I may have been reading too much into **mswas’ **statement. Obviously you can learn things about people from how they dress. However, I took **mswas’ **post to be referring to some sort of hidden symbolism in “how you wear your suit”, which sounds like nonsense to me. Deciding that someone may be a slacker because they wear a slacker slogan on their cap is one thing but deciding someone is sending out secret squirrel subliminal messages of boldness by their choice of colour sounds like woo to me.
Unless you are talking about the actual range of frequencies used for the transmission of data (the width of the band!), it’s no excuse.
People do not have bandwidth. They have time.
When I run for President, I will run on the platform of eliminating the language known as corporate bullshit speak.
No longer will people say ‘ping’ when they mean ‘call’. No longer will people use ‘bandwidth’ to mean ‘time’. No longer will they say ‘offline’ when they mean ‘privately’.
Yeah, that’s right, I fully support linguistic cleansing! 
I would if he actually would have controlled his camp and stopped them from using the Wright association during the final week. However, he’s either weak or lying. My guess is the latter.
Princhester, Let’s posit identical twin women, one dressed in a bright, red dress and the other in an identical dress, except it is a bland beige. Which twin do you think people would say looks like she is more fun?
Or identical twin men in identical suits except one is standing like a male model and the other is slouching, with his hands in his pockets and the back of the jacket riding up. Which twin do you think people would pick as the one who looked more presidential? (Think Kennedy vs Nixon.)
This election, more than any in the past, had been symbolically defined by the colors blue and red. The family of a “blue” president-elect wearing red on the night when he was calling for national unity could be seen as reaching out to the “red” voters. The message there is subliminal–not all subliminal messages are horseshit readings of “sex” in an ice cube–and may not have been conscious–we make subconscious decisions all the time–but, in a campaign as thoroughly planned and tightly managed as the Obama campaign, I doubt it.
Yes, the power of symbolism and subliminal messages has been oversold, in some cases well into woo-woo territory, but human brains evolved to find patterns quickly and make snap decisions based on those patterns, and other people know how to use those traits to give a nudge in a particular direction. Not the shove that Key claimed in “Subliminal Seduction,” and the examples I gave are barely subliminal, but your statement that, “deciding someone is sending out secret squirrel subliminal messages of boldness by their choice of colour sounds like woo to me,” is not backed up by decades of research or even the biology of other species. It’s not for nothing that many poisonous species are brightly colored, especially red. Red symbolizes danger for many creatures. It only works as an attractant for the twin in the red dress because a lot of guys, especially after a few drinks, confuse danger with fun.
I will wear an armband in this crusade. You don’t need to say “let’s do a download” when really, all you mean is “let’s talk”.
Are you sure you really want to run for President? Having to deal with all the media spam, and all the networking you have to do? You’d have to be a real multitasker to handle all the data that people throw at you.
I presume you’d like to go back to speaking Anglo-Saxon. Purge the language of all that nasty Gallic influence that William the Conqueror brought with him.
I kid. And dont intend to hijack this thread any longer. Corporate lingo buzzwords make me :rolleyes: as much as anyone; on the other hand, language is a living, evolving thing.
“Wasilla hillbillies”? But I thought it was the elitist Democrats who hated real Americans, right?
All 7 chapters are up now. It’s a thoroughly absorbing read. The whole saga could be a movie.
Sooner or later it will be.
It is just me, or does the article have nothing but glowing reviews for Obama’s team but scathing information on Hillary’s and McCain’s? There seem to be lots of infighting, clear lack of vision and the inability for Hillary and McCain to set a direction and to control their advisers.
Is it the norm, or did other winning candidates have such uncoordinated campaign team?
From other books and articles I’ve read about previous campaigns (including Clinton’s winning campaign in 1992), some degree of chaos and infighting is normal in any campaign, win or lose. The Newsweek piece itself makes the observation that any disarray typically gets exaggerated in post-mortems for losing campaigns and minimized for winning ones. My impression – and one that’s been backed up the public observations of campaign pros from both sides of the aisle – is that the “No Drama Obama” campaign was unusually well controlled.
Note also that of course there’s going to be more infighting and such in a losing campaign. Aside from a brief period after the GOP convention, McCain’s campaign was in trouble most of the time. If a campaign is in trouble, someone’s to blame, people are going to be replaced, and the personality types that are likely to be in such positions are not generally going to be the type to go down without a fight. So the campaign manager and the chief strategist are going to snipe at each other trying to make sure that it’s the other guy who’ll lose his job.
Yes, there’s a bit in the Newsweek article about how Clinton staffers coming over to the Obama campaign were confused, as they were used to more chaotic conditions. I wouldn’t say that Clinton ran a bad primary campaign, either, aside from some of the unusual slip-ups she made.
the “no drama” trickled (pun intended) down to the campaign headquarters. in philly no yelling, no shouting, no drama. everyone was even tempered and great to work with.
i can remember only once that you could tell someone was on a time sensitive mission critical thing and wasn’t the usual bubbly upbeat guy. once in 3 months. and there were many situations at the headquarters that would have had some people i worked with in other offices throwing fits and acting like screaming banshees.
sen. obama seems to draw people that are steady and even going.
that is an example of an amazingly well run machine and campaign from top to bottom.
It seems to me that if McCain had said “Fuck all y’all” and kept Mark Salter, and his two BFFs, Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman, on board while firing everybody else, he might have had a much better chance. After reading all seven chapters, I was not the least surprised when they revealed that Mark Salter was responsible for McCain’s concession speech.
Exactly right. People are so quick to believe the worst in this situation. The worst may or may not be true, but let’s remember that we’re getting all this information from unnamed sources right after a battle that was doubtlessly fraught with in-fighting, bruised egos, and hurt feelings.
Dopers often pride themselves on their analytical ability and skepticism. Well, this is a situation in which careful thinkers should know better than to believe these accounts unconditionally.
True enough. I find some of my irritation at Palin dissipating now. I certainly don’t think it’s her fault McCain lost. She was the only thing who gave his campaign any energy at all. The towel story, in particular, struck me as gratuitously snarky. I actually don’t see anything wrong with that. To me it just makes her seem more down to earth and not self-important.
I think them calling her family “Wasilla hillbillies” was also a bit over the line. I mean, I might say something like that, but I’m just a jack off on the internet. Those guys are supposed to be a little more mature than me.
If anyone else wants to see it, it’s in thisvideo.
It would have been even better if he’d said “The real question, Brian, is how many Palins it takes to change a f—ing light bulb.”