Past performance is once again no guarantee of future results:
Every appearance by a top Republican official or candidate should be recorded. Every one of them.All it takes is one “Macaca” incident to transform a race or create one where one didn’t exist. As the Montana incident blogged earlier today showed, a video can knock out prospective candidates before they even enter.
And this is no longer about finding one big blunder to put on a campaign commercial. It’s about using video and (free) technologies like YouTube to build narratives about opponents, using their own words, at their own events.
— Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos, from May of 2007. Plenty on the right would also take him up on the offer beginning in 2009, although one of the most lethal “gotchas” by that rarest of birds, the enterprising Huffington Post journalist, who captured Obama with her cell phone video in 2008 delivering his Bitter Clingers speech, the very definition of a Kinsleyesque gaffe.
Which brings us to this item at BuzzFeed yesterday: “Cell Phone Ban Keeps Obama Fundraisers Secret:”
Former aides to presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Rick Perry, and Jon Huntsman all expressed surprise at the practice, and they’ve never seen an instance where a campaign asked donors to surrender their cell phones.
The former Clinton aide called the Obama policy “absurd,” suggesting that the Obama policy is almost certainly a response to the infamous 2008 fundraiser where Obama described voters in rural Pennsylvania as “bitter.”
“They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” Obama told donors in San Francisco, in a gaffe that breathed new life into Clinton’s campaign at the time.
“What is he hiding? Candidates should be for and against the same issue in private as they are in public,” said former Perry campaign manager Rob Johnson. “This shows just how uncomfortable the Obama team is with their message an their candidate. And in addition to religion and guns, voters like to cling to their cell phones.”
Presumably this ban is valid in all 57 states, and Obama will dispatch the necessary corpse-men to enforce it, even if they have to confiscate every cell phone in Cominsky Park.
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