Judging other magazines by their covers

Posted July 15th, 2008 at 2:12 PM in Journalism, Politics

The cover art accompanying Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker profile of Barack Obama’s political ascension has provoked a frenzy of media self-flagellation.

It’s clear that the cover is satire, and should any conservatives attempt to cite it as factual rather than ironic, the joke will be on them.  There are a lot of Americans who believe Obama is a Muslim, and there are a lot of Americans who believe that Michelle Obama is a radicalized, angry Black woman.

But those who buy into that false narrative aren’t reading the New Yorker, and it’s obvious mockery like the cover below that will help put an end to it, as long as enough people see it in the proper context.  Over the past three days, I think everyone has heard about it in the right context.

I actually think it’s the subtler magazine covers that present the most danger for misinterpretation.  This week’s Newsweek cover (above, left) asks what it thinks is a reasonable question, but it leaves the answer to the inside pages that the vast majority of Americans will never see.

It’s not the answer to the question of “What does Barack Obama believe?” that will drive false narratives about the Illinois senator’s religion and patriotism, it’s the constant, open-ended questioning of it that is most dangerous.

The New Yorker mocks those who question Obama’s patriotism and values, while Newsweek reinforces the question’s relevance.  Which do you think is worse?

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Somebody, please explain Minnesota to me

Posted July 15th, 2008 at 10:49 AM in Politics

Jesse “The Body” Ventura, a.k.a. “Former Governor Jesse Ventura,” pretended to consider a run for Senate in Minnesota this year, ending rumors only a short time before the filing deadline passed.  Preposterous as it may be, it actually looked like he could affect the race between Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken, even if he would not probably win it.  Whom he would be a spoiler for remains a difficult question to answer.  As Rasmussen (um…) reports:

If Ventura had entered the race, he would have started with 22% support from Minnesota voters. Coleman earned 36% of the vote in a three-way race and Franken attracted 34%.

Stunning.  Ventura was a relatively mediocre governor by his own admission.  He was a professional wrestler with little interest in the day to day minutia of running a state, from what I’ve gathered.  Local media hated him, and he hates them.  It just wasn’t meant to be.  And yet, had he run, he could well have drastically changed the electoral strategies of both major parties in Minnesota, an important swing state.

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Smart analysis

Posted July 10th, 2008 at 11:32 AM in Politics

Today, find it here.

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With a name like T. Boone Pickens…

Posted July 9th, 2008 at 5:13 PM in Politics

A really rich, self-described “oil man” named T. Boone Pickens has been on my television a lot recently.  He’s spending his personal fortune to save America with wind power and natural gas.  And he possesses some unknown quality that makes me want to see more.

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McCain campaign still not vetting names on press releases

Posted July 9th, 2008 at 12:51 PM in Journalism, Politics

John McCain’s presidential campaign has been embarassed several times for associating itself — ususally in tangential ways — with individuals who end up, in one way or another, embarassing the Arizona senator.  Usually it’s something petty, like an anti-semitic pastor, a former lobbyist for state sponsors of terrorism, etc.

This week, it’s 300 economists, whom McCain got to sign on to his economic plan.  But to get the signatures, he had to leave some of the more politically important pieces of his plan out.  And it turns out not all of the signatories are even supporters of his.  Politico got the story:

The endorsement could hardly have been stronger. On Monday, John McCain’s campaign released a statement signed by 300 economists who “enthusiastically support” his “Jobs for America” economic plan, providing a heavyweight testimonial to the presumptive Republican nominee’s “broad and powerful economic agenda.”

There’s just one problem. Upon closer inspection, it seems a good many of those economists don’t actually support the whole of McCain’s economic agenda. And at least one doesn’t even support McCain for president.

Read the rest here.

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Dept. of “refighting the same fights”

Posted July 8th, 2008 at 7:07 PM in Politics

If one fact of Barack Obama’s candidacy sent a tingle up my leg, it was the possibility that for the first time in my lifetime, a presidential election might not come down to a fight between those who fought in Vietnam and those who burned their draft cards.  For somebody who lived through that era, maybe this dynamic of every presidential race I can remember is hardly noticeable, but for me it has become tiresome.

For John McCain, it might be salvation.  This is his new ad, which spends five seconds trying to imply that Obama would have burned his draft card, if only he had been there.  Will it be enough?

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Dept. of 2004 campaign hindsight

Posted July 8th, 2008 at 11:43 AM in Journalism, Politics

In Time’s Swampland blog, we’re reminded of a GOP argument about small business taxes that President George W. Bush used in 2004: that John Kerry wanted to raise taxes on small businesses, which employ an astoundingly high percentage of the American workforce.  It took Jay Newton-Small one paragraph to debunk the argument:

Bush loved to cite on the stump the plight of the 4.1 million “subchapter S” companies – another catagory of small businesses that have less than 100 shareholders and pay individual income taxes. As my former Bloomberg colleague Ryan Donmoyer — the best tax reporter in town — pointed out, the argument was a bit ridiculous because less than 5% of small businesses who file under sub-chapter S made more than $200,000, Kerry’s threshold in 2004.

I know folks who voted for Bush over Kerry because of this argument.  Those voters likely didn’t know that Kerry’s proposal would only affect the 5% of “subchapter S” companies making more than $200,000 per year.

Is that the Kerry campaign’s fault, for not defending its plan to raise taxes and communicating the details more effectively?  No. Read the rest of this entry »

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Email Fundraising 1, Direct Mail 0

Posted July 8th, 2008 at 2:13 AM in Journalism, Politics, Technology

Talking Points Memo may have singlehandedly taken down GOP direct mail fundraising firm BMW Direct for charging ridiculous fees (perhaps selectively) and — worse — for deceiving clients.  The way TPM has reported the story will be a textbook study in online journalism going forward, because their execution — timing, reaction, writing style, etc. — have been pitch perfect.

And no, a direct mail firm isn’t on the same level as Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, but that became too big a story to credit one online news outlet with everything.  The BMW Direct story is all TPM’s.

My reaction to the allegations?  I’m not shocked.

Perhaps to those who are used to watching politics on a national stage, who haven’t gotten their hands dirty in races that don’t get the media spotlight, consultants ripping off candidates is a new phenomenon.  But away from all the attention, it happens all the time.

Uninitiated candidates who try to navigate the terrain of a campaign alone are unbelievably easy marks.

Among other lessons campaigns can learn from the story is this: the more a campaign can use the Internet to cut out vendors and consultants, the better.  Email fundraising will put companies like BMW Direct out of business, or it will at least prevent them from inflating production and delivery costs, since those are effectively zero online.

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Who benefits from the pro-Hillary, anti-Obama movement online?

Posted July 7th, 2008 at 11:41 PM in Politics, Technology

There has been a lot of chatter about the supposedly large contingent of Hillary Clinton supporters who refuse to back Barack Obama in the 2008 general election.  They’re a vocal group, but it turns out some of them might have ulterior motives.

Yesterday, I happened upon IOwnMyVote.com, one of the many online petition sites organized around the anti-Obama Clinton supporters.  The petition asks for basic contact information, just as all online petitions do, becuase online petitions are really only useful to organizations insofar as they help build up an email list.  (For more on that, see below.)

But the petition’s owner doesn’t keep the contact information for himself; he or she forwards it to the presidential campaigns.  Sounds like it’s supposed to be nonpartisan and honest, right?  Wrong.  Only one of the candidates — John McCain — stands to gain anything from the arrangement. Read the rest of this entry »

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In politics, the value of an email address is difficult to quantify

Posted July 5th, 2008 at 8:38 PM in Politics, Technology

One of the most popular strategies for selling something online involves the use of an opt-in email list.  Rather than pay to send somebody to a page where they have two choices — buy product or don’t buy product — you give them a third option: sign up for more information.  You can incentivize signups in many ways (e.g., “free 10-page information pack sent instantly to your email,” or “sign up to receive a coupon for 10% off”), and you get to contact anybody who signs up by email a theoretically unlimited number of times.

Conventional wisdom is that it takes 7 “asks” to get a “yes” from an average customer buying an average product.  I don’t know where that number came from, but it’s still true that an email opt-in is worth money to a seller.  And most sellers can quantify exactly how much a new email address is worth to them by taking their profit on a sale and multiplying it by the likelihood that somebody will buy their product after receiving their series of automatically generated emails.  For instance, I’ve run marketing projects where I’ve assumed the value of an email address to be about $1.  But I was selling crap and making crap money, so that number can get significantly higher.

In politics, it’s harder to quantify the value of an email address.  Barack Obama’s proprietary social networking web site has about 1 million members, his online donor rolls have swelled to over 1.5 million, and the total size of his email list is unknown (GOP tech guru Patrick Ruffini thinks it’s 4 to 8 million).  What we do know is that only a small fraction of supporters on a candidate’s email list will ever make a donation.  Whether we’re talking 1% or 15% depends on a lot of variables for which there aren’t obvious controls, but Obama’s ratio of email list recipient to donor is almost certainly higher than any candidate on his level. Read the rest of this entry »

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