Candidates add email to campaign arsenal

Columns

October 6, 2012

Candidates add email to campaign arsenal

By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnist The Picayune Item Picayune Item Sat Oct 06, 2012, 08:00 AM CDT

PICAYUNE — On Sept. 5, Michelle Obama sent a message to her husband’s email list with the subject line, “As always, thank you.” It was the morning after her speech to the Democratic convention, and she wrote: “I know your life is full — with work, or school, or family — and yet you still find the time to help out when you can. You may have a tight budget, but you give what you can afford.”

In two short sentences, plus the subject line, she used some version of the word “you” seven times. Then she noted that one family recently “skipped pizza at their favorite place so that they could make a difference in this election.” In a concluding P.S., she added: “It meant a lot to me to speak with you and everyone else last night. Thank you for everything you do.”

Both candidates communicate with their followers in many ways — through speeches and interviews, commercials and videos. But the emails sent by both campaigns offer a particular insight into their rival strategies.

Team Obama places top priority on making supporters feel directly connected to the campaign effort, on making them feel that their contributions — in money, energy, effort — are invaluable. The most common word used in those emails is not “I” or “me” but “you.”

Leading up to midnight on Aug. 31, the campaign’s fundraising pleas became increasingly fervent and frequent. At 9:58 that night, Barack Obama wrote: “After three straight months of being outraised and recently being outspent — in some key states more than 3-to-1 — your support before the deadline couldn’t be more urgent.”

It worked. Obama raked in $114 million in August, barely edging Mitt Romney for the first time in three months and adding a boatload of names to a donor base that’s reached 3.2 million.

Team Obama has always insisted that supporters should not be treated simply as ATMs, so the emails offer many ways for ordinary folks to get involved besides giving money. Join Michelle on a conference call for student volunteers. Attend a convention watch party in your neighborhood and bring a friend. This link will help you register to vote, that link will get you to a new video, and here’s one to an online shop where Vote Obama beach towels are on an end-of-season special.

Recent polls reveal the reasoning behind this push to energize volunteers. In the new ABC News/Washington Post survey, Obama posts a 6-point lead among registered voters but is held to a virtual tie among likely voters. That puts a huge premium on efforts to identify and turn out folks on Election Day who already agree with you.

Romney’s strategy is quite different. He uses email less often, and fewer communications are aimed at raising money. Instead, they’re aimed at raising temperatures. The most common word in his messages is “Obama,” and they’re designed to stoke anger and outrage among his backers.

An email sent on Sept. 8, for example, is titled “The cold hard truth.” Communications director Gail Gitcho writes: “No amount of liberal mythology or political theater in Charlotte can mask the cold, hard truth: This president has not kept his promises, and America is not better off.”

This is Team Romney’s strongest campaign theme, and the ABC News/Washington Post poll shows why. Only one in five voters say they’re better off financially than when Obama took office.

Romney’s emails repeat many of his standard campaign riffs and are designed to portray government in the worst possible light. One on Sept. 6, titled “Scandals and cronies,” attacks Obama for backing Solyndra, a solar energy company that “went bankrupt and left American taxpayers to pick up the bill.” Another, on Sept. 5, insists the president has “effectively gutted” welfare reform. A third denounces the president’s stimulus bill for wasting federal money repairing tennis courts and studying honeybees.

It’s a popular line of argument. By 53 percent to 40 percent, voters say government programs do more to interfere in people’s lives than to improve them.

The Democrats’ core theme is: like Obama (and his wife) and work for them. The Republicans’ retort: hate Obama (and big government) and vote against them. It’s no wonder that 74 percent of Obama supporters say they’re voting for the president and not against his rival; only 35 percent of Romney backers describe their vote as a positive gesture of support.

So which is more powerful? Admiration or animosity? That’s a key question voters will decide in November.

Text Only

Columns

Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.”

March 29, 2013
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist

Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.

March 29, 2013
VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008.

March 27, 2013
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists

When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”

March 27, 2013
Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing.

March 23, 2013
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered.

March 23, 2013
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun

The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral.

March 22, 2013
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.

March 22, 2013
Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.

March 20, 2013
Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist

Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley.

March 20, 2013
More Columns Headlines

Columns

Search Results

Candidates add email to campaign arsenal

Site Map

Contact Us