Sixty years ago...
26 July 2024 | 11:30 am

When I said Democrats wanted another 1964, that included a desire for the kind campaign that LBJ ran, unapologetically aggressive and most of all, willing to call a spade a spade. That's one reason why this...

... is a reliable laugh/applause line.

Sixty years ago these ads were playing over broadcast TV and radio at a time when almost everyone was tuned in to these two media. I doubt that any political advertising has had the same cultural impact before or since, particularly this:

"Daisy", sometimes referred to as "Daisy Girl" or "Peace, Little Girl", is an American political advertisement that aired on television as part of Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign. Though aired only once, it is considered one of the most important factors in Johnson's landslide victory over the Republican Party's candidate, Barry Goldwater, and a turning point in political and advertising history. A partnership between the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency and Tony Schwartz, the "Daisy" advertisement was designed to broadcast Johnson's anti-war and anti-nuclear positions. Goldwater was against the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and suggested the use of nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War, if necessary. The Johnson campaign used Goldwater's speeches to imply he would wage a nuclear war. 

...

The ad was pulled after its initial broadcast but it continued to be replayed and analyzed by media, including the nightly news, talk shows, and news broadcasting agencies. The Johnson campaign was widely criticized for using the prospect of nuclear war, and implying that Goldwater would start one, to frighten voters. Several other Johnson campaign commercials would attack Goldwater without referring to him by name. Other campaigns have adopted and used the "Daisy" commercial since 1964. 

"Daisy" Ad  September 7, 1964



Telephone Hotline Ad



Which Barry Goldwater?



Ice Cream Ad



Social Security

 

 



Medicare



"Confessions of a Republican"



After Daisy, the most disturbing ad featured images of of a Klan rally and a quote from Robert Creel, grand dragon of the Alabama KKK, listing the targets of his bigotry and ending with his statement of support for Goldwater. Because of the language, it's been pulled from YouTube, but you can watch it here.


Nate Silver and Stuart Stevens from 2023
25 July 2024 | 11:30 am

[Gelman addresses some similar points here.]

I've been meaning to talk about this exchange since it happened, but it's just as well that I waited. Difficult to beat the timing on this one.


 

Gene Maddaus writing for the LA Weekly, November 24, 2010 [Emphasis added.]

Whatever the outcome of the attorney general's race, it's clear that Steve Cooley led most of the way and then blew it in the final days.

That's because Cooley ran a tentative and complacent campaign. If he loses, and trends suggest he will, it will be thanks to several tactical mistakes, an indifference to stumping for votes, and a gaffe on pensions.

Cooley can also blame Meg Whitman, whose 12-point loss probably sealed his defeat. But the fact remains that he could have won with a more aggressive campaign. Herewith, a post-mortem analysis.

Kamala Harris declared her intention to run for attorney general in the afterglow of the 2008 presidential race. She was a rising star, a member in good standing of Generation Obama. Like the president, she was a biracial candidate who had proven she could attract white votes.

But the glow wore off as Obama's approval ratings dipped, and by the time Steve Cooley entered the race early this year, Harris was all but written off.

She was a San Franisco liberal. She opposed the death penalty. In an anti-Obama year, she was an Obama clone.

Polls consistently showed her trailing Cooley by about five points, though a large chunk of the electorate remained undecided. Conventional wisdom held that he would do well in L.A. County, his home turf, because he was seen as a competent prosecutor, not a partisan Republican.

 

 

The tweet is yet another reminder of how lazy Nate Silver has gotten. He ignores two of the three races cited by Stevens, runs one metric, doesn't bother to look at other equally relevant numbers such as initial position in the polls, completely leaves out important context like campaign spending, the endorsement of the LA Times and the fact that Cooley went into the race as the popular district attorney of LA representing about one in four Californians, as compared with less than one tenth of that represented by Harris as the district attorney of San Francisco. Silver then goes on to draw a sweeping conclusion and adds an LOL just to push the dickishness level over the top.

There is a bit of an analogy here with Harvard's Avi Loeb. Both he and Silver are experts in their fields. Silver knows a great deal about certain aspects of political science while Loeb has done seminal work in astrophysics, but those are both big subjects and it is possible to be highly knowledgeable in parts of those disciplines and completely ignorant of others. Both men have been opining outside of their areas of expertise, and they have been doing so with an entirely inappropriate level of confidence.

This is also a prime example of one of the driving narratives of recent political coverage, hapless Kamala. Along with Trump's followers will abandon him after he loses an election, DeSantis has a lock on the nomination, and Dobbs won't matter, this is one of the stories that has guided journalists over the last four years. By now, two of these have been completely discredited and the other two are looking highly questionable. If you are new to this game, you probably think that being proven this wrong this often would humble Silver and Barro and all the other pundits and big-name reporters who have staked so much of their reputations on these claims, but what we've seen instead is defensiveness, denial, and evermore tortured logic trying to prop up failed arguments.

1964, 1968, 1972, and a bit of 1980
24 July 2024 | 11:30 am

What follows is a grossly oversimplified mental model based on flawed and arguably past their sale date historical analogies. I'm giving you a lot to criticize, but consistent with the maxim that all models are wrong but some are useful, I found this very useful for organizing my thoughts. I'll go even further and say I think it is true in the advisory sentence: when it tells you to do something, you should probably do it.

1964 was a very good election for the Democrats. 1968 was a bad one and 1972 was a disaster (at least with respect to the presidency). In the broadest sense, how can we characterize 64 versus 68/72?

Skipping a lot of back story, 1964 had a unified Democratic party spend the campaign aggressively attacking an ideologically extreme Republican as dangerous and erratic.

1968 had a divided Democratic Party largely focused on internal squabbles. 1972 took this to the next level, passing over the candidate who actually got the most primary votes for the one who had headed the committee that rewrote the nominating rules.

Like I said, this leaves a lot out, but if we take the analogy at this very high level I think it gets to the gist of what Democrats want and why they feel so angry with and disconnected from much, perhaps most of the elite mainstream media. The response to Kamala Harris clearly suggests they want 2024 to be another 1964, one where a united party concentrates all of its attention, energy, and resources attacking and unfit candidate and his wildly unpopular positions.

By comparison, viewed using this framework, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic have been actively lobbying for what looks a great deal like a combination of 1968 and 1972 with a little bit of 1980 thrown in. Ezra Klein is still whining over the lack of a Eugene McCarthy or a Ted Kennedy this time around.

It is almost impossible to take the arguments of the 68/72 crowd at face value. After months of complaining that Biden was too old and would leave the party divided, now they have a young candidate implicitly chosen by primary voters and currently backed by the near universal support of a reenergized party, and it's driving them crazy. 

Why are they so upset over getting what they claimed to want? I've heard cynics suggest that the editorial boards of papers like the New York Times secretly want Trump to win because he's good for the news business, or because they tend to represent the social class that will benefit from his tax policies, or because they secretly agree with parts of his philosophy. While there is some merit to the first two and perhaps just a little to the third, I don't think that's it. 

I believe they don't want Trump to win, but more importantly, they don't want him to lose in a way that makes them look bad and feel foolish. It is nearly impossible to overstate how invested institutions like the New York Times become in their narratives and how far they will go to defend them. Over the past four years, the standard narratives have been that Trump's support would evaporate once he actually lost an election, that Dobbs would not play a significant role in any upcoming elections, that DeSantis had a virtual lock on the Republican nomination, that JD Vance was the principled conservative and political talent we needed to counter Trump, and that Kamala Harris was an extremely weak politician who could not possibly unite the Democratic Party. Compared to the pain of owning up to all their mistakes, four more years of Trump doesn't seem that bad to these people.











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