Tag: Margaret Hartmann

Those running for Congress this year are faced with a problem: Tradition (and common sense) dictates that they mention what office they’re seeking in their ads. However, in the 30 or so seconds they have to win over voters, no one wants to bring up a legislative body known for its ineffectiveness, abysmally low approval ratings, and tendency to kill enjoyable Internet memes. That’s why candidates across the country are turning to a new strategy. They hope that omitting words like Congress, senator, and representative from commercials will encourage voters to elect them to take on the fat cats in some vague location where laws come from.

According to the Washington Post, this high-stakes version of Taboo isn’t limited to first-time office-seekers. Even incumbents are touting their homespun values and promising to change things in Washington, without mentioning that they’ve already had several terms to accomplish that task. For example, in a recent ad, Martin Heinrich, a candidate from New Mexico, declares that the state’s problems “won’t be solved by the powers that be in Washington,” without mentioning that he sort of is one of those powers. Heinrich has been a member of the House since 2009, and now he’s running for Senate (that detail might be easy to miss, since the word “Senate” only appears in tiny fonts at the end of the ad).

Congressional approval ratings have actually been up in recent months, but a jump from 10 percent to 17 percent isn’t all that impressive. Republican strategist and admaker Mark McKinnon tells the Post, “The best and only thing candidates can do is to vigorously point out every reason why you are not like the rest of your colleagues.” It’s too bad that incumbents have rejected “do things that make people hate us less” as a campaign strategy.

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Filed Under:
congress

via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/06/candidates-wont-mention-congress-in-ads.html

Today MSNBC aired footage of Mitt Romney marveling at the Wawa hoagie-ordering process during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, saying, “You press a little touchtone keypad — you touch this, touch this, go pay the cashier — there’s your sandwich. It’s amazing.” He’s so corny and out of touch! Except, the full three-minute clip shows that Romney was actually describing his Wawa outing as part of a metaphor about government bureaucracy. The guy may be rich, but he’s ordered a sandwich before.

The gaffe has been gaining traction today, with “Wawa” trending on Twitter and Matt Bevens, a surrogate press coordinator for the Obama campaign, remarking, “So out of touch he’s never used a gas station touchscreen.” Yet, in context, Romney was contrasting the simplicity of ordering a sandwich at Wawa with the difficulty a local optometrist had changing his address on government forms. He concluded, “People in the private sector have learned how to compete. It’s time to bring some competition to the federal government.”

On her show today Andrea Mitchell dubbed the incident Romney’s “super market scanner moment.” She’s more accurate than she realized. In 1992 George H.W. Bush was painted as out of touch after it was reported that he was “amazed” by the device at a National Grocers Association convention. He actually wasn’t looking at the standard scanner found in most grocery stores at the time, but new technology that could weigh food and read torn bar codes.

Wawa-gate is a textbook “Out-of-Context Gaffe,” plus, even without the edited footage there was enough material for a story on Romney’s awkward attempt to embrace Pennsylvania’s local cuisine. He repeatedly referred to the chain as “Wawa’s,” not “Wawa,” and used the (unimpressive) touchscreen to order a meatball hero with pickles and sweet peppers rather than a classic hoagie.

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Filed Under:
stuck in the mittle
,mitt romney
,gaffes
,wawa
,msnbc

via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/06/msnbc-misquotes-romney-invents-wawa-gaffe.html

Though thunderstorms ruined New Yorkers’ outdoor plans today, some good came out of the nasty weather. The storm was followed by a beautiful double rainbow over Manhattan, which allowed people to spend the afternoon posting terribly clever reenactments of a certain viral video.

Read more posts by Margaret Hartmann

via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/06/new-yorkers-treated-to-double-rainbow.html