Will Stancil: What’s funny about this is that the lesson our official politics knowers took from Obama’s focus on Bain was “specifically, try to tie your opponent to a vulture capital firm” not “identify a line of attack that really bites and hammer it into the dirt”

our political nerd class spent too much time learning how to do regressions and not nearly enough time learning about postmodernism www.politico.com/news/magazin...

bad luck for biden to run in an electoral cycle where "are you old" is the most important issue instead of in one of the cycles where email security procedures or accuracy of vietnam war medal citations was the most important issue in the country.

lawyers! lawyers are training to communicate in pretty much the polar opposite way that you actually need to communicate to voters. basic communication techniques like reptition, re-framing, analogy are all things that will make a judge mad at you if you do it in a legal filing

I mean lawyers are great at understanding how to frame things to win hearts and minds… just, the kind that litigate crummy personal injury cases to a jury, not the fancy kind whose entire career is filing appellate briefs to Harvard-educated circuit court judges. Guess which kind go into politics

Yes! Scumbag ambulance chaser trial lawyer John Edwards was one of the only good Dems in my lifetime at doing this sort of communications!

Although it was incredibly annoying to hear how many times he would repeat that he was the son of a millworker, he at least understood that that's how you had to communicate messaging in politics: drill sh*t into people's head beyond any resistance

20 years later and if you asked me what john edwards' dad's job was i could still remember! it worked!

and I'll never forget that little Paul Wellstone was a wrestler

Remember that all the nice influential people who are supposed to matter in politics with their opinions--pundits, insider journalists, supposedly Democrat-friendly Republicans--got mad at Obama in 2012 for running so many ads & talking about the evils of Romney's Bain Capital, how dare he.

What’s funny about this is that the lesson our official politics knowers took from Obama’s focus on Bain was “specifically, try to tie your opponent to a vulture capital firm” not “identify a line of attack that really bites and hammer it into the dirt”

This led to many strained efforts to characterize Trump as a slick-suit capitalist while ignoring the fact that he’s, you know, a criminal rapist and fascist

I have the vibe that the Bill Clinton campaign would've wanted to make something out of an opponent having continual actual mafia ties, including his father's from where he got his wealth, and all the money laundering and stuff but maybe that would've made Wall Street mad, can't do that

a lot of them took from that that this Bain focus was rude and Democrats should spend more time appealing to unity and working together for bipartisan goals and strangely here we are

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