Go back to: General discussion
Since we're just weeks away from the US election, let's use this forum to comment on things like use of media, campaign strategy, etc...
To kick it off, I'm going to comment on the Jerry Brown/Meg Whitman campaign here in California. Some of you may have heard that both candidates are having their own self-imposed troubles this week: Whitman for having had an undocumented employee for nine years and Brown for having failed to hang up the telephone following a conversation with the Whitman-leaning (and now endorsing) police union, with the result that that the police union taped a campaign employee calling Whitman a "whore" for purportedly moderating her hard line on public pensions with the police.
As a campaign manager, you will frequently be confronted by revelations about your candidate's past - what they said or did ten years ago or just yesterday. I'm going to comment more on Brown's situation, because the kind of "salty" language his staff used is also typical of both the high emotions and intense fatigue of people who are working 16-hour days weeks or months on end.
But more to the point is why Brown chose to make two-tier public pensions a cornerstone of his campaign. By far the largest group of employees in California are public employees and pension cuts, particularly those that promise significant budgetary benefits only in 15-20 years, seems a very odd position. In fact, it is a centerpiece of Brown's campaign - his willingness to take on the unions (police, fire, prison guards, teachers, state employees).
I'm sure that Brown's campaign has poll-tested this position and found it to be attractive to the marginal voters that he needs, even if it is less popular with his core voters that he assumes will still vote for him for lack of alternatives. The widely commented "enthusiasm gap" in this year's elections may be the result of the continued belief by Democrats that core voters can be continually disappointed in search of marginal votes. In the short term, it may work. In the long term, it is a corrosive strategy more related to the needs of campaign fundraising than to the needs of the base.
.
US 2010 Election Cycle
Since we're just weeks away from the US election, let's use this forum to comment on things like use of media, campaign strategy, etc...
To kick it off, I'm going to comment on the Jerry Brown/Meg Whitman campaign here in California. Some of you may have heard that both candidates are having their own self-imposed troubles this week: Whitman for having had an undocumented employee for nine years and Brown for having failed to hang up the telephone following a conversation with the Whitman-leaning (and now endorsing) police union, with the result that that the police union taped a campaign employee calling Whitman a "whore" for purportedly moderating her hard line on public pensions with the police.
As a campaign manager, you will frequently be confronted by revelations about your candidate's past - what they said or did ten years ago or just yesterday. I'm going to comment more on Brown's situation, because the kind of "salty" language his staff used is also typical of both the high emotions and intense fatigue of people who are working 16-hour days weeks or months on end.
But more to the point is why Brown chose to make two-tier public pensions a cornerstone of his campaign. By far the largest group of employees in California are public employees and pension cuts, particularly those that promise significant budgetary benefits only in 15-20 years, seems a very odd position. In fact, it is a centerpiece of Brown's campaign - his willingness to take on the unions (police, fire, prison guards, teachers, state employees).
I'm sure that Brown's campaign has poll-tested this position and found it to be attractive to the marginal voters that he needs, even if it is less popular with his core voters that he assumes will still vote for him for lack of alternatives. The widely commented "enthusiasm gap" in this year's elections may be the result of the continued belief by Democrats that core voters can be continually disappointed in search of marginal votes. In the short term, it may work. In the long term, it is a corrosive strategy more related to the needs of campaign fundraising than to the needs of the base.
.