.
 
Stealthy said:
You misunderstanding spin. The point is that we take the question from being "Did Libby Pataki use unethical practices to cheat the taxpayers?" to "Do the candidates attacking Libby Pataki think she's being paid too much because she's a woman?" and "How dare you go after my wife!". Question 1 isn't a winning battle, so we're not gonna fight it. But Question 2 is something we can work with. I mean, I'm sure there may be a better Question 2 that we can use, but that's the main concept. It's what we did with the Trump B&E story. We immediately changed it from "Pataki breaks into Trump campaign" to "NYT uses dishonest journalism". And it seems to have worked pretty well.
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Fair point. It's dishonest, but it is how spin works. I probably wouldn't be convinced by such a spin, but it would be up to the dice, I suppose.
Artemis said:
Wait, a solution to all of this. Clearly, the article was only written rather recently. All we need to do is, as Laxalt, through the history of the Pataki's. When we two are complete surprise find the issue, we fix it.
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The problem with this idea is that with Pataki doing so so much better in this version of the primary than in the real one, this could very well be uncovered much sooner with more thorough vetting being directed Pataki's way. Maybe we should directly ask Pataki about skeletons in his closet. We probably should have done that anyway. He might not really think it's a big deal, however.
 
yidgamer said:
Fair point. It's dishonest, but it is how spin works. I probably wouldn't be convinced by such a spin, but it would be up to the dice, I suppose.
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It doesn't really matter if you would be convinced by it, since you've already researched the issue. The point of spin is to angle the story early on to deflect the criticism. It usually doesn't work with people that have already formed an informed opinion on the scandal/news story.
yidgamer said:
The problem with this idea is that with Pataki doing so so much better in this version of the primary than in the real one, this could very well be uncovered much sooner with more thorough vetting being directed Pataki's way. Maybe we should directly ask Pataki about skeletons in his closet. We probably should have done that anyway. He might not really think it's a big deal, however.
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Oppo-research during the Republican primaries was terrible, so I don't think you have too much to worry about on that front. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it but it's not an immediate worry since even Trump as the front runner was able to get through the primaries with few scandals that weren't his own doing.
 
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tbf, everybody thought Trump's self-inflicted scandals would kill him. Then they didn't. Also Harry literally just dumped a oppo research scandal on Walker that's killed off his campaign.
 
Stealthy said:
tbf, everybody thought Trump's self-inflicted scandals would kill him. Then they didn't.
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There was plenty of time to correct that mistake during the primaries, even after Super Tuesday. The fact that they didn't means they're incompetent or delusional. (EDIT: Or honorable, which is even worse)
Stealthy said:
Also Harry literally just dumped a oppo research scandal on Walker that's killed off his campaign.
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Which didn't happen IRL. That's the whole point. Jeb or some of the other candidates should've uncovered this when Walker was the front runner but they didn't because they suck at oppo research.
 
Republicans usually don't go digging into each other skeletons a good example would the 2012 primary where Newt Gingrich hit Romney with the "The American people know there's a difference between venture capitalism and vulture capitalism" he lost a lot of support from the bigwigs from that and dropped that line of attack pretty quickly. It goes back to Ronald Reagan and his 11th commandment "Thou Shalt Not Speak ill of a fellow Republican". Democratic primaries are far more vicious.
 
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veekie said:
It's all devastating scandals...which his core supporters don't care about and scores a lot of free media attention.
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Also, the scandals & media attention just reaffirm his supporters' belief that the media is being biased towards Hilary, because where are her emails/Bengazhi/etc???
 
Malaquez said:
Also, the scandals & media attention just reaffirm his supporters' belief that the media is being biased towards Hilary, because where are her emails/Bengazhi/etc???
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No, they moved passed that. Now it is the Emails don't count because Russia touched them and the same somehow goes for her bank speeches.
 
I woke up this morning, and I'm getting serious déjà-vu to walking down on morning in the UK, watching the pound crash.
 
I feel that we can be optimistic. This election is proof that democracy exists, and that people *do* have a voice. The issue was, there wasn't a good candidate. I see 2020 (or earlier, depending on impeachment) having a lot more options, and a lot more voices. Trump, at the end of the day, has as much power as the people give him, and there will be enough republicans who will push back.

I also think Republicans might turn themselves around, and become something the educated middle class might vote for. It depends on whether Trump is going to go forward again for 2020, but I think they'll start to change.

I'll start to feel more scared if Le Pen gets traction with this. Having nationalists in charge is going to end in war.
 
Artemis said:
I feel that we can be optimistic. This election is proof that democracy exists, and that people *do* have a voice. The issue was, there wasn't a good candidate. I see 2020 (or earlier, depending on impeachment) having a lot more options, and a lot more voices. Trump, at the end of the day, has as much power as the people give him, and there will be enough republicans who will push back.

I also think Republicans might turn themselves around, and become something the educated middle class might vote for. It depends on whether Trump is going to go forward again for 2020, but I think they'll start to change.

I'll start to feel more scared if Le Pen gets traction with this. Having nationalists in charge is going to end in war.
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If the Democrats controlled even one of the institutions I'd be alright, I'm sure that they'd be able to stall any ludicrous ideas Trump comes up with.
I rember a quote I read once that said something like "The purpose of Checks and Balances is to insure that the President is not the most powerful man in the world, the Vice President is."
I'm just really concerned that the Checks are only in place for this as long as Trump doesn't have the support of his party.
 
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