If you haven’t heard about Mitt Romney’s $10,000 bet, chances are you weren’t on Twitter during the Iowa GOP Candidates Debate on 10 December and the days following.

Mitt’s bet is a good example of how social media is changing political news reporting. Since the dawn of time, political reports have listened hard for good (“gotcha”) quotes and sound bites that sum up a debate, announcement or interview. Now, social media is changing the way journalists pick their sound bites, by amplifying certain quotes and giving journalists a real-time gauge of public sentiment.

Tweet via @blakehounshell - managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

Within minutes of the fated bet, Twitter started buzzing. While analysts mostly ignored it, the social media response was strong. The Twitter hashtag #What10kbuys was added alongside a lot of the #IowaDebate and #GOPDebate posts. Eventually, it started trending in its own right.

Social media amplifies

The Mitt Romney #What10kbuys debacle shows that social media can amplify your message to all corners. A few years ago, Romney’s comment would have gone reported in a nfew newspapers, for a single day. The social media reaction to Romney has shown that what you say as a candidate will get widely promoted — and most of it is outside your control.

The amplification is not what you say about your campaign, it’s what everyone else is saying. It allows an undercurrent of sentiment to become mainstream — like the strong response that was appalled by the cavalier way that Romeny made a $10,000 bet as though it were a dollar-bet.

Another good example is the video of Rick Perry appearing to be drunk at while giving a speech. This video went viral, although the speech and event itself was fairly minor and uninteresting.

Social media scrutinises

After  the debate, the Democrats tweeted:

DNC: We want to know #what10Kbuys for you and your family. #IowaDebate

This helped not only to spread Romney’s comments further, but helped ensure that even people who weren’t watching the debate or following the GOP primaries have heard of it. What’s more, Romney’s defenders on Twitter have kept the hashtag going by trying to use it to attack Obama and the Democrats — leaving confused people days later to try to find out what it is all about.

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1. Social Media for Unions E-Book
2. Social media and real political change
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Back in March 2009, when Obama was riding high from his historic win, and Rudd was still basking in the post-Apology glow, I wrote:

…the US Republicans are cannibalising themselves, that they are struggling to find a leader, and that they have no clear strategy for combating Obama and the Democrat machine.

Only two years later, the picture is very different. Paul Krugman in the NYTs writes:

Last week, President Obama offered a spirited defense of his party’s values — in effect, of the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. Immediately thereafter, as always happens when Democrats take a stand, the civility police came out in force. The president, we were told, was being too partisan; he needs to treat his opponents with respect; he should have lunch with them, and work out a consensus.

Everywhere we look, progressive politics are on the defensive. Labor is struggling here, the Democrats are still reeling after the mid-term elections in the US, and UK Labour won’t be able to reverse its massive loss for another four years.

Krugman’s thesis is that Democrats need to stand up to the conservative onslaught. He calls out the media narrative of “bipartisanship” and “civility” as being little more than a sop for conservative Democrats and Republicans cutting taxes for the wealthy and running down public services.

Don't Think of an Elephant (Photo courtesy: epSos.de)

Over at The Political Sword, the pseudonymous HillbillySkeleton invokes (without credit) George Lakoff’s “Don’t Think of an Elephant” in seeking to explain the “nervousness” of the ALP and the “effectiveness” of the Liberals. Lakoff’s explanation of the conservative “frame” of “tax relief” is applied to Abbott’s “great big new tax” sloganeering.

I am sure that Lakoff’s “Don’t Think of an Elephant” did the rounds back in 2004 in Australia – I remember it back at university – and I am also sure that the likes of Gillard and Swan – and other Ministers – would both have read it (it is very short). Yet incredibly, our PM and DPM and many in Cabinet continue to use “tax relief” or removing the “regulatory burden” in press conferences and interviews.

This week, the conservative criticism of the Federal Budget is that it is “made in China“. This stirs the pot in several ways. It implies that any good news in the budget is not due to Labor’s fiscal management. It implies that Labor has made Australia beholden to the Chinese. It implies that Labor’s budget is shoddy, cheap or not well made. Lakoff would say that the conservatives have “framed” the Budget debate. (Conservative spin-doctors like Frank Luntz would call it “context”.)

The “made in China” label should never be used by Labor – even in dismissing it. Yet we had Wayne Swan on the radio this week saying something to the effect that “this budget is not made in China” and “the budget surplus of 2013 will not be made in China”.

While Lakoff is off the mark in much of his political analysis, his cognitive analysis of politics in my view is spot on. Using conservative phrases and slogans simply serves to reinforce the conservative message. Lakoff explains how this happens at a cognitive level. If you haven’t read “Don’t Think of an Elephant” yet, get it here (and also read “The Political Mind“).

Back in 2009, Republican “wise-man” Fred Malek said that the Republican’s best bet was to wander around waiting for the economy to tarnish Obama. That’s just what has happened. I’ve written before about my view that the Republican surge in the mid-terms was more of a vote against incumbents than a vote of confidence in the GOP. Similarly, the thrashing that UK Labour received at the General Election was as much due to the Global Financial Crisis as the charisma-less Gordon Brown (whose lustre came off as the economy tanked).

Rudd’s political fortunes also tracked downward as unemployment (and underemployment) tracked upward – with the CPRS backdown being the double-underline in voter’s minds that they didn’t know what Rudd stood for anymore.

Krugman’s call for a “frank discussion of our differences” is really a call for Democrats (and by extension, Labor in Australia) to articulate what they stand for. Given the great Progressive Australia conference last weekend, which talked a lot about progressive values, I really agree with Krugman on this one.

Related posts:

1. Republicans struggling, near bottom
2. China’s Carbon Emissions: A Thinking Point at CPD
3. Pelosi, party discipline and policy

It now appears that Tony Abbott’s tactics in Parliament of consistent obstruction and negativity is directly lifted from the extreme Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell.

Republican Dalek Mitch McConnell with John Boehner

While reading a profile on McConnell in The Atlantic Magazine, I came across a discussion of his tactics that seem remarkably familiar.

But McConnell didn’t waste the crisis, either. He has used it to chart a path back from oblivion for the Republican Party, mainly by blocking or delaying Democratic bills and then raising an outcry about the travesties being perpetrated on the country. Democrats may have won on health care, the stimulus, Wall Street reform, and a host of other measures that made the last Congress the most productive in a generation. But, at least for now, they have lost the political battle. Significant numbers of Americans disapprove of these policies, especially the expansion of health care. Many of them have been convinced by McConnell’s skillful exertions— especially his gift for scornful neologisms, which has helped to demonize not just Democratic policies but the very manner in which they came into being. (Roger Ailes, the Fox News chairman, was a campaign adviser early in McConnell’s career.) If you got upset when you heard about the “Cornhusker Kickback” or the “Louisiana Purchase”—or perhaps you were lectured by a Fox News–watching relative who did—that was McConnell. He coined the terms to cast sinister aspersions on what were actually typical instances of political horse-trading, in this case over health care.

Scornful neologisms may not be evident in the Australian context, but Abbott’s relentless use of the three-word slogan “no new tax” and describing everything as a “great big tax” is clearly aimed to demonise Labor’s policies.

Forgive me while I excerpt a large part of The Atlantic article, but I’m sure you’ll find it illuminating:

They went about this by escalating an arms race that had been building in the Senate for the better part of a decade: the increasingly aggressive use of rules and procedures by successive minorities to frustrate the will of the majority. The very first bill to be considered on the Senate floor in the 111th Congress, in early January of 2009, before Obama was even inaugurated, was the Public Land Management Act, a sweeping conservation measure with broad bipartisan support that would protect 2 million acres of parks and wilderness in nine states. The Republicans filibustered, forcing a series of votes and requiring a weekend session to finish. The bill eventually passed, 77–20.

The same tactics were deployed against most other initiatives, and expanded into new realms. Traditionally, only votes on the most controversial judicial nominees had been delayed or filibustered, although the number crept upward during Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s presidencies. Under McConnell, Republicans have also filibustered noncontroversial nominees, many later confirmed unanimously. They have filibustered even nominees put forward by Republican senators, and required separate votes for district-court judges, who used to be confirmed in groups as a matter of routine. The resulting increase in vacancies has exacerbated a shortage of judges across the country, leading many districts to declare “judicial emergencies”—vacancy levels so high that they threaten the courts’ ability to function. McConnell bet (correctly) that he would pay no political price for this type of obstruction, because the White House and the media would be preoccupied with other things—things even harder to accomplish as the Senate calendar filled up.

“Reporters underestimate how powerful the calendar is,” says Jim Manley, the former communications director for Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate leader. “Say you want to break a filibuster. On Monday, you file cloture on a motion to proceed for a vote on Wednesday. Assuming you get it, your opponents are allowed 30 hours of debate post-cloture on the motion to proceed. That takes you to Friday, and doesn’t cover amendments. The following Monday you file cloture on the bill itself, vote Wednesday, then 30 more hours of debate, and suddenly two weeks have gone by, for something that’s not even controversial.” All of this has slowed Senate business to a crawl.

“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell says. “Because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”

Think about Abbott’s attitude to every debate since he became leader. Whereas Malcolm Turnbull and Brendan Nelson agreed to take a bipartisan attitude to many major policy issues, Tony Abbott resolved to obstruct every piece of legislation that has come through the Parliament. Even before the 2010 election, Abbott’s leadership was predicated on block block block – specifically over the climate change legislation.

Talk in the Senate has been about how the Liberals are increasingly using (abusing) the rules to slow things down, to throw a spanner in the works of democracy. Unlike the US Senate of course, debates can be guillotined, but getting legislation through the Senate has become much harder since the last substantial legislation passed in 2009 – the Fair Work Act. Since then, almost no “contentious” legislation has passed the Senate, due to Abbott.

Similarly, we can witness the Australian media casting this delay and non-action as the fault of the Government. The inability to get the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation through (due to the Liberal and Greens Parties voting to block it) was portrayed as a failure of the Government. Similarly, the other delays and blockages – National Broadband Network, the QLD Reconstruction Levy – have become political problems for Labor – Labor “has paid the political price”.

Winning on the CPRS allowed Abbott to show that Kevin Rudd (who had sky-high approval ratings) that the Labor leader was not bullet proof. Since then, the inability for Rudd to get anything through parliament exacted a heavy toll. The relentless criticism about his competency by Abbott was played out in Parliament with the Liberals using their numbers in the Senate to prevent the Government from governing. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What’s more, Abbott used his obstruction – something that the Canberra Press Gallery has never held him accountable – to argue that Rudd’s agenda was objectionable and outrageous, somehow unAustralian. A subterranean campaign was run against Rudd’s Mandarin language skills – suggesting that he was actually a sinister Manchurian candidate leading Australia to totalitarianism. Every out of character moment – swearing, yelling, etc – was used as evidence of un-Prime Ministerial behaviour.

Eventually, by the 2010 election, Labor had lost the public relations battle – and for many of the murmuring Labor back-bench, they had come to believe the conservative key messages that appeared daily in The Australian. Rudd was done for, and the only rational course for Labor was to dump the damaged Rudd in favour of Gillard.

Play for play, Tony Abbott has lifted the tactics of Republican dalek Mitch McConnell. And it has worked.

The media, the general public and even Labor MPs have accepted the narrative. That it’s Labor’s own ineffectiveness and objectionable legislative agenda that has caused the roadblocks. None of the political-backsplash has landed on Abbott or the Liberals. They’re not the Government afterall, and their mantra is that “they’re only stopping the outrageous legislation being forced on Australia by Labor”.

The Liberals have abandoned their civic responsibility as a political party to act in the best interests of Australia, to address Australia’s problems, whether social or economic. They have abandoned the century old practice of Oppositions acting in good faith on issues of national significance. Bipartisanship has been ruthlessly bashed to death by Boxer Abbott.

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2. The Liberals’ “crisis pragmatism”
3. Great news for Tony Abbott: Liberals’ economic credibility trashed

If you don’t read TechPresident regularly, you are missing out on a daily discussion of top quality political news and updates on the latest tech-trends in elections and political activism.

Micah Sifry has written a post asking whether the much-reported “rise of the Tea Party” in America – represented by the surge in Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers – is real.

According to the reports cited by Sifry:

Tea Party Patriots (TPP), one of the main umbrella groups, has almost four times as many Facebook supporters as the Democratic Party, and and almost five times as many as MoveOn.org.

Much of Sifry’s post tries to go deeper into the stats, looking at the various blog rankings for leading “liberal” and “conservative” sites, and examining who amongst the conservatives are getting all the fans and followers.

His conclusion is that the Tea Party and other conservative activists are more energised than their Democrat opponents, but that the reported Tea Party movement numbers are grossly overstated.

What I found interesting about his article – which is not delved into in any depth – is the growing political ecology of online tools and resources made available for online conservative activism. There is now a small but growing army of conservative coders, social media experts and designers who are making their services available to the many Tea Party groups and conservative Republican candidates.

Following the victory by Obama, successful exploitation of the Internet was made a major priority for the Republicans and for conservatives more widely. In particular, the ability to transform online supporters into real-world activists and donors was seen as key to Obama’s success.

The tools now being made available for conservative causes are quite sophisticated – they allow local Tea Party or other pro-Republican groups to quicky set up a professional-looking web presence at low cost, that is then focused on turning online supporters into donors and activists.

Rules for Patriots is a Tea Party version of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals".

I’ve checked a range of Tea Party related sites, and most of them are very effective at harvesting email addresses of supporters. I’ve not ventured onto their Ning (or other) social networks, but as Sifry notes, they are utilising various social media hubs quite effectively.

The Tea Party are taking tried and true community organising priciples used by Obama’s campaign and applying them to growing their own movement. They even have a version of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – called “Rules for Patriots” – designed to “help the Right learn from the Left”.

For the broader progressive movement, the energised conservative movement seems to be spreading out from the USA to other social democratic countries. Australia has its own “TEA Party” movement, the UK Conservatives scraped through in their election and other European countries have seen an upsurge in radical right-wing parties (who have always been present, but are now re-emerging).

Related posts:

1. Tea Party warning
2. Short book review: The Whites of their Eyes by Jill Lepore
3. The Democrats will be victims to incumbency

For my Project 52 post this week, I thought I’d quickly comment on Karl Rove’s recent article in the Wall Street Journal.

Karl Rove writes that the conservative, anti-Obama Tea Party movement needs to avoid being co-opted by the Republicans. They strength, he writes, is their decentralisation and their ability to “hold the feet of politicians in both parties in the fire” over debt, spending and federal power.

The key paragraphs are these however:

If tea party groups are to maximize their influence on policy, they must now begin the difficult task of disassociating themselves from cranks and conspiracy nuts. This includes 9/11 deniers, “birthers” who insist Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., and militia supporters espousing something vaguely close to armed rebellion.

The GOP is also better off if it foregoes any attempt to merge with the tea party movement. The GOP cannot possibly hope to control the dynamics of the highly decentralized galaxy of groups that make up the tea party movement. There will be troubling excesses and these will hurt Republicans if the party is formally associated with tea party groups.

Rove’s article is not advice to the Tea Party movement, but rather a warning to the Republicans to be wary of the ultra-extreme constituent units that make up the TPM.

Rove knows that in order to win elections, the Republicans need to win the support of the independent voters, as well as the Republican base. This is how Obama won – by mobilising the independents. Independent voters don’t generally support the ultra-conservative extremists like 9/11 deniers, birthers or La Rouchites.

The Republicans have been warned – don’t try to subsume the Tea Party movement into the GOP. Rather, mobilise them on issues and try to get them out to vote – but aim for the “conservative centre” rather than the fringe.

Related posts:

1. The rise of the US Right: “learning from the Left”
2. The Democrats will be victims to incumbency
3. Republicans struggling, near bottom

On Tuesday, I wrote that the Democrats would be the victims of incumbency. In Massachusetts, a strongly Democratic state, the Dems control the state Legislature, most or all of the Congressional seats, and now all but one of the Senate seats. With Obama in the White House, and the Democrats controlling the US Congress and Senate, the Mass. election seems to me to be a strong reaction against incumbents. I am also of the opinion that the Gubernatorial race in Democratic Virginia, that saw the Democrat candidate defeated, was a triumph over the incumbent party.

I’ve also been pondering about how social networking and online campaigning favours “outsiders” and oppositions. While the party of government is bound by the straight-jacket of actually running the country or state, a strong opposition can innovate, and take risks. Governments must be responsible, held to higher levels of accountability by the media, and are trapped by the ruts of institutional inertia. They are dragged towards old messages, old media and old policies, because of tidal forces that are inherent to governing. They are risk averse, because they have more to lose.

This was the case (in my view) for Obama, and we are seeing it for David Cameron in the UK. It was the case in Virginia and now Massachusetts.

Over at TechPresident, they’re dissecting the Massachusetts election. The view expressed there is that the Internet enables “insurgent” voices. Insurgents by their nature are oppositional.

The Internet has suggested again and again that it loves an insurgent candidate (Howard Dean, Ron Paul, Barack Obama…) , and Brown’s surge seemed in many ways to be a perfect match for the Internet’s particular metabolism.

Their point is that online campaigning doesn’t replace traditional campaigning, but amplifies and legitimises marginal voices. The Tea Party “movement” is a good example of an oppositional force being elevated both in size and stature, due to the megaphone of the Internet.

Micah at TechPresident also muses that perhaps the Internet is a force that promotes the status quo:

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2. The Democrats will be victims to incumbency
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There’s been some discussion about whether the Democrats will be victim to the over-cooked expectations of Obama supporters and energised conservative Republicans:

First, the background: the party of the president in office essentially always loses seats in the mid-term elections (2002 was a post-9/11 one-off), a tendency likely to be reinforced in 2010 by the fact that so many Democrats rode the Obama wave to win marginal districts in ’08. Plus, this year many progressive activists are turned off by what they perceive to be a failed healthcare reform bill, while others oppose Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan. Add into the mix on the other side a fired-up movement of Tea Partiers and Sarah Palin fans and you have what looks like the recipe for a massive Democratic defeat in eleven months.

My view is that, given the still-parlous state of the US economy, the Democrats will be a victim of incumbency. This is certainly my analysis of the victory by Republican candidate for Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell – who beat the incumbent Democrat.

This is not a resurgence of the Republicans, but a reaction against the failing body-politic of the USA. Disenfranchised Americans will try to punish whichever party is in power – not just the Democrats. The Obama campaign, while lauded as a “digital revolution” and a shining example of grass-roots, bottom-up empowerment, has not translated into decentralisation of decision-making. Normal people are still locked out of the policy making process in Washintgon and in their home states.

The ten percent  unemployment (much higher in many areas) doesn’t help.

I also agree with Colin Delany from TechPresident that the Tea Party movement won’t necessarily equate to success for the Republicans. The Tea Party movement is largely an astro-turf movement, but even where there is a real ground swell, the Republicans are still an integral part of the broken system that the Tea Party-ers are rallying against:

…the Tea Partiers may have energy, but they primarily seem to employ it against other Republicans, particularly those in the party establishment, even when they’re not squabbling amongst themselves. Many mainstream Republicans will face ideological primary challenges in 2010, forcing them to spend scarce resources early on and to take positions that could box them into a corner in the Fall. And with the RNC short on cash, individual candidates can’t count on the party bailing them out even if they do manage to shrug off the rightwing rabble.

The Democrat’s biggest problem will be to turn out their disheartened supporters, and to convince Americans that they should retain control of the Congress.

More on the Senate by-election at Larvatus Prodeo.

Related posts:

1. Massachusetts election outcome shows dangers of incumbency
2. Tea Party warning
3. Republicans struggling, near bottom

If you’re a follower of US politics, you’ll know that the Republican candidate for Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, has won a resounding victory over his Democratic rival. While the campaign seems to have been run mainly on local issues (rather than national issues like health care), there is an interesting debrief taking place on sites such as TechPresident, about the McDonnell campaign’s use of new media and new campaign techniques, especially the use of text messages.

McDonnell bought into the idea early on, putting some of that campaign expenditure towards buying a dedicated short code rather than going the “dirt cheap route,” says Taylor, of sharing a code. That dedicated code of GOBOB or 46262 allowed the campaign to set up custom keywords — like “women,” “life,” “taxes,” or “UVA” — that helped segment the list they were building into different interest and geographic areas.

(The full article is worth a read, as it is an interesting case study of how to powerfully use text messaging for political campaigns.)

As I understand it, using text messaging has been relatively slow in uptake in the United States, principally because of the relatively high cost per text message. In Australian (and other countries), where SMS is relatively cheap, text messages are used extensively, from real estate agents, banks, political parties, and yes, trade unions.

In my work, I’ve used SMS quite a few times, and reading about how the McDonnell campaign utilised it (even mimicking the Obama campaign) caused me to reexamine if I could improve my own use.

Currently I’m aware of several unions routinely using text messages to get information to members and supporters.There seem to be two methods:

1. Purchase use of or subscribe to a corporate SMS broadcast system (fairly expensive); or
2. Purchase of a phone and SIM card dedicated to broadcast text messages.

I’m not aware of any union that has its own dedicated system, software or hardware for sending broadcast text messages.

At the NTEU, we use SMS notifications and reminders for important events. For our rounds of industrial action this year (in May and September), members received SMS reminders about details of strikes, pickets and so on. They also received SMS reminders to vote in the ballot for industrial action in April/May. Similarly, at another union I worked for, the LHMU, we used SMS as reminders to activists for important meetings and actions.

However, these were fairly crude tools – although we can target different demographics of members, we are nowhere near as sophisticated as the political campaigns. I’m also not aware of unions registering a mobile code, or using key words.

Techpresident’s follow up story about the Virginia Governor campaign suggests that although mass media advertising (television and radio) were decisive, the use of text messaging for mobilising supporters was also crucial to McDonnell’s campaign success. Over US$130,000 was spent by the McDonnell campaign, compared to just over US$20,000 by his opponent.

I certainly see it as useful in mobilising volunteers, and turning out the vote. Sending direct messages to supporters, without the filter of the media, is also very powerful.

Related posts:

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3. New free e-book: Online Campaigning for Unions

I have previously written that the US Republicans are cannibalising themselves, that they are struggling to find a leader, and that they have no clear strategy for combating Obama and the Democrat machine.

Now, with the Democrats hammering the Republicans over Rush Limbaugh, some Republican representatives are acknowledging that they nearly as low as they can get:

“You think you hit bottom, and it can always go lower,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, who said his party’s best hope is that President Barack Obama overreaches. “The Republicans just entered the wilderness – we’re going to wander around there for a little while before coming back stronger than ever.

“I have no idea where the bottom is just like I have no idea where the bottom is on the stock market,” he said.

“It probably gets worse before it gets better, though I’m not sure how much worse it could get,” said Tom Rath, a New Hampshire Republican leader and former state attorney general. “The first chance at redemption is 18, 19 months away, and we’re going to have to gut it out here for a while.”

Another party wise man, Fred Malek, told POLITICO the party now sits at its “nadir” – though he, like others, said its best hope is to wait for the economy to tarnish Obama.

“Our leaders’ arguments are falling on deaf ears today, but they are sound. It’s just a matter of time before this becomes Obama’s recession,” he said.

Karl Rove, who has written on this problem, has a different view:

KarlRove It’s Dem strategy – misdirection — Dems don’t want debate on stimulus, omnibus, budget, pork, so trying to argue with Rush.

His view is that the Democrats are using Rush as a straw man to draw attention away from Obama’s spin.

With no clear Republican leader to attack, the Democrats are forced to target the conservative shock-jock:

Richard Viguerie, the direct mail pioneer who helped create the modern conservative movement, was more scathing in a press release Wednesday.

“The ‘Rushification’ of the GOP is the natural and inevitable result of the fact that those who are supposed to provide leadership — Republican elected officials and party officers — are doing little to bring the party back,” he said. “Nature abhors a vacuum, and there is no vacuum in nature as empty as the leadership of the Republican Party today.”

Related posts:

1. Republicans eat their own
2. The Democrats will be victims to incumbency
3. Tea Party warning

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin typifies the hard-right conservative group in the GOP that would rather eat their own than work towards defeating a common foe.

From CNN:

At a boisterous Sarah Palin rally in Polk City, Florida on Saturday afternoon, one name was surprisingly absent from the campaign decor John McCain’s.

Looking around the Fantasy of Flight aircraft hangar where the rally took place, one could see all the usual reminders that it was a pro-McCain event. There were two large “Country First” banners hung on the walls along with four enormous American flags meant to conjure the campaign’s underlying patriotic theme. Many of the men and women in the audience wore McCain hats and t-shirts.

But on closer inspection, the GOP nominee’s name was literally nowhere to be found on any of the official campaign signage distributed to supporters at the event.

The McCain team is not immune to this attitude (although his campaign has been taken over by the neo-conservatives of the Bush White House).

From ThinkProgress:

Last week, CNN reported that one McCain source called Palin “a diva” who “takes no advice from anyone.”

…

Asked to respond to reports that she is “going rogue,” Palin declared them “absolutely, 100 percent false,” adding, “John McCain and I, and our camps, are working together to get John McCain elected.” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow noted Palin’s word choice: “Your camps, plural? A McCain camp and a Palin camp? That does not sound good.”

This destructive behaviour is reminiscent of the last dying days of the Howard Government, as Minister turned on Minister (for example, the leaks by Turnbull and the media commentary from Abbott).

Related posts:

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2. Republicans struggling, near bottom
3. Joe Trippi on Online Campaigning

Negative campaigning works.

Negative ads are also generally are more ‘honest’ than positive ads – they generally reference their sources. They are more likely to energise supporters into taking action – even Obama’s campaigning to potential volunteers use the scare-tactics of Rove, Cheney, Bush and ‘more of the same’.

It especially works when you are behind in the polls against a popular candidate.

John McCain and his Republican allies are “readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama’s character, believing that to win in November they must shift the conversation back to questions about the Democrat’s judgment, honesty and personal associations,” several top Republicans told the Washington Post.

They are only effective however, if they tap into something that the populace are already concerned about. Negative ads will miss the mark if they make outrageous, unrealistic or incredible claims.

McCain’s campaign is engaging in a massive negative campaigning spree. Unfortunately its attacks on Obama’s character are misplaced. On the whole, Americans are not scared of Obama. Most character issues were addressed during the primaries.

McCain’s negative campaigning has also overwhelmed his positive message, and has made his campaign look overly negative, with no clear narative or vision. This hyper-negativity can turn off voters, particularly the all-important independent voters that were McCain’s biggest supporters, sending them to Obama or depressing their vote altogether.

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