Month: October 2014

Jessica Roy calls this College Republican National Committee ad “just a teensy bit tone-deaf”:

Esther Breger piles on:

The ads, which somehow cost $1 million dollars, are part of CRNC’s campaign to reach young voters in a “culturally relevant way,” as CRNC’s Alex Smith told the Wall Street Journal. (Smith, by the way, is a woman.) And to be fair, Democratic campaigns have also struggled painfully in their attempts to be hip and with it, though at least their gifs and co-opted memes show some awareness of a cultural world beyond basic cable. (Note to Alex Smith: The median age of “Say Yes to the Dress” viewers is 44.)

Bernstein spots perhaps a bigger problem with the ad – it is being used in multiple states:

Making cookie-cutter ads is just asking for trouble.

See, not only does Brittney the “undecided voter” “think that “The Rick Scott is perfect,” she feels the same way about “The Rick Snyder,” “The Tom Corbett” and three other dresses. The ads are identical, only the candidate names change (never mind that Brittney can’t vote in six states in November).

But whatever their quality and however mockery-worthy they are, the ads are open invitations for Democratic opponents to hammer the dreaded Outside Interests Who Don’t Care About [insert name of state here]’s Values. It’s a classic example of the way elections are conducted in the U.S.: Candidates’ campaign organizations are seemingly in charge, but decentralized party and quasi-party organizations step in and help — or embarrass — them.

Waldman also discusses ad strategy more generally:

[W]hen you’re trying to reach out to a particular group, it’s important to communicate to them that you respect them and you understand their concerns. And these ads do precisely the opposite. Instead of talking about the things that are important to women, they take the same message they’d offer to anyone else, and just put in what they consider a womanly context (wedding dresses! boyfriends!). Imagine that a candidate went before an audience of Hispanics and said, “Let me explain this in a way you can relate to: My economic plan is like a really good tamale. My opponent’s economic plan is like the worst tamale you ever ate. Understand?” And he’d expect everyone in the audience to turn to each other and say, “I may not care for his position on immigration, but that tamale analogy showed me that he really gets us.”

Drawing on his new book Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature, Robert Darnton declares that censorship is “essentially political; it is wielded by the state” – but also finds that its historical use has gone far beyond just banning certain texts:

Reading was an essential aspect of censoring, not only in the act of vetting texts, which often led to competing exegeses, but also as an aspect of the inner workings of the state, because contested readings could lead to power struggles, which sometimes led to public scandals. Not only did censors perceive nuances of hidden meaning, but they also understood the way published texts reverberated in the public.

Their sophistication should not be surprising in the case of the GDR [East Germany], because they included authors, scholars, and critics. Eminent authors also functioned as censors in eighteenth-century France, and the surveillance of vernacular literatures in India was carried out by learned librarians as well as district officers with a keen eye for the folkways of the “natives.” To dismiss censorship as crude repression by ignorant bureaucrats is to get it wrong. Although it varied enormously, it usually was a complex process that required talent and training and that extended deep into the social order.

It also could be positive. The approbations of the French censors testified to the excellence of the books deemed worthy of a royal privilege. They often resemble promotional blurbs on the back of the dust jackets on books today. Column 16 in the secret “catalogues” of the India Civil Service sometimes read like modern book reviews, and they frequently lauded the books they kept under surveillance. While acting as censors, East German editors worked hard to improve the quality of the texts they vetted. Despite its ideological function, the reworking of texts had resemblances to the editing done by professionals in open societies. From start to finish, the novels of the GDR bore the marks of intervention by the censors. Some censors complained that they had done most of the work.

Jonathan Yardley offers more details on the situation writers faced in East Germany:

As for East Germany between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, “censorship was not supposed to exist,” because “it was forbidden by the constitution, which guaranteed freedom of expression.” Like so much else during the hegemony of communism there and elsewhere, that was institutionalized hypocrisy pure and simple. The system of book censorship was elaborate and rigidly hierarchical, starting at the top with Erich Honecker, general secretary of the central committee of the Communist Party, who took an active interest in the system’s quotidian operation, but becoming somewhat less rigid lower in the ranks. Darnton was able to talk to two “veterans of the state machinery for making books conform to the Party line,” who did not like being called censors and who insisted that “most censorship took place in the heads of writers, and what the writers failed to cut usually got filtered out by editors in publishing houses.” Anyone who has written for an institution is familiar with the practice of self-censorship, but it is a far more risky and ambiguous task when performed within an institution as inflexible as the Communist Party than it is when performed by a writer for an American newspaper or magazine.

After a series of security breaches, Secret Service director Julia Pierson resigned yesterday. Bryce Covert doesn’t fault Pierson:

This is the first year since 2010 that the agency isn’t operating with a budget below what it requested. And since that year, personnel levels have seen a severe decline. In her testimony before Congress, Pierson said that the agency’s current 550 employees is below “optimal level.”

The understaffing, for which Pierson was not responsible, could have played a significant role in the breach that led to her losing her position. Former secret service agents told the Washington Post that the incident may have been related to the severe staffing shortage in the division responsible for securing the White House. It’s gotten so bad that the agency has had to fly agents in from around the country, who are less familiar with the grounds and response plans.

Ron Fournier mostly blames the state of the Secret Service on the decision “fold it into the fledgling monstrosity that would come to be known as the Homeland Security Department”:

Secret Service personnel, particularly those in uniform, are often paid less today than law-enforcement officials in other agencies. More than the money, the agency’s declining reputation in the law-enforcement community—a trend that goes back to 2003—has hurt morale and recruitment. Also diminished are efforts to develop the agency’s “brand,” the little-known marketing efforts that supported books and movies and other pop-culture references to the Secret Service, which in turn made the presidential detail an iconic, aspirational profession.

People used to worry that the Secret Service had too much independence, that its agents and leaders were bureaucratic cowboys who answered to almost nobody. There was something to those concerns, but at least presidential security wasn’t a laughing matter.

Ed Morrissey agrees:

Fournier called the reorganization in 2003 a “Bush-era mistake,” which made some conservatives bristle, but that’s accurate. George W. Bush could have, and should have, resisted the creation of DHS entirely. Many conservatives, myself among them, opposed the creation of even more bureaucratic overhead in this consolidation as well as the later consolidation of intelligence agencies into the [Director of National Intelligence].

Ambinder recommends some reforms. Among them:

Employees of the Secret Service should never, ever face repercussions for bringing to the attention of their superiors any observation, fact or suggestion that challenges received wisdom about how we protect people. It seems inconceivable that anyone would be afraid to speak their minds, especially about security problems affecting the president or his family. But recent events, including the decision of some employees to speak directly to Congress and to the press, are plain proof that this stigma exists within the Secret Service. Every manager must be held responsible for ensuring that every direct report feels empowered to speak out.

Jelani Cobb examines the big picture:

The Secret Service that was antsy about the prospect of a newly inaugurated Obama walking along Pennsylvania Avenue in January, 2009, is, as Voxreported, handling three times the number of death threats that attended other Presidencies. It is doing so on a severely limited budget. Speaking before a House inquiry into the security lapses, Pierson remarked that the budget sequester has left the Service nearly five hundred and fifty people short of their optimum number of personnel. This at a time when the factions we need to be most concerned with are driven not only by the President’s identity but by American foreign policy and the dictates of the interminable war on terror. What signal does Secret Service ineptitude send to foreign adversaries?

And Cillizza considers why stories about the secret service resonate:

[T]he creeping question in most Americans’ minds that is raised by all of this: If people with, at best, uncertain intentions can get that close to the president of the United States, what does that mean for my safety and the safety of my family? It’s a conversation — or at least a strain of thinking — that has been active in the American consciousness since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. That’s when the idea of all the horrible things we saw happening in far off places weren’t so far off after all hit home. It fostered a sense of vulnerability that we had previously not known for decades — if ever.

(Photo: Secret Service Director Julia Pierson. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)