Elections – Page 53 – Chicago Boyz

Open Letter

August 14, 2015August 14, 2015 by David Foster

Tony Parker, Treasurer–RNC

Reince Priebus, Chairman–RNC

Gentlemen,

I recently received a letter from Tony Parker which is excerpted below:

Chairman Priebus has written to you several times this year asking you to renew your Republican National Committee membership for 2012 As the Treasurer of the RNC, I’m concerned that we haven’t heard back from you…I know other things come up, and perhaps you’ve just been delayed in renewing your membership. If that’s the case I understand….I hope you haven’t deserted our Party.

Oh, no, Tony, I haven’t forgotten. I’ve made substantial political contributions in the past, and will continue to do so in the future. But at present, I believe the highest leverage can be obtained by contributing directly to campaigns I like, rather than to the RNC or the various umbrella campaign organizations.

For one thing, I’m not very impressed with the way the Republican leadership has chosen to conduct itself, which seems more oriented toward ensuring long-term employment (followed by comfortable retirement) for members of the Republican side of the political class, than it does with pursuing the needed political change. But in addition, I am extremely unimpressed by your political marketing skills, particularly those having to do with the ever-more-critical Internet arena.

Please review my post at the Chicago Boyz blog, for some thoughts on this:

Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is…do you, Mr Priebus?

You are failing at social media, not using it effectively either offensively or defensively. For example, this morning the following image was being circulated on Facebook:

Note the assertion that the problems with medical services for veterans are to be laid at the door of the Republican Party. A competent political marketing organization would monitor for things like this and make a hard-hitting response post available for sharing immediately. You don’t seem to be able to do this, or even to see the need for it.

You’re not very good at traditional direct-mail marketing, either. Most of the very high volume of mail I get from you is so bad it’s embarrassing. Your DM people seem to think that we are living in the ’50s….not the real ’50s, but some highly stereotypical version thereof:

“Maw! Maw! We got us a letter from these political people up in Washington DC…and it must be REAL important! It has this really long number on it, and it says we HAVE to answer it!”

Most people who have enough money to make significant political contributions have at least some degree of astuteness, and are not likely to respond well to this sort of thing.

The verbal communication of the senior Republican leadership is also generally pretty terrible. There is too much talking like a Martian, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out:

When the government was shut down during the Clinton administration, Republican leaders who went on television to tell their side of the story talked about “OMB numbers” versus “CBO numbers” — as if most people beyond the Beltway knew what these abbreviations meant or why the statistics in question were relevant to the shutdown. Why talk to them in Beltway-speak?

As Sowell also said:

You might think that the stakes are high enough for Republicans to put in some serious time trying to clarify their message. As the great economist Alfred Marshall once said, facts do not speak for themselves. If we are waiting for the Republicans to do the speaking, the country is in big trouble.

Democrats, by contrast, are all talk. They could sell refrigerators to Eskimos before Republicans could sell them blankets.

You…the institutional Republican party…are doing a very poor job at selling and marketing. The consequences for this country and the world of your failure are likely to be very severe. I hope that you will solve the problem before it is too late, but history does not lead me to be very optimistic on this front. Unless and until I see serious evidence of change and improvement, I will be directing my political contributions to individual candidates who appear to “get it,” rather than to the RNC or to the various Republican umbrella campaign organizations.

Regards

David Foster

via: paper mail and electronic mail; posted at the Chicago Boyz blog and the Ricochet blog

Virtue Signaling

August 9, 2015 by Michael Kennedy

This is a new term to me but it makes a lot of sense. It seems to have begun in Britain where it has been explained well.

“The most savage, bilious, self-righteous rants are from people living affluent self-pleasing lives in comfortable homes, doing lucky and rewarding jobs with like-minded friends. What they are doing (I risk losing a friend or two) is “virtue-signalling”: competing to seem compassionate. Few are notably open-handed: St Matthew would need a rewrite of Chapter 19. “Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. So he went on Twitter instead and called Michael Gove a ‘vile reptilian evil tory scumbag’, and linked to a cartoon of Iain Duncan Smith stealing a paralysed woman’s wheelchair. And lo, he felt better and went for a £3.50 caramel macchiato with some mates from the BBC”

Beautifully put.

Elite Failure and Populist Trump It

August 5, 2015August 5, 2015 by Zenpundit

Cross-posted at Zenpundit.com

GOP Front Runner, Donald J. Trump (Image: Michael Vadon)

A friend sent an essay by the prolific IR scholar, Professor Angelo Codevilla that had been posted at Powerline Blog. It was good.

For the unfamiliar, Codevilla often writes on national security and intelligence matters and some readers may be familiar with his (with Paul Seabury) book, War: Ends and Means; but in recent years Codevilla has, like Walter Russell Mead and a number of other intellectuals, turned his attention to the shoddy performance, ethical deficiencies and arrogant demands of the new American “ruling class”, writing a biting critique of their “meritocratic regime”.

In his essay for Powerline, Codevilla turns his attention to the political phenomenon of the improbable GOP presidential front runner, billionaire and reality TV star, Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Codevilla is not a huge fan of the bombastic Mr. Trump, but his analysis of why Trump has captured the moment so easily has some astute insights about the decaying state of our political system and the seething anger of the electorate:

VDH on Trump, the Fed-Up Crowd and Hypocrisy

July 27, 2015 by Jonathan

The conclusion:

To explain the inexplicable rise of Donald Trump is to calibrate the anger of a fed-up crowd that is enjoying the comeuppance of an elite that never pays for the ramifications of its own ideology. The elite media, whose trademark is fad and cant, writes off the fed-up crowd as naÃ¯ve and susceptible to demagoguery as the contradictory and hypocritical Trump manipulates their anger. In fact, they probably got it backwards. Trump is a transitory vehicle of the fed-up crowd, a current expression of their distaste for both Democratic and Republican politics, but not an end in and of himself. The fed-up crowd is tired of being demagogued to death by progressives, who brag of “working across the aisle” and “bipartisanship” as they ram through agendas with executive orders, court decisions, and public ridicule. So the fed-ups want other conservative candidates to emulate Trump’s verve, energy, eagerness to speak the unspeakable, and no-holds barred Lee Atwater style — without otherwise being Trump.

This is one of VDH’s best recent columns and explains well the appeal (for now) of Donald Trump to conservative voters. Worth reading.

Civil Wars everywhere in politics.

July 25, 2015July 25, 2015 by Michael Kennedy

At the “Netroots Nation Conference, while an illegal alien was interviewing Martin O’Malley, a Democrat candidate for president, the stage was invaded by a black convicted felon (embezzlement) named Tia Oso who protested when O’Malley said “All lives matter.”

Chanting, “What side are you on, my people, what side are you on?” and “Black lives matter,” the demonstrators moved to the front of the ballroom about 20 minutes into the event as Mr. O’Malley discussed proposed changes to Social Security. They remained there, heckling the candidates and posing questions, until organizers shut down the event, one of the centerpieces of the annual Netroots Nation conference.

The Democrats are going to have serious problems with the black activist movement.

The black radicals even plan to dig up the remains of General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife, law or no law. This sort of lunatic behavior is going to discredit this stuff pretty soon.

Of course the Connecticut Democrat State Central Committee voted to remove the names Jefferson and Jackson from their annual celebration, so the black radicals not that much more crazy.

Connecticut state Democrats voted Wednesday to remove the names of former presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson from their annual fundraising dinner, reportedly because of their ties to slavery.

According to the Hartford Courant, it only took two minutes for the Connecticut Democrat State Central Committee to unanimously pass a resolution stripping both names from the title of the Jefferson-Jackson-Bailey Dinner.

Party Chairman Nick Balletto proposed the change. He told the Daily Caller the decision, which apparently came under pressure from the NAACP, was about party identity.

Yup, the lunacy continues.