Posts by Hadyn Green
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Can anyone name 5 openly homosexual athletes from Australasia?
Not 5, but the guy who won the diving gold medal at the Olympics was gay (though the American TV stations did everything they could do to hide it.
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No leaflets etc.
Count yourself lucky. I've been shoveling them out of our "no junk mail" letterbox and into the recycle bin
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I don't know if this has been posted yet, but here is why republicans are red and democrats blue apparently:
I was a polling analyst for Mark Penn and Doug Schoen in 1995, when we were brought in by Dick Morris and Bill Clinton to do the polling for Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign.
In 1995 and 1996, there were private weekly meetings (Wednesday nights) held in the White House residence on Wendesday nights to plan the campaign. It was a small group (Clinton, Morris, Penn, Schoen, Al Gore, Leon Panetta, Bob Squier, Bill Knapp, George Stephenopolous, maybe a few others). These meetings were later detailed, I believe after the election, by The New York Times.
For each week’s meeting, I would develop maps of the status of the electoral college, as well as maps of media buys and visits by the Clinton and Dole campaigns. At the time, mapping software was making it easier to create these kinds of maps. I was known as “the Map Guy.”
When you sit down to develop an electoral map, you have to actively decide which colors to use. I did some research at the library (this was before the extensive online resources we have today) and found that the networks were inconsistent in their assignment of colors to the different parties, so that wasn’t helpful. And the parties themselves tended to use red, white, and blue — again, no help.
So I decided to assign the Democrats blue and Republicans red. I wavered between green and yellow for “toss-ups.”
After a few weeks of meetings using these maps, Mark Penn came back to my office (something he rarely did) and said something like, “Josh, they love the maps, they’re a big hit. The President loves it.” He then said the President had asked him why we chose these colors for the parties.
As I explained to Mark, there were several reasons. For one, the term “Blue Dog Democrats” was thrown around in the early and mid-’90s, so the association stuck with me. In addition, we were centrist Democrats and I never liked the association of our party with red communism. So I wanted to symbolically throw the red back at the Republicans. I also saw the Republicans as more angry/red in the face/out of control, since this was the era of the Newt Gingrich and the Contact with America. In addition, I associated red with a “red light” and stopping, while blue connotes something more positive and forward-thinking. All of these were reasons that went into my decision.
So that was the genesis of the color selection.
From these meetings, the shorthand vernacular turned to using the terms “red states” and “blue states” and spread from the private meetings to conversations with political professionals and the media. By 2000, these terms had been part of the DC language for years.
The funny thing is, I am a public opinion researcher and we never tested the branding impact of the colors red and blue — yet this is one decision that (unintentionally) has had long-lasting brand implications.
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russell brown is currently (and still) too hungover to make it to the interwebs.
ae. But still able to enjoy his big TV from his big comfy chair
ps. Che undoes the buzzkill
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Wow, this thread became a total buzz kill.
Last night after Obamam's big speech all the pundits on the telly turned into criticism mode
"He'll try to blah but it won't work because..." etc etcExcept over on the BBC, where the guy running the show said "can we save the pessimism for the moment". Good ol' BBC
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Did anyone else think Obama's speech was a bit lame? As in it could have been any speech during his campaign?
Except maybe the bits where he talked about being president.
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mccain was a guy who could finally say what he wanted
I totally agree with that, but wasn't his crowd all class? Booing Obama's name.
Whereas Obama mentioned McCain and there was applause. -
Cheers... we want "no" right?
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And yes, there were no dry eyes in our house. especially during the "yes we can".
Man our election is gonna suck.
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@Mark you got the latest on Prop 8?