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Because They Could | Oct 31, 2008 08:44

American Stories, American Solutions, the 30-minute Obama campaign "infomercial" that screened across multiple US TV networks yesterday is a supremely assured work of political messaging. If parts of it seemed familiar, it's because they were intended to be so. George Stephanopoulos noted that "every single line during that 30 minutes was something that the campaign knows works and appeals to those undecided voters":

There was one point during those 30 minutes where he talked about education. Over images of Obama in a classroom with children, they rolled a tape of Obama's Sept. 9, 2008 speech in Dayton, Ohio:

"Responsibility for our children's' success doesn't start in Washington," Obama said. "It starts in our homes. No education policy can replace a parent who's involved in their child's education from day one, who makes sure their children are in school on time, helps them with their homework, and attends those parent-teacher conferences. No government program can turn off the TV set, or put away the video games, or read to your children."

The campaign knows for a fact that when Obama said those lines during the debate, it had the highest response of the entire debate from voters hooked up to dial groups.

So they repeated it again tonight and that idea was reprised again and again over these 30 minutes.

And then, because they could, the producers rounded out their political advertisement by crossing live to the final two, soaring minutes of Obama's speech at a rally in Florida. It was extremely convincing and far harder than it looked.

You can see it here:

Or, for your collection, grab a high-quality .avi off the torrent.

By way of comparison, McCain yesterday invoked, for the millionth time, "Joe the Plumber" at a rally in Ohio. He hailed Joe in person, but Joe hadn't turned up at the rally.

It's the kind of basic flub that makes it hard for me to understand why anyone would have any faith in the McCain-Palin team to run a large and somewhat troubled country. They're a shambles.

The sleekness of the Obama campaign also, of course, makes our own parties' efforts look pretty daggy. They hardly have the candidate star-power, but, more importantly, they don't have the money.

The Listener recently ran a story speculating on the role of Blue State Digital -- one of two key companies behind Obama 08's joined-up digital media strategy -- in the New Zealand Labour campaign. T'would have been a fine thing, but I gather Blue State would have cost roughly the entire campaign budget. That might have been a trifle risky.

If approved messages aren't your thing, you might enjoy Coldcut vs TV Sheriff's campaign media mash-up, Revolution 08 ("A drum+bass powered all-out AV assault on an American media machine now in psychotic overdrive for the Presidential election"), which comes in three handy sizes: YouTube, iPod-friendly MP4 and full-welly MPEG2.

Also, try Pundit's election quiz, which is adapted from an award-winning US version that polls users on their issues and recommends a ticket to fit.

PS: To the person who phoned 95bFM management pretending to be Herald editor Tim Murphy, threatening BSA action, after I'd been critical in a Breakfast-show phone interview of last Friday's Herald editorial declaring victory for National ... you're a dick.

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Mood and meaning in a time of crisis | Oct 30, 2008 11:02

Honestly, we weren't quite sure how well this week's Media7 was going to come off, but it turned out to be a very interesting show. The theme is money, meltdown and the media -- and specifically, the impact of gloomy economic news on consumers -- with of author and former British Labour MP Brian Gould, Colmar Brunton's Briar Harland and psychological therapist (specialising in grief and anxiety) Jock Matthews.

They all brought something to the table, and it was useful to hear Bryan explain both the alarming scale of the financial crisis and the relatively limited impact it will have on indivduals who aren't laden with debt or in vulnerable jobs. Briar confirmed that her company is seeing marked changes in attitudes this year, but not always very rational ones. And Jock agreed that he sometimes advises people feeling great anxiety to simply turn off the news.

It's here on TVNZ ondemand. And happily, it appears that both the podcast and our YouTube channel are working this week. There's also the Window Media clips

Unfortunately you don't get the Newsmash segments on YouTube (which I find ironic given that that's where most of the content comes from) or the podcast -- and the opening Newsmash is listed as "Part 3" on the clips page. I'll try and get something done about that, because the show is hard to make sense of without them.

Meanwhile, check out 'The Credit Crunch Anthem', a parody based on 'Candle in the Wind' and my personal favourite of a surprisingly large number of satirical songs about the financial crisis that I found in the course of research:

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Punk'd? | Oct 30, 2008 07:22

'Labour reaches for smoking gun in Key's past' ran the headline of the story published at 3.30pm on the New Zealand Herald website yesterday, under the byline of Eugene Bingham.

The story held that "John Key faces accusations of misleading the public about his knowledge of one of New Zealand's most notorious white collar crimes," -- a fake foreign exchange transaction conducted by Equiticorp in the 1980s -- and its most notable paragraph related to statements Key made in an interview with the Herald last year:

Checks by the Herald of court documents made public by Labour have unravelled several aspects of the version he told, including the fact that he resigned from Elders in June 1988, six months after the first payment. There is no evidence that he was involved in handling the sham transactions.

At 5.24, the headline became 'Key claims no knowledge of fraud' and the paragraph had been reworked thus:

Checks by the Herald of court documents made public by Labour have raised questions about several aspects of the version he told, including his memory of when he left the company. He resigned from Elders in June 1988, six months after the first payment. There is no evidence that he was involved in handling the sham transactions.

So there was no suggestion in the paper that Key was involved with the dodgy deal, just that he may not have been straight about his history. Enter Labour's "Trust" theme.

There followed details on some minor discrepancies between court records seen by the Herald in Melbourne this week and the interview Key gave last year to the Herald. Key claimed to have been able to refute Elders' chief Ken Jarrett's denial to investigators that he had been in New Zealand in connection with the deal, because he:

… had paid for the lunch and had the credit card bill to prove it. In fact, the court records show that Mr Richards paid for the lunch, not Mr Key. Neither do any of the records show that Mr Jarrett denied attending the meeting with Mr Richards, though he did say it was several days earlier, on August 26.

"Read more in tomorrow's NZ Herald, plus exclusive online audio of Key's 2007 interview," the paper trilled.

This morning, that story, datelined 4am, again written by Bingham, is headed 'Neutron bomb' on Key proves fizzer for Govt. It says:

Last weekend, the party believed it had a smoking gun - a signature on the A$39m first H-Fee cheque bearing a striking resemblance to Mr Key's. Senior party figures advocated making the document public immediately.

Within days, though, court documents proved that what would have been the campaign's most explosive allegation was wrong. The January 11 cheque was actually signed by an Australian-based executive of the firm Mr Key worked for.

This isn't quite the tenor of story the Herald was promising its readers. Helen Clark was placing great emphasis on the Herald's investigation yesterday, offering that her party president "believes there are questions to answer but that would mean nothing if a major paper didn't think there were questions to answer." Did Labour, in return, get punked?

Perhaps it's simply, as Bingham himself pointed out in the extended tribute the Herald ran on Key this year (I had to laugh this morning when Key described it to Sean Plunket as an "expose") that when it comes to the "minutiae" of dates and places "he can be oddly imprecise".

A Standard reader recently noted similar imprecision from Key with respect to his time at Merrill Lynch, including an odd claim to have "recruited from the private sector" a longstanding Merrill employee who perished on September 11.

At best, Labour could have hoped to show Key was slippery with dates with respect to his time at Elders -- indeed, I expected that to be the gist of today's story -- much as he's been hard to pin down over his views on the Springbok Tour in 1981, a time when he claims to have been fascinated by politics. Nobody cares what he actually thought about the Tour at the time -- it has been his apparently unnecessary evasiveness over the matter that seemed odd.

Curiously, Key's imprecision over his own thoughts on the Tour continues. Bingham's big story for the Herald noted:

His answer is puzzling for someone who was surrounded by, and fascinated with, political debate. Whether he was pro-Tour or anti-Tour is almost irrelevant 27 years down the track. But saying that he can't remember how he felt leaves him open to criticism that he did not want to get off-side with people by stating his position. (In subsequent broadcast interviews, he sounds strangely confused. He has said that he didn't go to the games, but that he might have if he could have afforded it; and that he wasn't happy that the Springboks were here, but that he didn't feel strongly enough to go out on the street.)

But in this month's TVNZ debate:

The National leader did have his weak moments. His opening address was a little clumsy and over rehearsed. He struggled through his recollections of the Springbok Tour, declaring his position as "mildly pro-Tour".

As things stand, Labour would have been better advised to stick with the Tour, because its H-Fee story is going nowhere good, fast. The neutron bomb has not so much fizzled as backfired rather badly.

PS: One observation: it is a little ironic that some of the people most up in arms this morning about the "smearing" of John Key are the same people who spent weeks masturbating over Ian Wishart's despicable book about Helen Clark's supposed secret personal life. Sheesh.

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Poll Crunch | Oct 28, 2008 10:28

The Standard has been covering some admirable work on recording and presenting this year's political opinion polling on Wikipedia. Lynn Prentice noted the trend lines and an analysis of potential bias -- in any direction.

The developing Wikipedia article is partially the work of Denmark-based New Zealander Mark Payne, who emailed me last night to explain the project:

It's a "poll of polls" that I and some others have been doing via Wikipedia. It seems to suggest that the race is not over by any means, but:

1. the systematic difference between the individual polls is far greater than any statistical noise due to sampling and,

2. that the result is more dependent on the outcomes of certain key electorates than the party vote (eg will Winston make it?)

I've also looked for systematic biases in the polling firms. There certainly appear to be some (at least relative to the ensemble of polls):

Colmar-Brunton and Nielsen show significant bias towards National, TNS towards labour. The digipoll doesn't appear as bad as everyone makes it out to be, which is interesting.

So, what do the statistics tell us about the final outcome? No bloody clue. Ask me again November 9th, when I've finished the new and improved model (also known as watching the count on election night!).

Back at The Standard, Steve Pierson has his graph on again, with a "horse-race" analysis that quite vividly depicts the Parliamentary implications of several recent polls -- based on his assumption that the Maori Party will choose Labour if it is tasked with anointing a new government. Labour forms a government in two polls, National in one, and the race is tied under Colmar Brunton.

It ought to be required reading for the author or authors of the New Zealand Herald editorials of Friday and Saturday.

Friday's, as I noted, declared victory for National, and Saturday's effectively states that if would not be fair or legitimate if Labour were to form a coalition representing a majority in the House without itself being the single highest-polling party.

Such a majority government, it insists:

… is clearly not what most voters want or believe should happen. Around 80 per cent of them vote National or Labour and when they go to the polling booth they believe they are choosing a Government. If their party is beaten at the ballot box they accept it is fair and square. Parties trifle with that result at their peril.

As an argument, it's either feeble-minded or disingenuous. The fact that "around 80 per cent … vote National or Labour" is neither here nor there. As a rule, people vote for a party because they wish to see it in government. They might place conditions on that wish, but a Green voter is hardly likely to reject a coalition with Labour because it's somehow unfair to National.

The Herald is free to make an argument that a National-led coalition of three parties would be a sounder government than a Labour-led coalition of four parties, but it should do so without making presumptions on the public will. If a majority coalition can be formed without betraying undertakings made before the election, then by definition it represents the will of the majority of voters.

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"It's like smoking," Shayne Carter observed to me recently. "It's bad for your health and it's addictive, but it's fun."

Shayne was referring to his practice of following the US presidential election via Fox News. Personally, don't have the constitution for that -- but I do love me some wingnut bloggery.

You'd turn crazy if you had to find this stuff yourself, but happily, there are people who'll do it for you. I'm a big fan of Village Voice columnist Roy Edroso, who rounds up the Joe the Plumber madness and details the latest crazy Michelle Obama story to be clutched to wingnut breasts.

The crazy went off the scale late last week after a troubled McCain campaign worker, 20 year-old Ashley Todd, reported that she had been viciously assaulted by a "6' 4" black man", who, upon seeing her McCain bumper sticker, became enraged and carved a "B" into her face to teach her a lesson. But said "B" was reversed -- much as it might look as if a person had scratched it into her own face in a mirror.

The incendiary allegation was soon debunked as a sad hoax -- but not before a McCain campaign aide had shopped the story to the media, and was indeed the source of the claim that the "B" stood for "Barack".

Edroso recaps the affair in his latest Voice column, noting the weird contortions of the wingnuts who had been screaming race war (Jonah Goldberg's dive for cover is particular cause for mirth). There's lots more in his Alicublog.

Blue Texan's always-amusing Instaputz focuses on Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds and his chums, and he finds Reynolds in classic passive-aggressive intellectually dishonest form over the Todd business.

And self-described "reasonable conservative" Jon Swift surveys great moments in election-year conserva-blogging.

You may have other favourites you'd like to share.

And this just in: US authorities have released details of the apprehension of two racist skinheads who planned to kill Barack Obama as the culmination of a massacre of innocent black people.

PS: This week'sMedia7 programme looks at the unrelentingly bad economic news, and explores whether, at least in so far as it guides consumer behaviour, it could be self-fufilling. The panel is Bryan Gould, the former Waikato University vice-chancellor and British Labour MP; Briar Harland, executive director of Colmar Brunton in Auckland; and psychological therapist Jock Matthews. It's an afternoon record, so if you'd like to join us from 2pm at The Classic in Queen Street, hit "reply" and let me know asap.

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