The Southern Republican Leadership Conference – a quadrennial grand old party that serves as a bakeoff for potential presidential hopefuls – wrapped up Saturday night with its traditional straw poll.
H-e-double-hockey-sticks! Mitt Romney! By one (!) vote!
Official results:
Newt Gingrich 18%
Mike Huckabee 4%
Gary Johnson 1%
Sarah Palin 18%
Ron Paul 24% (438 votes)
Tim Pawlenty 3%
Mike Pence 3% Mitt Romney 24% (439 votes)
Rick Santorum 2%
Romney’s second-place finish in 2006 made him a GOPlayer in the 2008 race, and this performance makes him a GOPlayist.
As for Sarahcuda, say hello to the Newt Gingrich (18%) wing of the Republican Party.
Thursday’s trifecta of local coverage in the Phoebe Prince suicide case
#1: Thursday Boston Herald headline:
Pol: No foul by school
No longer seeking review in bully case
Lede:
South Hadley state Rep. John Scibak yesterday backed off his demand for an independent review of the relentless bullying surrounding Phoebe Prince’s suicide, saying he’s now satisfied school officials acted properly and should not face criminal charges.
What followed was virtually a PR piece for the South Hadley education-industrial complex, with this curious endnote:
[School Superintendent Gus] Sayer also blasted the Herald’s recent coverage of the case, saying, “I just wonder why the Herald can’t be a little kinder in its treatment of the stories.”
Turns out that Herald story was excessively kind.
#2: Thursday New York Times (dead-tree edition) headline:
Court Documents Detail a Teenage Girl’s Final Days of Fear and Bullying
Times reporter Katie Zezima has been all over this story, perhaps the shape of things to come when the Times dumps its albatrossian Boston Globe subsidiary.
Regardless, from the fourth graf of the Times report:
[The documents] describe evidence suggesting that some teachers and administrators had known for weeks about the harassment but failed to stop it, a contention that school officials have disputed.
What the Times buried, the Globe headlined.
#3: Thursday Boston Globe headline:
Prince pleaded for help at school
But prosecutors say officials sent her back to class
Phoebe Prince, desperate in the face of relentless bullying, turned to school administrators for help a week before she took her own life, prosecutors said yesterday, once pleading with them that she was “scared and wanted to go home’’ to avoid being beaten up by a vengeful classmate.
Prince was sent back to class, where she told a witness that school officials had no plans to intervene and that “she was still going to get beat up,’’ prosecutors said.
The stunning disclosure that Prince herself notified administrators at South Hadley High School about the bullying, an encounter previously unknown even to her family, was made public for the first time yesterday in court documents filed as three of her former schoolmates pleaded not guilty to charges that they tormented the 15-year-old freshman for months.
In his book Ogilvy on Advertising, Madison Avenue macher David Ogilvy wrote: “Whenever you can, make the product itself the hero of your advertising.”
Nike’s advertising, though, has always been about the hero as product.
Now, with its latest Tiger Woods ad, Nike is going for the tragic hero as product.
That would be the late Earl Woods speaking (think ghost of Hamlet’s father), and here’s what he says:
Tiger, I am more prone to be inquisitive.
To promote discussion.
I want to find out what your thinking was.
I want to find out what your feelings are.
And did you learn anything?
Scamlet: The Tiger Woods Story follows the standard arc of classical tragedy: Man rises (often from lowly status) to a position of high stature but he has a fatal flaw (typically hubris, or overweening pride) that leads to his downfall.
Act V: The possibility of redemption. As in, the above kickoff ad to the Tiger Woods Rehabilitation Tour.
Memo to anyone claiming it’s unseemly for this pathetic drama to play out in commercial time:
Tiger Woods lives in commercial time.
From a New York Times Magazine piece several weeks ago:
Off the course, he was a composite character created by the various commercials in which he starred. They supplemented our limited picture of the man, giving him a sense of humor (he walks across water to rescue his ball from a lily pad); whimsy (he bounces a golf ball on the face of his club while passing it behind his back and between his legs before smacking the ball in midair like a baseball); and even a touch of moral bite (“There are still courses in the U.S. I am not allowed to play because of the color of my skin”).
The more intimate glimpses of Woods’s life that were missing from his cursory pre- and post-tournament interviews came via TV commercials, too: his father’s death was memorialized with a Father’s Day ad featuring home-video footage of the two of them; his son’s birth with an ad that conjured the forging of the boy’s first set of golf clubs (complete with a personalized bag: “Baby Woods”).
Okay – before you accuse me of playing the grammar card, props where props are due: Kanye (Wild) West at least tried to make grammatical distinctions when he said this to Brooklyn Bodega (via the Boston Globe Names namers):
I just try to work with people who I admire or whom I think has got it.
Not to get technical about it, but Kanye just tries to work with people whom he admires or who he thinks have got it.
Slate blogiator Mickey Kaus is leading two lives. The longtime author of Kausfiles decided last month to launch a quixotic challenge to Barbara Boxer (D-They Call Me Senator Boxer) in California’s Democratic Senate primary.
One problem: What to do about that pesky Slate blog.
My Slate editors were actually quite willing to keep me on to write what would in effect be the Diary of a Longshot. The hangup was me. In part the problem was legal, but mostly it was a purely practical calculation that made me decide to take the blog off Slate (though I reserve the right to come crawling back).
(snip, as Kaus would say)
[T]he main reason I concluded I had to take the blog “private” had nothing to do with these arcane legalities. It’s simply this: I’m going to start a campaign web site, and the only reason anybody might go to it is if the blog is there. So I’m moving the blog there.
So . . .
Here’s the old-school Kausfiles blog, and here’s Kaus for Senate.
Karl Rove, the former political adviser to President George W. Bush, is appearing in a public service announcement asking people to fill out and mail back their 2010 census forms.
Rove invokes James Madison, the nation’s fourth president and principal author of the U.S. Constitution, in the ad released Monday.
“If you’ve not yet mailed back your 2010 Census form, it’s not too late. Please answer the 10 easy questions,” Rove says. “They’re almost the same ones that Madison helped write for the first census back in 1790.”
Rove video:
So why is the guy George W. Bush dubbed The Architect trying to build response to the decennial census?
Answer: GOP leaders are concerned that the anti-government mojo exemplified by the Tea Party movement will translate into a Census holdout, as this CBS News piece notes:
In June, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, a darling of the Tea Party movement, said she would not fully fill out her census forms because “the Constitution doesn’t require any information beyond” the number of people in one’s household. Bachmann also cited her concerns about ACORN’s involvement in the census-taking process. (Republicans later urged Bachmann to change course; for what its worth, census participation in her district is above-average.)
Texas Rep. Ron Paul, the Libertarian-leaning former GOP presidential candidate, has also complained about the ten-question census, which asks about race and age among other topics. Anything beyond a simple count of the number of Americans and where they live, he suggested, is beyond the scope of the Constitutional mandate.
Republicans are fretting about the impact, as North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry told the Wall Street Journal, of a failure by conservatives “to separate overall government intervention from a question as simple as the census.”
The roll-out of Rove’s pro-census spot came just as conservative talk-show kingpin Rush Limbaugh propounded the latest in what seem to be an increasingly outlandish set of conspiracy theories about alleged attempts by the Obama administration to misuse the census.
In hisMonday broadcast, Limbaugh charged that the Census Bureau is deliberately undercounting Republican voters by skipping neighborhoods where they live. “I haven’t seen a census form since I left home in 1970,” Limbaugh declared.
He concluded, somewhat conspiratorially: “I wonder how widespread this is, that areas thought to be Republican are either not getting forms or not being visited by the census workers. Nothing would surprise me.”
Census spokesman Jost retorted: “We have a mandate to count everyone. We wouldn’t know how to skip anyone.”
Limbaugh is only the latest in a series of right-wing provocateurs to suggest the Obama administration had some sinister intent for the 2010 census. Fox News hosts have been among the most strident critics, with Glenn Beck suggesting that by asking for information about a person’s race, the census somehow was promoting slavery.
Another prominent conservative personality, Michelle Malkin, suggested that the census was some kind of brainwashing exercise designed to create a permanent Democratic Party majority.
The Tiger Woods coming out party Monday afternoon was a drama in three acts:
ACT ONE: THE OPTICS
a) The moustache and goatee, designed to distance the new (good!) self from the old (bad!) self.
b) Five logos from the chest up, designed to denote sponsor support/confidence.
ACT TWO: THE MESSAGE
Going into this press conference, Woods knew exactly what he’d say. The real drama was in the questions – as in, how tough/uncomfortable would they be?
The denouement: Not very.
You could tell the tough ones, though: They were the questions Woods dodged.
Exhibit A: What kind of inpatient rehab did you undergo? (That’s personal.)
Exhibit B: Your wife Elin has taken a powder. Shouldn’t you be working on your family relationships instead of playing golf? (I’m excited to play this week.)
Exhibit C: Were you under the influence of Ambien during your car crash? (The police investigated – cited me 166 bucks – closed case.)
The presser was as important for the PGA as it was for Woods. From Jonathan Mahler’s recent New York Times Magazine piece:
As far as professional golf is concerned, Woods cannot come back fast enough. The PGA Tour is at a critical juncture. Next year it will begin negotiating new TV contracts with CBS and NBC. In the meantime, the tour is trying to secure sponsors for 10 events in 2011 while economic conditions are not exactly favorable. Two of the hardest-hit industries, financial services and car manufacturing, are responsible for underwriting a third of the PGA Tour’s sponsored events. More to the point, the entire economic model of a golf tournament is looking a bit suspect. At the moment, the value of a company’s flying clients and employees to a sunny locale to drink Grey Goose cocktails and get tips on their short games from professional golfers is most likely to be lost on many of its shareholders. In other words, drumming up new sponsors and increasing — or just maintaining, really — the worth of its TV deals would have been hard enough for the tour even if the world’s greatest golfer and most recognizable athlete had not become enmeshed in the biggest tabloid story in years.
So the hardworking staff at Campaign Journal was watching “60 Minutes” Sunday night when this spot popped on the screen:
The commercial comes from an outfit called Answers in Genesis, which describes itself as “a catalyst to bring reformation by reclaiming the foundations of our faith which are found in the Bible, from the very first verse.”
Whatever that means.
Here’s their pre-press for the CBS big-bucks TV spot, headlined “AiG on 60 Minutes.”
No, there’s no reason for alarm. 60 Minutes didn’t show up at our doorstep recently. Instead, AiG (through our agency, JDA) went to them, with our new television spot. It will air tomorrow night on this popular news program.
Check your listings to see when 60 Minutes is broadcast in your area (it’s at 7pm for many stations in the East). At this point, we don’t know when our short TV ad will air within the hour—but look for our spot promoting our new online video Bible, which is a big part of our new “I Am Not Ashamed” national campaign (see www.iamnotashamed.org). If you can’t watch the ad as it’s played on 60 Minutes, you may view the ad on YouTube.
Combo this with the Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad for religious-right stalwart Focus on the Family, and you have some serious mainstream-media conservative mojo going on.
Saturday’s New York Times featured this piece headlined “Battle of $50 Bill Splitting Republican Ranks.”
Visual:
Lede:
It is a battle that is pitting Republican against Republican.
Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina wants President Ronald Reagan’s likeness to replace that of President Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill.
But the bill introduced by Mr. McHenry and 17 co-sponsors, the majority from Southern states, has run into a hornets’ nest of opposition from Ohio lawmakers who will not stand still for any slight to their home-state hero.
Rep. McHenry (R-There You Go Again) provided this rationale to the Times:
“Every generation needs its own heroes,” he said. “One decade into the 21st century, it’s time to honor the last great president of the 20th and give President Reagan a place beside Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy.” Franklin D. Roosevelt’s image is on the dime, and John F. Kennedy’s is on the half-dollar.
Maybe the hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider can help.
Campaign Outsider 